Bus-Conductor
SC Supporter
- Oct 19, 2004
- 39,837
- 50,713
If you'd have stopped here, iI could have simply "winner'd" this post (and that probably would have been the first time ever in all our mutual SC co existence - which to be fair, may have worried you more than pleased you as we rarely seem to see eye to eye)
Good appraisal.
But then you blotted your tactical copy book with:
I don't entirely agree with this bit either:
I don't think we ever had an extra central midfielder, AVB pretty religiously stuck to the same 4231 mantra as Pochettino.
But you are right about the plodding football not being deliberate. We replaced Modric (clever, quick thinking, quick ball moving) with Dembele (not so clever, slow thinking, slow ball moving), VDV (quick brain) with Dempsey (Slow brain). Hardly surprising things slowed down.
I don't think we are doing much tactically to improve that under Pochettino at the moment. I don't think the tempo of our play has improved much under him so far. I hope it does.
I think the problem is football is very tactically multi faceted, but people only call the glory moments "good". By and large under AVB we defended "good" if you take out the hammerings to two teams who hammered others. We were organised off the ball "good", we were more coherently "good", more cohesively "good" with and without the ball and we were generally less frail, despite having equally poor or even worse defenders. We starved the opposition of the ball "good" usually. We starved the opposition of chances "good" most of the time. And best of all, despite the major team upheaval and loss of every top quality player we gathered points "good".
I think, as you partially allude to, Pochettino is struggling to balance off this desire to play a more expensive game with defensive efficiency, just as AVB struggled to guild a more defensively efficient strategy (including keeping and looking after the ball) with creativity.
Over the course of one and half seasons, AVB lost two players who were worth 20-30 goals/assist combo each, three if you include Adebayor's who only appeared in body but not spirit. Still got us to fifth and sitting 6th 4/5 points of 4th the halfway through the next season.
Personally, I think AVB's strategy was a better foundation on which to build than trying to do it the other way round. Get the boring basics in place, get people understand a general collective work ethos as basics, then guild it.
This is how Mourinho seems to operate for example. First season he gets everyone understanding what they must do when the opposition have the ball, even the likes of Hazard. No player is exempt from the "team first" ethos. If you are a liability in any way you are shipped out (Mata, Luiz, etc) sometimes for less (so called) flair/talented players. It's just that he's always doing it from a better talent pool.
