AVB on Levy and the direction of the club

Spurger King said:

AVB seemed to follow Moyes' Everton model...first make your team hard to beat, then try to snatch a goal. Bale was the exception in an otherwise negative and mundane set-up. If you stuck Bale in Everton's team last season, they would have finished above us.

Click to expand...

TaoistMonkey said:

You've just taken this thread to another level.

Well done!

Click to expand...

TottenhamMattSpur said:

A good level. My level.

Click to expand...

mattstev2000 said:

Did he? I seem to remember him being little more than good for the first half of the season. Certainly not better than other players in the team. About the same level as he was the previous season.

Exceptional second half of the season but if we truly did have a mundane fraud as a manager that wouldn't have mattered a jot because we would have been long cut adrift.

And there were plenty more than two games were we looked good last season.

Click to expand...

Spurger King said:

We could have had Zippy from Rainbow in charge and Bale would have still had a great season. He well and truly papered over the cracks of what a mundane manager AVB was. Did anyone notice how hardly any of Bale's goals were team efforts? Can anyone name more than two games where we actually looked good for more than 45 minutes?

Click to expand...

JUSTINSIGNAL said:

Yeah, even if Zippy, sorry I mean Harry had been in charge and continued to play him as an orthodox winger he definitely would have had an excellent season. He definitely would have scored those 30 goals stuck out on the left wing.

Click to expand...

Mullers said:

Thank Christ eh? Always the ones you least expect. Anyway he isn't a poor manager, I haven't seen any real evidence that he is but if he is Levy is the man who hired him. If he felt he was poor he should have got rid of him in the summer.

Click to expand...

JUSTINSIGNAL said:

Yeah, even if Zippy, sorry I mean Harry had been in charge and continued to play him as an orthodox winger he definitely would have had an excellent season. He definitely would have scored those 30 goals stuck out on the left wing.

Click to expand...

idontgetit said:

He couldn't get rid of him in the summer, it would have looked way worse on the club. He backed him with some top signings and gave him a chance to prove he wasn't all talk. In return we got some of the most turgid and boring football I have ever seen Spurs play. That's before you even mention losing 6-0 to City, 5-0 at home to Liverscouse and worst of all...3-0 at home to West Ham. I can write a fucking dissertation on why AVB wasn't a good manager for Spurs. But you know what, when we appointed AVB I could have written just as much for why he would be a good manager. The guy looked perfect for us and turned out to be something else entirely. Levy, like many of us on here, got AVB wrong. Levy eventually realised it and took the pressure on his own head by sacking him. He could have let AVB go through to the summer and take all the blame when the wrist-slittingly boring season ends in spectacular mid table mediocrity and all our best players want out.

Click to expand...

dagraham said:

Not sure I entirely agree with that. The warning signs were there in his only other job in the PL, even if everyone assumed all the Chelsea players were to blame.

He was also very inexperienced really, so in a lot of ways the appointment was a risk and I don't think Levy should be able to wriggle out of the blame for what transpired to be a shit decision basically.

Unfortunately, when it comes to choosing managers, the sucessful ones tend to be the ones he didn't really want, who he eventually appoints to clean up his mess.

The careful considered choices tend to be pap. Not sure which category Sherwood fits in ; shit clearer upper or considered choice.

Either way, let's hope Levy has chosen wisely this time.

Click to expand...

idontgetit said:

He couldn't get rid of him in the summer, it would have looked way worse on the club. He backed him with some top signings and gave him a chance to prove he wasn't all talk. In return we got some of the most turgid and boring football I have ever seen Spurs play. That's before you even mention losing 6-0 to City, 5-0 at home to Liverscouse and worst of all...3-0 at home to West Ham. I can write a fucking dissertation on why AVB wasn't a good manager for Spurs. But you know what, when we appointed AVB I could have written just as much for why he would be a good manager. The guy looked perfect for us and turned out to be something else entirely. Levy, like many of us on here, got AVB wrong. Levy eventually realised it and took the pressure on his own head by sacking him. He could have let AVB go through to the summer and take all the blame when the wrist-slittingly boring season ends in spectacular mid table mediocrity and all our best players want out.

Click to expand...

Spurs_Bear said:

In 2010/11 Man United won the league with 80 points, the following year they obtained 89 points, but came second in the league.

Do you reckon they put that down to bad luck? Or went around saying they'd achieved more or performed better even though they had lost the league to Man City?

Do me a favour.

Click to expand...

sloth said:

The outcome was worse, but the season performance was better, unfortunately the team that beat them did even better than that.

Unless you're saying that we should somehow include the performance of other teams in our judgement of our own performance then I'm not sure where you're coming from?

Take another sport, Athletics, you win the gold at the Olympics in an ok time, the next Olympics comes around, and you run your fastest time ever but don't win, it's a simple fact that your best ever performance was the one in which you ran your fastest time, however the best ever outcome, and obviously the one you'll celebrate more was the one in which you won gold, but celebrating more doesn't change the facts of the relative performances. In both races you could not control what your other competitors did, that you won one and not the other was simply how the chips fell.

In a Premier League season you can only aim to get as many points as possible - and it goes without saying that you cannot aim for your opponents to score as few as possible - if that's enough then well done, if not but you did the best you've ever done, then hard luck. You cannot say that in getting fewer points but a better outcome you performed better, you did not, you performed worse, but the chips fell your way on that occasion. This is so basic, it's simply inane to argue any other way.

Anyway, I think that's all there is to say on the matter, feel free to continue to argue black is white and if you convince yourself, well done, but it won't change the truth that black is black, and white, white.

Click to expand...

Spurs_Bear said:

I've missed your holier than thou attitude sloth. Whatever you've been up to, spend more time here.

You're still wrong, and it's better if we don't go down the route of comparing it to Athletics, because that's probably as bonkers as it sounds.

Click to expand...

sloth said:

The outcome was worse, but the season performance was better, unfortunately the team that beat them did even better than that.

Unless you're saying that we should somehow include the performance of other teams in our judgement of our own performance then I'm not sure where you're coming from?

Take another sport, Athletics, you win the gold at the Olympics in an ok time, the next Olympics comes around, and you run your fastest time ever but don't win, it's a simple fact that your best ever performance was the one in which you ran your fastest time, however the best ever outcome, and obviously the one you'll celebrate more was the one in which you won gold, but celebrating more doesn't change the facts of the relative performances. In both races you could not control what your other competitors did, that you won one and not the other was simply how the chips fell.

In a Premier League season you can only aim to get as many points as possible - and it goes without saying that you cannot aim for your opponents to score as few as possible - if that's enough then well done, if not but you did the best you've ever done, then hard luck. You cannot say that in getting fewer points but a better outcome you performed better, you did not, you performed worse, but the chips fell your way on that occasion. This is so basic, it's simply inane to argue any other way.

Anyway, I think that's all there is to say on the matter, feel free to continue to argue black is white and if you convince yourself, well done, but it won't change the truth that black is black, and white, white.

Click to expand...

sloth said:

I think you'll find that's righter than thou attitude bear, and on this occasion it's because I am. Anyway in India atm. Off to bed now.

Click to expand...

Spurger King said:

So let's say, hypothetically, that the top six sides are moved to League two. You'd expect the six Prem teams to pick up a huge amount of points. The difference between them would come down to the results between the top six, and their consistency in beating the weaker teams in the league.

You can't simply isolate the points total and call that a better season. It's not even remotely comparable to the athletics analogy, as running a personal best time is not connected to the competition. A team gains its points by playing other teams, so yes points are entirely dependent upon the performances of other teams. If those teams perform well against you, you get less points. If other teams perform more consistently against the others, they will get more points.

If the division as a whole was generally weaker than the season before, the measure of a team's performance comes down to the final position...not building up a lot of points that four other teams were nevertheless able to do more effectively.

If every team in the Prem was bought by a multi-billionaire, and the best players from the other leagues in Europe were divided up between them, the Prem as a whole would be much tougher. A team finishing in the top four would almost certainly do so with a relatively low points total (due to it being far more competitive), yet it would be a huge achievement.

Click to expand...

Spurger King said:

So let's say, hypothetically, that the top six sides are moved to League two. You'd expect the six Prem teams to pick up a huge amount of points. The difference between them would come down to the results between the top six, and their consistency in beating the weaker teams in the league.

You can't simply isolate the points total and call that a better season. It's not even remotely comparable to the athletics analogy, as running a personal best time is not connected to the competition. A team gains its points by playing other teams, so yes points are entirely dependent upon the performances of other teams. If those teams perform well against you, you get less points. If other teams perform more consistently against the others, they will get more points.

If the division as a whole was generally weaker than the season before, the measure of a team's performance comes down to the final position...not building up a lot of points that four other teams were nevertheless able to do more effectively.

If every team in the Prem was bought by a multi-billionaire, and the best players from the other leagues in Europe were divided up between them, the Prem as a whole would be much tougher. A team finishing in the top four would almost certainly do so with a relatively low points total (due to it being far more competitive), yet it would be a huge achievement.

Click to expand...

sloth said:

The outcome was worse, but the season performance was better, unfortunately the team that beat them did even better than that.

Unless you're saying that we should somehow include the performance of other teams in our judgement of our own performance then I'm not sure where you're coming from?

Take another sport, Athletics, you win the gold at the Olympics in an ok time, the next Olympics comes around, and you run your fastest time ever but don't win, it's a simple fact that your best ever performance was the one in which you ran your fastest time, however the best ever outcome, and obviously the one you'll celebrate more was the one in which you won gold, but celebrating more doesn't change the facts of the relative performances. In both races you could not control what your other competitors did, that you won one and not the other was simply how the chips fell.

In a Premier League season you can only aim to get as many points as possible - and it goes without saying that you cannot aim for your opponents to score as few as possible - if that's enough then well done, if not but you did the best you've ever done, then hard luck. You cannot say that in getting fewer points but a better outcome you performed better, you did not, you performed worse, but the chips fell your way on that occasion. This is so basic, it's simply inane to argue any other way.

Anyway, I think that's all there is to say on the matter, feel free to continue to argue black is white and if you convince yourself, well done, but it won't change the truth that black is black, and white, white.

Click to expand...