Besiktas Vs Tottenham: Match Thread

[Norwegian Spurs fan]

Lack of width, people looking confused, Lamela losing the ball, Vlad inducing spasms of horror, a palpable sense of ennui?

Am glad I went for a carvery instead then...



Did we panic after the mistake? Everyone seems to have gone from being all "I have no particular outrage to express" to "FFS, we're doomed!"

Also, will they get fined for the light failures?

I would not say we panicked after the Majones Kaboul fuck up, This quote from the mirror "
Cenk Tosun, who also crashed a spectacular shot against the bar, scored the winner after 60 minutes following a good move by Gokhan Tore and Olcay Sahan.

Tottenham turned up the pressure as they went in search of an equaliser but Soldado saw another effort deflected wide before being substituted in the 69th minute as his and Pochettino's night went from bad to worse.

But just when you thought it was over, the lights went out again just as it was announced we were about to move into three minutes of added time. It took them ten minutes this time to fix the lights so we could play out three minutes of injury time.

What a farce.

 

[Ghost Hardware]

VDV was an established player, but unwanted by RM which is why we got him. Modric was a player which bigger clubs had looked at but didn't think he was suited to PL, so we bought him but it was only after 18 months he looked a decent player.

We've bought Soldado, Paulhino, Dembele, and Lamela (priced on scoring zillions of goals at Roma) as established players and paid big sums - but all have yet to preform at a level we might have expected for the price.

We've also bought a number of lower priced players such as Capoue, Chirches but none of these have kicked on on to be better players, in fact if anything they seem to have regressed.

All of which is why many suggest we have a large squad of players of similar average ability - supplemented by a few decent youth club produced players. So the only way out is to sell a few of our underperforming players and buy players who may kick on like Beerbatov, Modric, Bale etc plus bring through more youth players who will be no worse than our squad players and may well develop to be better players - but importantly play for the shirt unlike some of our current squad players.

Exactly my point, although I wouldn't say Lamela was necessarily established at time of purchase, more a hot prospect after only really having one stand out season in Italy. VDV was tho, and probably one of the biggest name players we have ever bought, maybe along with Soldado. But this is exactly it, I can understand one player not clicking but so many just smacks of a poor recruitment policy. As I say, we shouldn't spread our money about, buy one or two highly talented players and look towards the youth set up for the rest were there may be gaps. It will be interesting to see where we go from here regarding transfers, I just can't see Levy changing his spread betting tactic.... I hope i am wrong.

 

[spursbri111]

Exactly my point, although I wouldn't say Lamela was necessarily established at time of purchase, more a hot prospect after only really having one stand out season in Italy. VDV was tho, and probably one of the biggest name players we have ever bought, maybe along with Soldado. But this is exactly it, I can understand one player not clicking but so many just smacks of a poor recruitment policy. As I say, we shouldn't spread our money about, buy one or two highly talented players and look towards the youth set up for the rest were there may be gaps. It will be interesting to see where we go from here regarding transfers, I just can't see Levy changing his spread betting tactic.... I hope i am wrong.

basically levy went out with bale and came home with some magic beans. The man said there really good so just throw them in the team and watch them grow.

 

[Borks]

It's easy to slag off the transfer policy now but at the time, most, if not all of the spurs fans I knew were very excited about the 7 players that we signed.

Soldado, Chiriches, Chadli and Eriksen had all played in the champions league, Paulinho had just had a great Confed cup and Lamela was being raved about after his great season in Italy.

Nobody could've guessed how bad it would've turned out for these 7 but to criticise that we bought these players is a bit harsh IMO given that you can only go on what you've seen from their performances at their previous clubs.

I don't really know what's happened to Paulinho but we could definitely use some of his last seasons goals right now.

 

[DiscoD1882]

i watched the last 8 minutes of the game due to my sons carol concert. so i will review the carol concert instead.

They started well. Then the lights went out and after that they were god awful. there was no cohesion. the kids were all over the place and their pitch was terrible, it looked like they had no direction and were just out there doing their own thing. I paid good money to watch it and was left massivley disappointed.

 

[Breezer]

Hard to disagree. My only concern at the time was none of these players had Prem experience. However all internationals who should be able to cope with a slight change in football styles compared to other leagues. I do believe some of our players are struggling with the formation and tactics. Soldado makes clever movements but most of the time we don't find him and when we do the pass is so delayed he already has a defender on him. Our passing in the final third of the pitch is too slow and has been since we sold modric, vdv, bale etc.

At the time we didn't need 7 players. 3 top quality additions would have been better. But obviously DL looking for bargains to sell on. Few more goals from Chadli and we'll easily get double what we paid for him. The same with Eriksen. I believe that's the problem with our recruitment. We're not buying players that we need! We're buying players who can hopefully do the job and who have great sell on values.

Unfortunately we'll never see a return on Lamela. £30m? While Stoke are paying £3m for Bojan.
I know who I'd prefer. Unless Levy is prepared to sell some of these players at a loss and clear the deck and provide money for our current coach this rot will not stop. We're in December and I can't wait for the season to end and allow Poch to buy 2-3 of his own additions (if he's still here)

 

[Breezer]

It's easy to slag off the transfer policy now but at the time, most, if not all of the spurs fans I knew were very excited about the 7 players that we signed.

Soldado, Chiriches, Chadli and Eriksen had all played in the champions league, Paulinho had just had a great Confed cup and Lamela was being raved about after his great season in Italy.

Nobody could've guessed how bad it would've turned out for these 7 but to criticise that we bought these players is a bit harsh IMO given that you can only go on what you've seen from their performances at their previous clubs.

I don't really know what's happened to Paulinho but we could definitely use some of his last seasons goals right now.

Hard to disagree. My only concern at the time was none of these players had Prem experience. However all internationals who should be able to cope with a slight change in football styles compared to other leagues. I do believe some of our players are struggling with the formation and tactics. Soldado makes clever movements but most of the time we don't find him and when we do the pass is so delayed he already has a defender on him. Our passing in the final third of the pitch is too slow and has been since we sold modric, vdv, bale etc.

At the time we didn't need 7 players. 3 top quality additions would have been better. But obviously DL looking for bargains to sell on. Few more goals from Chadli and we'll easily get double what we paid for him. The same with Eriksen. I believe that's the problem with our recruitment. We're not buying players that we need! We're buying players who can hopefully do the job and who have great sell on values.

Unfortunately we'll never see a return on Lamela. £30m? While Stoke are paying £3m for Bojan.
I know who I'd prefer. Unless Levy is prepared to sell some of these players at a loss and clear the deck and provide money for our current coach this rot will not stop. We're in December and I can't wait for the season to end and allow Poch to buy 2-3 of his own additions (if he's still here)

 

[iluvsteffenfreund]

So if our midfield 3 is bentaleb, mason and erikson on Sunday what's the odds on siggy scoring ?! I cannot believe it's come this far that we are relying on bentaleb and mason to start premier league games. Just looking at our rivals and there spines and all of them are far far superior to ours. How we have fallen

 

[iluvsteffenfreund]

Hard to disagree. My only concern at the time was none of these players had Prem experience. However all internationals who should be able to cope with a slight change in football styles compared to other leagues. I do believe some of our players are struggling with the formation and tactics. Soldado makes clever movements but most of the time we don't find him and when we do the pass is so delayed he already has a defender on him. Our passing in the final third of the pitch is too slow and has been since we sold modric, vdv, bale etc.

At the time we didn't need 7 players. 3 top quality additions would have been better. But obviously DL looking for bargains to sell on. Few more goals from Chadli and we'll easily get double what we paid for him. The same with Eriksen. I believe that's the problem with our recruitment. We're not buying players that we need! We're buying players who can hopefully do the job and who have great sell on values.

Unfortunately we'll never see a return on Lamela. £30m? While Stoke are paying £3m for Bojan.
I know who I'd prefer. Unless Levy is prepared to sell some of these players at a loss and clear the deck and provide money for our current coach this rot will not stop. We're in December and I can't wait for the season to end and allow Poch to buy 2-3 of his own additions (if he's still here)

But wait lamela scored a rabona and rolls his foot over the ball and does that no look pass Everytime he is possession. He also runs after it when he loses possession..... Is that not value for money ?

 

[Spursidol]

Eriksen wasn't a bit part player under AVB. He was injured on international duty and out for a couple of months and didn't return until after AVB had gone. Sherwood dropped Soldado as soon as he scored.

True but AVB didn't seem to use Eriksen in every maych he was fit - and Eriksen certainly had very few assists/goals under AVB compared to under Sherwood. Adebayor was used a bit under AVB (mainly i his first season) but Sherwood motivated Adebayor who started scoring. Soldado was dropped after scoring a penalty - so its not as if he'd been on a hot run of scoring, whereas Kane did score 3 goals from open play in 7 matches.

 

[Spursidol]

Exactly my point, although I wouldn't say Lamela was necessarily established at time of purchase, more a hot prospect after only really having one stand out season in Italy. VDV was tho, and probably one of the biggest name players we have ever bought, maybe along with Soldado. But this is exactly it, I can understand one player not clicking but so many just smacks of a poor recruitment policy. As I say, we shouldn't spread our money about, buy one or two highly talented players and look towards the youth set up for the rest were there may be gaps. It will be interesting to see where we go from here regarding transfers, I just can't see Levy changing his spread betting tactic.... I hope i am wrong.

IMO one of the problems is that Spurs felt under pressure (partly from AVB, part from fans) to buy some 'established' players rather than players which we could develop (which has been our modus operandi for a number of years) - Burt (Telegraph) says that Soldado, Paulhino and Lamela were all players AVB wanted, but I think that the differences between the speed and physicality of the leagues was not properly taken into account and equally how all the players would fit together in a team (remember the thread about Soldado being isolated in the box with no service).

At the same time we also bought players like Chadli,Chirches and Capoue thinking we could develop them - but this time we seem to have chosen poorly - Chadli has done 'ok' but none of them have really kicked on except Eriksen.

So it was (20/20 hindsight) a clusterfuck of a TW. We should have only bought 3 or 4 players better suited to the team (keeping some of the ones we sold who new the PL), and saved some of the money in a 2nd TW when we knew where the gaps in the team still were - and also eased integration problems. Put simply it was trying to change things too quickly.

Now its imploded, IMO we need to learn and takes 2 or 3 TW's to offload players, bring more youth through to develop, but intially they will be squad players. We've been set back a couple of years by 2013 TW, but there's no magic formula - we just need to find and develop the next few good players but it will take time.

 

[Spurs Lodge Kittens]

Our players have insatiable desire to constantly pass backwards, look for options backwards and dribble backwards.

It's infuriating to watch and last night was more frustrating than most games. Players like Paulinho are so dam scared of making a mistake they don't even look forward with the ball or take a risk. I'd love to see a stat on how much our centre midfielders pass the ball backwards compared to other sides.

 

[Borks]

Our players have insatiable desire to constantly pass backwards, look for options backwards and dribble backwards.

It's infuriating to watch and last night was more frustrating than most games. Players like Paulinho are so dam scared of making a mistake they don't even look forward with the ball or take a risk. I'd love to see a stat on how much our centre midfielders pass the ball backwards compared to other sides.

Why do you think players are scared to pass forward?

 

[nightgoat]

True but AVB didn't seem to use Eriksen in every maych he was fit - and Eriksen certainly had very few assists/goals under AVB compared to under Sherwood. Adebayor was used a bit under AVB (mainly i his first season) but Sherwood motivated Adebayor who started scoring. Soldado was dropped after scoring a penalty - so its not as if he'd been on a hot run of scoring, whereas Kane did score 3 goals from open play in 7 matches.

He played in every league game bar one under AVB before his injury. Now where's the match thread from Norwich away last season?

 

[TaoistMonkey]

I'm not going to trawl through all the pages here as I assume its been mentioned but I think its pretty piss poor that the floodlights kept going out.

Did they restart the game at the end or did it just get suspended? If it did surely it should go down as a draw?

 

[nightgoat]

Also, will they get fined for the light failures?

Probably not. I don't think Galatasaray received any kind of punishment for driving a tractor over their half of the pitch at half time against Juventus last season.

 

[Spurs Lodge Kittens]

True but AVB didn't seem to use Eriksen in every maych he was fit - and Eriksen certainly had very few assists/goals under AVB compared to under Sherwood. Adebayor was used a bit under AVB (mainly i his first season) but Sherwood motivated Adebayor who started scoring. Soldado was dropped after scoring a penalty - so its not as if he'd been on a hot run of scoring, whereas Kane did score 3 goals from open play in 7 matches.

It was actually from open play against Cardiff, but your point about Eriksen - yes AVB had started favouring Holtby ahead of Eriksen getting injured for Denmark.

 

[Borks]

It was actually from open play against Cardiff, but your point about Eriksen - yes AVB had started favouring Holtby ahead of Eriksen getting injured for Denmark.

That was Sherwood.

 

[VegasII]

Surprised nobody has blamed Jenas for the lights going out.

 

[JAYSTAR]

To be honest, it's a day later and I've had time to reflect. Things are not actually as good as they seem...