Tottenham need to find their bearings quickly as Wembley tenants

[teok]

Spurs need to find their feet on the larger pitch now it is their temporary home.

Read the full article at The Guardian

 

[jamesinashby]

The gist of this article suggest that the larger pitches make it easier for attacking and harder to defend especially when pressing the opposition. Whether true or not, it surely must apply to BOTH teams. So where is the problem?

Trust in MP ~ if there is a way to play on the larger pitch, he will find it.

COYS

 

[ParkLaneUpper]

We beat Leicester at their place end of last season on a pitch same size as wembley

 

[stuffies]

Only downside about Wembley will be the lower teams upping their own game more because there playing at Wembley and unlikey to play there too often so for some it be like a cup final day out.
However our training pitches should have been changed to match wembly specs and we should be used to it plus pre season games so come start of the season the pitch size shouldn't be an excuse.
The more we play on it the better we'll get and will help when we reach all the cup finals ...be like playing at home

 

[midspur]

Isn't the training pitch supposed to be the same size as Wembley?

 

[davidmatzdorf]

I think one issue that contributed to our poor results at Wembley was that Pochettino & co. anticipated that the larger pitch would have the opposite effect than it actually had. They thought it would free up our attacking movement, without diminishing our defensive solidity.

What actually happened was the pressing upfield to win the ball was less effective, because the opposition in possession had more space to find an outlet, whereas our defence, especially when the fullbacks were up the pitch and the defensive midfielder was dropping back, was more vulnerable to pace along the flanks.

The main issue was defence. Most of our bad results at Wembley were directly related to conceding the kind of sloppy goal, often against the run of play, that we rarely conceded at WHL. My memory is that all or nearly all of those involved a pacy opponent getting behind or through the defensive line: wider pitch, bigger gaps.

As the season progressed, the team learned how to play more effectively against opposition that played us at our own game (pressing hard and early) and also worked out more effective defensive positioning on larger pitches. We won 5 of our last 6 away league matches by a combined score of 19-4. I don't how many of those were on larger pitches, but the majority would have been on pitches larger than the old one at WHL.

None of this addresses the other problem at Wembley, which is that it is impossible, with 80,000 supporters, to generate anything close to the level of intensity that 35,000 could produce at WHL. It all just ... evaporates. I'm more concerned about that. We can learn how to deal with the pitch (which is slow as well as being large). You can't manufacture fan noise and intensity in a venue that is not designed for it.

 

[Gaz_Gammon]

Fact is the competition that we faced at Wembley were far better than eighty percent of PL teams.

The pitch size is similar to that of Leicester and Hull, who we mothered both sides away from home.

Far too much crap written about the pitch size at Wembley.