Manager Watch: Ange Postecoglou

DarwinSpur said:

Does it make you feel good writing posts like that? Is that the point of it? To score feel good points by shitting on players?

Just feels odd to me but whatever. Like i said I'm happy for us to buy better.

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It's called an exaggerated example. "I'm so hungry, I could eat a horse". When people say things like that, don't go around warning Ascot that some lunatic is coming over to eat their horses.

As to the sentiment behind that (apparently not so obvious) exaggeration, it seems we are in agreement that he's not up to it.

I hope our fans now don’t release the Robbie Williams song. Ange deserves all the punishment he gets

I feel like the overreaction is because people are desperate to win anything as soon as possible to silence other fans and pundits, but if we went on to win this cup, those same people would say “it’s only the league cup” and they would be right.

The FA Cup has always been the one to win, and I’d rather us focus all our energy on that and the league. Winning something should be because you’ve beaten the best teams and put in top performances, not because it was easy to win against sides that also don’t care about the competition.

I’m glad Ange got to test our second team against another prem side this early on, he knows exactly what he’s working with now.

SambaSpurs said:

Ultimately I’m left with the feeling that winning was not Ange’s main priority tonight, finding out about his squad was. Maybe that leads to more winning in future who knows. Feels like a big blow given our drought.

Still feel he could have done that with half the changes from the off and then a few subs.

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I’d say his priority is to build a team ultimately.

woth that he gotta find out if his ways are being understood I guess.

me other way it’s done, we didn’t limp out by any means.

we held a decent Fulham team with our second string team, that bodes well for the league - looking at the glass half full.

Some serious overreacting in here! Ok all of us are disappointed and there were too many changes last night. That said, I understand why Ange did it as it's one thing seeing players in training but it's a whole other ball game watching them in a competitive match against decent opposition.

Ange I'm sure will be just as disappointed as us but hopefully he will also now have a clearer opinion on some of our second string players and that can only be a good thing in terms of squad building in the longer term.

Still early days with Ange and no doubt we will have games where things don't click and we suffer poor results. It's going to happen so we need to try to focus on the bigger picture and not totally lose our shit.

After both Mourinho and Conte's first limp cup exits we all hoped they were going to use those exits to a positive, to take the lessons of who can and cannot be trusted in the squad and use that to build a better team that didn't make the same mistakes again. They both failed on that account.

The sense of deja vu is so strong that I understand why people are overreacting to yesterday. Postecoglu's task now is to make sure he doesn't fall into the trap. If he learns from it, this will have been worthwhile. If we continue to put in meek performances whenever we rotate because our backups just aren't good enough, then he will have failed.

Rebounding from this both in the league but also with a good FA Cup run is vital now. If anything this exit puts more pressure on the squad and manager to deliver in the FA Cup, and by that I don't mean winning the thing but competing and not going out before we play a team that is actually better than us. Another meek exit from that in the spring and there will be alarm bells, unless we're in a fantastic league position.

Marty said:

After both Mourinho and Conte's first limp cup exits we all hoped they were going to use those exits to a positive, to take the lessons of who can and cannot be trusted in the squad and use that to build a better team that didn't make the same mistakes again. They both failed on that account.

The sense of deja vu is so strong that I understand why people are overreacting to yesterday. Postecoglu's task now is to make sure he doesn't fall into the trap. If he learns from it, this will have been worthwhile. If we continue to put in meek performances whenever we rotate because our backups just aren't good enough, then he will have failed.

Rebounding from this both in the league but also with a good FA Cup run is vital now. If anything this exit puts more pressure on the squad and manager to deliver in the FA Cup, and by that I don't mean winning the thing but competing and not going out before we play a team that is actually better than us. Another meek exit from that in the spring and there will be alarm bells, unless we're in a fantastic league position.

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A good FA cup run relies heavily on the draw.

More disappointed by the manner of the defeat, than the result itself. Fulham out-Anged us, with high tempo, direct football. We didn't seem to react to that at all. Players need a safe place to go to when things go wrong, someone to put a foot on the ball and slow it down, or just hoof it long for a spell. We seemed to just try to play through it, when it was clear that it wasn't working for us. Maybe a lack of leadership on the field, or maybe Ange doesn't believe in Plan B?

spurmin said:

A good FA cup run relies heavily on the draw.

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That's why I specifically said compete and not go out until we play a team that's better than us.

If we draw City away in the third round, then of course that's just tough luck and shit happens.

dk-yid said:

A thought experiment for you; would you rather compromise his chance of building a squad that can win five trophies over the next five years, for someone who can win a trophy now, at the expense of testing the entire squad?

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I don't agree with you, but fair enough, your points are valid for your argument in this post until this last sentence. It just doesn't make sense. Not only there will be revisionism in the future when either of the two scenarios you painted happens, but you are also making it as if this route/decision taken will lead us to five trophies over the next five years, when not even X number of trophies over the next Y years will hold true to what happened last night.

ComfortablyNumb said:

More disappointed by the manner of the defeat, than the result itself. Fulham out-Anged us, with high tempo, direct football. We didn't seem to react to that at all. Players need a safe place to go to when things go wrong, someone to put a foot on the ball and slow it down, or just hoof it long for a spell. We seemed to just try to play through it, when it was clear that it wasn't working for us. Maybe a lack of leadership on the field, or maybe Ange doesn't believe in Plan B?

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I think that's 90% about the players that were picked and only 10% about the manager and his plans, tbh.

coy-spurs1882 said:

the fact is the same mistake has been made and we are out of another cup again.

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So a stronger side whilst giving a slightly better chance of beating Fulham away, in your eyes is a guarantee.

srups34 said:

I hope our fans now don’t release the Robbie Williams song. Ange deserves all the punishment he gets

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I mean punishment would be to actually release it.

Bloody hell....I personally think some if you are going way overboard.

I've seen more positive football in 3 league games than I've seen for 3 years. Genuinely. We're playing front foot positive football at last.

The drop off from our first 11 is startling. I think Ange knows that. I also think we have some absolute key players who if they get injured would really cripple us. It's that fine line.

If Maddison or Bissouma played a full 90 last night and did their hammy so were out for months, we'd be fucked quite frankly.

Moderate rotation is the ideal for me, another manager would look at the 3 away games in a week and maybe do around 3 changes per game that way you keep an element of fluency for the team.

Mourinho, Conte and now Ange do the full rotation thing and it has never bloody worked, is it that our best team is too weakened if we leave a couple out?

Fulham changed 6 players but they kept their spine in.

The performance was poor and we lost the lottery at the end.

Typical Spurs said:

Bloody hell....I personally think some if you are going way overboard.

I've seen more positive football in 3 league games than I've seen for 3 years. Genuinely. We're playing front foot positive football at last.

The drop off from our first 11 is startling. I think Ange knows that. I also think we have some absolute key players who if they get injured would really cripple us. It's that fine line.

If Maddison or Bissouma played a full 90 last night and did their hammy so were out for months, we'd be fucked quite frankly.

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you are quite right but to be fair any player could pick up a serious injury at any time in any game so that is not a reason not to pick a player

marion52 said:

you are quite right but to be fair any player could pick up a serious injury at any time in any game so that is not a reason not to pick a player

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They could. A crucial player getting injured in a league game would feel completely different to me though, rather than the EFL cup 2nd round.

Marty said:

That's why I specifically said compete and not go out until we play a team that's better than us.

If we draw City away in the third round, then of course that's just tough luck and shit happens.

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City at home on the other hand and we basically have a bye to the 4th round. It’s swings and roundabouts.

Kirito said:

I feel like the overreaction is because people are desperate to win anything as soon as possible to silence other fans and pundits, but if we went on to win this cup, those same people would say “it’s only the league cup” and they would be right.

The FA Cup has always been the one to win, and I’d rather us focus all our energy on that and the league. Winning something should be because you’ve beaten the best teams and put in top performances, not because it was easy to win against sides that also don’t care about the competition.

I’m glad Ange got to test our second team against another prem side this early on, he knows exactly what he’s working with now.

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I think you've nailed why I'm so irritable about this still, wasn't anybody on here but felt like I was getting a lot of flack from Spurs fans because I was choosing to be pragmatic about the situation and I was annoyed by the way they speaking about the manager because I felt disappointed in how angry they were towards him that quickly. I thought people would be more sensible than that, my fault for believing in them, I guess. I feel like their anger is because they allow themselves to get too excited and then can't handle when reality knocks.

The same people who, when Kane was sold, wanted to rush past the disappointment because they want to skip past the negative feelings back into the feel good and I warned them that doing so, would just lead to anger the next time things go wrong. This is why I keep repeating myself on what this season is, why I think it's better we accept the priorities of the board because once we accept those disappointments, we have a better chance of seeing thing's clearly and the best approach to how we can be successful rather than deluding ourselves that thing's will suddenly be different. Let go of the hope of immediate success and let's build a team that can succeed within the variables as they are at Spurs.

Our defences age gives the best indication of when we can be a successful, It's probably going to take 2 seasons. Up until January now we can focus on the league and training. We have more chance of achieving a league position beyond our current squad capability than we do winning a cup, if we focus on consistency of beating the teams we're better than, then trying to grind some results out vs top6 opposition, we may achieve a tremendous finish that can accelerate things. That has more chance of yielding success than an illusionary cup run to the late stages.

People may mistake my opinion for not taking the cups seriously, it's the opposite, I'm looking at the most likely chance of winning a cup and putting the same team out as we had for the weekend, is not more likely to yield winning a trophy than building a team capable of going toe to toe with the best in 2 seasons time. Last year was slightly different, or the season we sacked Jose, we had Harry Kane and Bale.

Constantly finding excuses to put off competing for prizes so that some other future prize can be prioritised is the fucking bane of following this club.

Our second 11 are largely shite, but 4 or 5 can be plugged in individually to the first team and perform reasonably.

He didn't have to do this. We might have exactly 40 games to play this entire season now. And it's a reminder of last year's unnecessary and season swinging game that fucked away the momentum of back to back derby wins.