- Aug 21, 2011
- 14,573
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It depends what you value and what you enjoy. There are various different tactical and coached approaches that teams can take, and at least having one I can appreciate and enjoy. From about three months of his career onwards I didn't find most of what AVB was doing or our performances awful, it is hard to teach élan, quick witted ingenuity, creative genius. As we found throughout most of last year too. But at least there was clearly an ethos in place and a method that yielded results, even without much quality in the team, and it wasn't about parking buses and praying either.
We didn't play team attacking football under AVB and I think that's why I really disliked his approach. We played team defensive football and we played team possession football but we never played team attacking football. It was press hard, win the ball, keep the ball, try give the ball to Bale as much as possible and hope he does something with it. We never created for Bale, we just gave him the ball as often as possible and left him to do it all. Football without purpose or intent. Obsession with technicality, clouding the true purpose of a Spurs side which should be to put the ball in the back of the oppositions net and to bloody well enjoy doing it. I get what he was trying but he was so wrong about our play on the ball it was never going to work out. And in the end it even impacted the bits he had previously got right. We were so insecure about an ability to score goals or threaten going forward that we went to pieces in desperation against any of the big sides that went ahead against us. If you can't defend comfortably then you cant attack comfortably and vice versa. Nah his philosophy was flawed in the first place and it was way too boring to get away with, certainly at Spurs