- Oct 25, 2005
- 32,629
- 33,579
- Staff
- #281
We have been bullied for too long. That will no longer happen.
Our fighting spirit.
- Thread starter bomberH
- Start date
Everlasting Seconds
Well-Known Member
- Jan 9, 2014
- 14,914
- 26,616
From my close and personal experience with Scandinavians, and I don't mean any disrespect to all the Scandinavians on this site,
that's Eriksen simply acting like most Scandinavians would. It doesn't mean that he is too soft really.
Lloris is a great captain and I'm proud that he is leading the pack. A gentleman in public, he reserves his more adamant sides for closed doors. And anyway, we have strong players tasked with marshalling the players in-game, so I think the present set up works perfectly. A great captain is so much more than a guy shouting at rash players on the pitch.
EastLondonYid
Well-Known Member
- Jan 26, 2010
- 7,837
- 16,145
For the posters on here who were embarrassed and ashamed of our boys against the chavs...
Did you see Man C's pathetic semi final performance?
Now thats something to be embarrassed and ashamed of.
Did you see Man C's pathetic semi final performance?
Now thats something to be embarrassed and ashamed of.
SargeantMeatCurtains
Your least favourite poster
- Jan 5, 2013
- 11,765
- 61,763
Stamford
Well-Known Member
- Sep 15, 2015
- 4,211
- 20,153
No point trying to speak sense into these people. Dyke of the PFA for example wants the Leicester team knighted. I mean ffs
spursram
Well-Known Member
- Aug 3, 2013
- 1,910
- 2,904
Understand all that but we still lost a two goal lead!
danielneeds
Kick-Ass
- May 5, 2004
- 24,183
- 48,814
Or will teams try to niggle us more now, in the hope that we lose it again?
eViL
Oliver Skipp's Dad
- May 15, 2004
- 5,841
- 7,965
It's rare we react to that sort of stuff this season. The Chelsea game was definitely a one-off, but certainly a statement of intent for next season should the middle-tablers decide to they want to sacrifice their own glory to stop us from achieving our goals.
rossdapep
Well-Known Member
- Aug 25, 2011
- 22,405
- 80,711
Even Barcelona got into playing games at times. Expansive football will work most of the time but them days it doesn't you need to really fight for it.
danielneeds
Kick-Ass
- May 5, 2004
- 24,183
- 48,814
It's got to be controlled agression though - that's what the likes of Mourinho and Simeone specialise in. Monday we were out of control, we need to be more like samurai than hooligans.
LondonOllie
Well-Known Member
- Jul 17, 2003
- 1,126
- 2,878
I was talking about this with someone who was religious the other day, and about how Chelsea are such wind up merchants that Dembele lost his head and reacted.
He asked me, "well, what would Jesus do?"
To which I replied, "It's Diego Costa, so he'd probably try and gouge his eyes out too."
He asked me, "well, what would Jesus do?"
To which I replied, "It's Diego Costa, so he'd probably try and gouge his eyes out too."
TheBlueRooster
Well-Known Member
- May 10, 2005
- 3,818
- 4,707
I don't think we were out of control, the match got out of control and that's down to the referee. It's his responsibility to protect the players and up hold the laws of the game. There were times in that game you could see fear in his eyes, he was the complete "homer" on Monday. He was allowing Chelsea players surround him but sending our boys away. At one point he sent Jan Vertonghen away, who is our vice captain and can stand there with the ref when talking to a player who's in the wrong and when the 'keeper is the captain. People say we lost it because we threw away a 2 - 0 lead, five of the nine bookings came before Chelsea levelled and three came in time added on mainly for stoppages for flare ups caused by both teams. Maybe were were a bit more physical, but we didn't lose it.
danielneeds
Kick-Ass
- May 5, 2004
- 24,183
- 48,814
I'm sorry but I disagree - at 2-0 up at half time we shouldn't have been giving a flying fuck what the referee was doing. If we were in control and looking at it tactically we should have been looking to disrupt Hazard - who was their Hail Mary - with niggly fouls and doubling up, making sure he couldn't get into the game, because we had the rest of them in control. Instead we gave him the freedom of the pitch to change the game. That's what I mean by tactical agression. Find your target and shoot to kill. We were just firing wildly into the distance.
TheBlueRooster
Well-Known Member
- May 10, 2005
- 3,818
- 4,707
Five of our players were booked before Hazard came on, how can you evaluate anything before he's even playing, Dier was the only one of ours booked in the 90 after they levelled and the last three came in time added on 2 in 90+5 and 1 in 90+6.
Guus Hiddink said we didn't have the stomach for the fight, well he may have the stomach but we had the balls. Spurs a soft touch? Not any more we can play the football that excites but this team showed if you want to mix it, even on your own manor, we'll fight back, and Alli wasn't playing.
danielneeds
Kick-Ass
- May 5, 2004
- 24,183
- 48,814
Having the stomach for the fight is not giving up 2-0 leads though. We had them in the palm of our hand, but we lost our heads - not just in terms of bookings, but in terms of controlling the game which is the most important thing. Any old bunch of cloggers in Sunday League can go around the pitch kicking opponents, but not everyone can maintain discipline and tactically foul when needed, and kill a game when you are cruising 2-0 up.
thebenjamin
Well-Known Member
- Jul 1, 2008
- 12,380
- 39,410
Exactly why it' was a good learning experience for a very young team. Impossible to go from incredibly fired up and passionate kids to experienced, controlled aggression without going through something like this along the way. If you want a team that fights, this is always going to happen. Our red card record is in fact unbelievably good.
danielneeds
Kick-Ass
- May 5, 2004
- 24,183
- 48,814
Nice article by Rob Smyth on the Battle of the Bridge
http://www.eurosport.co.uk/football...d-changing-masculinity_sto5561913/story.shtml
Tottenham's scraps with Chelsea were exactly what many fans wanted to see, writes Rob Smyth, and denying that is the case has implications beyond football.
It was Nick Hancock, of all people, who pricked the pompous reaction that followed Eric Cantona’s attempt to kick xenophobia out of football. On Fantasy Football League, 48 hours after the event, Hancock was asked for his opinion. “I thought it was appalling,” he began, wearing a newsreader’s grave face. “I thought it was terrible, I thought it was tragic. But most of all, I thought it was very, very funny… comfortably the best thing that’s happened this season. Absolutely brilliant!”
Hancock’s comments came to mind earlier this week, when Spurs’ hilarious rampage at Stamford Bridge prompted a tedious crescendo of sanctimony. There are some people who are genuinely appalled with Spurs’ behaviour. Nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with pretending the alternative view – one that is held by millions of football fans – does not exist. “We don’t like to see that kind of thing.” Oh yes we do Des! Mousa Dembele’s impromptu ophthalmology on Diego Costa was out of order, not to mention a little weird, but the rest was good, unclean fun.
Jock Wallace, the former Rangers and Leicester manager, called it the “battle fever”. Games with an edge are generally far more interesting and rousing. When Manchester United beat Arsenal 4-2 at Highbury in 2005 – after Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira almost came to blows in the tunnel – there was a similarly outraged response from many. In the Sunday Times, Hugh McIlvanney, Britain’s greatest sportswriter, offered an alternative appraisal. “… United grew stronger amid the intensity of a contest that was, understandably, too bitter for many tastes but which I must admit to finding an irresistible spectacle,” he said. “It did have deplorable elements … Yet, in spite of its intermittent echoes of the ugliness that had erupted in the tunnel before kick-off, the match was memorable mainly as epic entertainment.” Spurs and Manchester City both missed out on major prizes this week; one went down like Tony Montana, the other closed the door quietly behind them. As a neutral or a fan, what would you rather watch? In their post-match interviews, Eric Dier, Harry Kane and Mauricio Pochettino seemed to be having a competition to see who could use the word ‘proud’ the most. Quite right too: Spurs stood up to Chelsea in a way that would never have happened in the past, and that burst of aggression is intrinsically linked to other qualities that make this the best Spurs side in decades. It is almost impossible for a team to excel in the Premier League without those qualities. In their darkest hour, Spurs looked like winners. If that happened every week it would be an issue, but these were unique circumstances. Spurs gave a human response to crushing disappointment; as such, they deserved a bit more sympathy and a lot more empathy. They had been battling for the title all season, and saw it disappear, at a time when they were being goaded by 40,000 fans, not to mention a number of Chelsea players. What were they supposed to do, smile sweetly and take a selfie?
Such needle invariably elevates games – in terms of skill as well as aggression, as Eden Hazard proved with his sparkling performance and beautiful goal. Diego Maradona spent an entire career using anger as a creative energy. It is not just about winning or losing; it is about winning or losing against them. That heightened experience is a rare visceral thrill for neutrals, never mind supporters, never mind players. Football at its best should a fusion of skill and steel – or, in the words of Ruud Gullit and Louis van Gaal, when “sexy football” meets “sex masochism”. It’s easy to blame gentrification, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Many ex-players suffer from an interesting amnesia when it comes to their own on-field excesses. There are exceptions, like Gary Neville, who says he always tries to put himself in the dressing-room before he rushes to criticise. Neville was Roosevelt’s man in the arena; most of those passing judgement from on high have never entered the arena and wouldn’t last two minutes if they did. All football fans who enjoy games with an edge instinctively know when it goes too far. There is a simple test: watch a bad tackle, and see whether your instinctive reaction is nearer to a laugh or a wince. This should prompt a laugh; this probably shouldn’t. There is an element of guilty pleasure in this, certainly. Nobody wants to see over-the-ball tackles, or anything that significantly endangers an opponent, but none of the Spurs tackles did that. If you take the sanctimony to its logical conclusion, everybody will end up living in a padded cell.
Football, like society, has become obsessed with image. Not only has it lost touch with reality, it wouldn’t recognise reality if it walked past it in the street. There are umpteen reasons for that, beyond the scope and intelligence of this blog, but the most influential bear the acronym PC: political correctness and personal computers, the latter facilitating a digital identity that sometimes bears little resemblance to the person constructing it. So many people are keeping up appearances, attempting to present a perfect world that can never exist, and taking cheap shots at those who are caught deviating from the fantasy. Burn the witch, we know your Twitter handle. If you’re going to throw those crowd-pleasing shapes, you’d better live like Mother Teresa. The reality is that most people would bundle their gran under a bus for a retweet. Values aren’t necessarily correct, they are just contemporary. Many are cyclical. Football’s attitude to physical contact differs enormously from rugby and other sports; they can’t both be right, yet there is a smug certainty in the way even the vaguest physical contact is dismissed. There were references to “two mass brawls” in the Spurs/Chelsea game and, while Susie Dent would not argue with that phrase, this was hardly the wild west, or even Chelsea v Leeds in the 1970 FA Cup final replay. Increasingly things are painted as either good or bad, black or white, when really life is one long shade of grey. There is nuance in most things that football does not recognise. The Sopranos was also a comedy; The Office was also a drama. There aren’t good and bad human beings, just human beings capable of both good and bad – often, like Spurs, at the same time. It often feels like celebrity status disqualifies someone from being allowed to have a human reaction, when the opposite should be the case because the pressures are far greater. All of this is not to say that matches with aggro are intrinsically enjoyable. The 2010 World Cup final, for example, was profoundly depressing. The difference between those games and the enjoyably nasty ones, like Monday and the 2006 World Cup game between Portugal and Holland, is honesty. There is something dispiriting about watching teams who try to win matches by foul means or fouler, with calculated cynicism. Spurs’ heads had gone by the end, and Dier in particular left part of his brain somewhere in a field in west London. There are few things in life to compare with the dark humour of watching an adult who has completely lost it. Maybe it shouldn’t be funny, but it is. A culture has developed, in football and life, where snide, passive-aggressive behaviour is becoming an acceptable norm. Dishonesty is the best policy; nobody makes eye contact or has difficult conversations. That has serious long-term implications. Masculinity is changing - we know that, we’ve all seen the Sopranos – but that change has been dramatically accelerated by an attempt to impose a set of values that are alien to so many. Man up? Man down more like. “We are men, they are men,” said Pochettino. “It's football.” Well, it was.
http://www.eurosport.co.uk/football...d-changing-masculinity_sto5561913/story.shtml
Tottenham's scraps with Chelsea were exactly what many fans wanted to see, writes Rob Smyth, and denying that is the case has implications beyond football.
It was Nick Hancock, of all people, who pricked the pompous reaction that followed Eric Cantona’s attempt to kick xenophobia out of football. On Fantasy Football League, 48 hours after the event, Hancock was asked for his opinion. “I thought it was appalling,” he began, wearing a newsreader’s grave face. “I thought it was terrible, I thought it was tragic. But most of all, I thought it was very, very funny… comfortably the best thing that’s happened this season. Absolutely brilliant!”
Hancock’s comments came to mind earlier this week, when Spurs’ hilarious rampage at Stamford Bridge prompted a tedious crescendo of sanctimony. There are some people who are genuinely appalled with Spurs’ behaviour. Nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with pretending the alternative view – one that is held by millions of football fans – does not exist. “We don’t like to see that kind of thing.” Oh yes we do Des! Mousa Dembele’s impromptu ophthalmology on Diego Costa was out of order, not to mention a little weird, but the rest was good, unclean fun.
Jock Wallace, the former Rangers and Leicester manager, called it the “battle fever”. Games with an edge are generally far more interesting and rousing. When Manchester United beat Arsenal 4-2 at Highbury in 2005 – after Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira almost came to blows in the tunnel – there was a similarly outraged response from many. In the Sunday Times, Hugh McIlvanney, Britain’s greatest sportswriter, offered an alternative appraisal. “… United grew stronger amid the intensity of a contest that was, understandably, too bitter for many tastes but which I must admit to finding an irresistible spectacle,” he said. “It did have deplorable elements … Yet, in spite of its intermittent echoes of the ugliness that had erupted in the tunnel before kick-off, the match was memorable mainly as epic entertainment.” Spurs and Manchester City both missed out on major prizes this week; one went down like Tony Montana, the other closed the door quietly behind them. As a neutral or a fan, what would you rather watch? In their post-match interviews, Eric Dier, Harry Kane and Mauricio Pochettino seemed to be having a competition to see who could use the word ‘proud’ the most. Quite right too: Spurs stood up to Chelsea in a way that would never have happened in the past, and that burst of aggression is intrinsically linked to other qualities that make this the best Spurs side in decades. It is almost impossible for a team to excel in the Premier League without those qualities. In their darkest hour, Spurs looked like winners. If that happened every week it would be an issue, but these were unique circumstances. Spurs gave a human response to crushing disappointment; as such, they deserved a bit more sympathy and a lot more empathy. They had been battling for the title all season, and saw it disappear, at a time when they were being goaded by 40,000 fans, not to mention a number of Chelsea players. What were they supposed to do, smile sweetly and take a selfie?
Such needle invariably elevates games – in terms of skill as well as aggression, as Eden Hazard proved with his sparkling performance and beautiful goal. Diego Maradona spent an entire career using anger as a creative energy. It is not just about winning or losing; it is about winning or losing against them. That heightened experience is a rare visceral thrill for neutrals, never mind supporters, never mind players. Football at its best should a fusion of skill and steel – or, in the words of Ruud Gullit and Louis van Gaal, when “sexy football” meets “sex masochism”. It’s easy to blame gentrification, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Many ex-players suffer from an interesting amnesia when it comes to their own on-field excesses. There are exceptions, like Gary Neville, who says he always tries to put himself in the dressing-room before he rushes to criticise. Neville was Roosevelt’s man in the arena; most of those passing judgement from on high have never entered the arena and wouldn’t last two minutes if they did. All football fans who enjoy games with an edge instinctively know when it goes too far. There is a simple test: watch a bad tackle, and see whether your instinctive reaction is nearer to a laugh or a wince. This should prompt a laugh; this probably shouldn’t. There is an element of guilty pleasure in this, certainly. Nobody wants to see over-the-ball tackles, or anything that significantly endangers an opponent, but none of the Spurs tackles did that. If you take the sanctimony to its logical conclusion, everybody will end up living in a padded cell.
Football, like society, has become obsessed with image. Not only has it lost touch with reality, it wouldn’t recognise reality if it walked past it in the street. There are umpteen reasons for that, beyond the scope and intelligence of this blog, but the most influential bear the acronym PC: political correctness and personal computers, the latter facilitating a digital identity that sometimes bears little resemblance to the person constructing it. So many people are keeping up appearances, attempting to present a perfect world that can never exist, and taking cheap shots at those who are caught deviating from the fantasy. Burn the witch, we know your Twitter handle. If you’re going to throw those crowd-pleasing shapes, you’d better live like Mother Teresa. The reality is that most people would bundle their gran under a bus for a retweet. Values aren’t necessarily correct, they are just contemporary. Many are cyclical. Football’s attitude to physical contact differs enormously from rugby and other sports; they can’t both be right, yet there is a smug certainty in the way even the vaguest physical contact is dismissed. There were references to “two mass brawls” in the Spurs/Chelsea game and, while Susie Dent would not argue with that phrase, this was hardly the wild west, or even Chelsea v Leeds in the 1970 FA Cup final replay. Increasingly things are painted as either good or bad, black or white, when really life is one long shade of grey. There is nuance in most things that football does not recognise. The Sopranos was also a comedy; The Office was also a drama. There aren’t good and bad human beings, just human beings capable of both good and bad – often, like Spurs, at the same time. It often feels like celebrity status disqualifies someone from being allowed to have a human reaction, when the opposite should be the case because the pressures are far greater. All of this is not to say that matches with aggro are intrinsically enjoyable. The 2010 World Cup final, for example, was profoundly depressing. The difference between those games and the enjoyably nasty ones, like Monday and the 2006 World Cup game between Portugal and Holland, is honesty. There is something dispiriting about watching teams who try to win matches by foul means or fouler, with calculated cynicism. Spurs’ heads had gone by the end, and Dier in particular left part of his brain somewhere in a field in west London. There are few things in life to compare with the dark humour of watching an adult who has completely lost it. Maybe it shouldn’t be funny, but it is. A culture has developed, in football and life, where snide, passive-aggressive behaviour is becoming an acceptable norm. Dishonesty is the best policy; nobody makes eye contact or has difficult conversations. That has serious long-term implications. Masculinity is changing - we know that, we’ve all seen the Sopranos – but that change has been dramatically accelerated by an attempt to impose a set of values that are alien to so many. Man up? Man down more like. “We are men, they are men,” said Pochettino. “It's football.” Well, it was.
