SUIYHA
Well-Known Member
- Jan 15, 2017
- 1,739
- 8,650
Lots of debate raging back and forth about our manager, and understandably so, but do we need to start taking a look beyond the guy at the top, and take a closer look at the coaching staff currently employed by the club?
Cast your minds back to when Sherwood was running the show in the 2013-14 season. Aaron Lennon, once one of the most devastating wingers in the league, could no longer beat a man or hit anything close to resembling the target with a cross. Nacer Chadli, a new signing that season, looked like he had absolutely zero good attributes and was a complete car crash of a signing. Moussa Dembele, Jan Vertonghen and Hugo Lloris - who had all had excellent debut seasons the year before, were now all looking error prone and clumsy. And of course - you had Kyle Walker and Danny Rose. Two full-backs widely mocked as liabilities throughout the league, players that were over reliant on pace but kept getting caught out of position and giving away needless fouls. There was genuine anger and confusion when Rose was given a new contract in 2014.
It was too late for Lennon, but within a year you had seen a transformation in these players. Chadli suddenly became our second top scorer behind Kane. Dembele became one of the league's dominant midfielders, Vertonghen one of its best centre-backs, Lloris one of it's best goalkeepers again. And all of a sudden, those two widely mocked full-backs had not only ironed the mistakes out of their game, but had become two of the best in their respective positions in Europe. What had changed? It was of course, the coaching.
This is not a hark back to the Pochettino days, or something to downplay the many other factors that determine how well a player performs - tactical setup, confidence, motivation, mental state and fitness all clearly play a big role too. But what I am seeing is an alarming number of individual mistakes amongst our squad at the moment, more than I have seen in any season since that Sherwood season. During that season, as listed with the examples above, you saw players that had formerly looked like good players start to regress, before picking things up again when being coached better. So I have started to wonder with our current bunch - are they getting the right sort of coaching to get the best out of them? Could they be making less mistakes and winning more football matches with better people working with them on the training ground?
Mourinho has improved the game of many players in his time. Lampard, Terry, Deco, Carvalho, Ozil, Sneijder...all took their game to the next level under him. But looking at our current squad, a year and a quarter into his time here - how many of our players would you say have gotten better as footballers? Only real arguments are for Kane and Ndombele, one of which you could argue always had these brilliant passes in his locker but is just playing a slightly different role, and the other you could argue is just settling into English football more. But there are many players that have notably regressed. Dier, Sanchez, Alderweireld, Sissoko, Winks, Alli...some of it may be down to age but the trend is alarming. Much of that might be down to Mourinho himself. Perhaps. But unlike all of his other clubs, we don't appear to have the success stories of players getting better. So I am going to put forward a hypothesis. That hypothesis is that at least one of Joao Sacramento and Ledley King is not up to the job, or at least is way out of their depth at this early stage of their careers.
Up until 2018, Mourinho worked with Rui Faria as his right hand man at all of his clubs. Even at Man Utd, he was able to deliver two trophies in his first season and then a solid second placed finish plus the FA Cup final in his second, with a pretty sub-standard squad by their standards. However, Faria left in 2018, and within six months Mourinho had been sacked, with the club well off the pace even for top four let alone the title. Without trying to make this into the script from The Damned United, I am starting to wonder if we really need to think about getting in Faria or another big name to work on the more technical details of coaching with the players. I've always thought that a manager's true value comes from their ability to create an environment where players feel confident and determined to give their best, and to make subtle tactical tweaks at key stages in games to get the results - but that the ways to improve players come from those that work closely with them on the training ground. We love Ledley for what he did as a player, but our defending has been a joke this season and whilst that doesn't mean it's all his fault it's reasonable to ask the question about what value he is adding. Sacramento comes with a high reputation and has worked alongside some other big name managers in his time, but he's still younger than some of the playing squad, and combined with Mourinho's own non-playing career it means the two top jobs in the Spurs coaching team are made up of people who never actually played the game themselves, which isn't necessarily the end of the world but it does make me wonder about whether they can impart specific coaching methods to improve footballing skills in the same way that someone like Guardiola has done.
I'll put the questions out to the forum - what do we know about these two? Do we need a heavy hitter to join the coaching staff to compliment Mourinho's leadership? Can we really put ALL of the blame onto sub-standard players or could we be getting more out of them with better coaches and methods?
Cast your minds back to when Sherwood was running the show in the 2013-14 season. Aaron Lennon, once one of the most devastating wingers in the league, could no longer beat a man or hit anything close to resembling the target with a cross. Nacer Chadli, a new signing that season, looked like he had absolutely zero good attributes and was a complete car crash of a signing. Moussa Dembele, Jan Vertonghen and Hugo Lloris - who had all had excellent debut seasons the year before, were now all looking error prone and clumsy. And of course - you had Kyle Walker and Danny Rose. Two full-backs widely mocked as liabilities throughout the league, players that were over reliant on pace but kept getting caught out of position and giving away needless fouls. There was genuine anger and confusion when Rose was given a new contract in 2014.
It was too late for Lennon, but within a year you had seen a transformation in these players. Chadli suddenly became our second top scorer behind Kane. Dembele became one of the league's dominant midfielders, Vertonghen one of its best centre-backs, Lloris one of it's best goalkeepers again. And all of a sudden, those two widely mocked full-backs had not only ironed the mistakes out of their game, but had become two of the best in their respective positions in Europe. What had changed? It was of course, the coaching.
This is not a hark back to the Pochettino days, or something to downplay the many other factors that determine how well a player performs - tactical setup, confidence, motivation, mental state and fitness all clearly play a big role too. But what I am seeing is an alarming number of individual mistakes amongst our squad at the moment, more than I have seen in any season since that Sherwood season. During that season, as listed with the examples above, you saw players that had formerly looked like good players start to regress, before picking things up again when being coached better. So I have started to wonder with our current bunch - are they getting the right sort of coaching to get the best out of them? Could they be making less mistakes and winning more football matches with better people working with them on the training ground?
Mourinho has improved the game of many players in his time. Lampard, Terry, Deco, Carvalho, Ozil, Sneijder...all took their game to the next level under him. But looking at our current squad, a year and a quarter into his time here - how many of our players would you say have gotten better as footballers? Only real arguments are for Kane and Ndombele, one of which you could argue always had these brilliant passes in his locker but is just playing a slightly different role, and the other you could argue is just settling into English football more. But there are many players that have notably regressed. Dier, Sanchez, Alderweireld, Sissoko, Winks, Alli...some of it may be down to age but the trend is alarming. Much of that might be down to Mourinho himself. Perhaps. But unlike all of his other clubs, we don't appear to have the success stories of players getting better. So I am going to put forward a hypothesis. That hypothesis is that at least one of Joao Sacramento and Ledley King is not up to the job, or at least is way out of their depth at this early stage of their careers.
Up until 2018, Mourinho worked with Rui Faria as his right hand man at all of his clubs. Even at Man Utd, he was able to deliver two trophies in his first season and then a solid second placed finish plus the FA Cup final in his second, with a pretty sub-standard squad by their standards. However, Faria left in 2018, and within six months Mourinho had been sacked, with the club well off the pace even for top four let alone the title. Without trying to make this into the script from The Damned United, I am starting to wonder if we really need to think about getting in Faria or another big name to work on the more technical details of coaching with the players. I've always thought that a manager's true value comes from their ability to create an environment where players feel confident and determined to give their best, and to make subtle tactical tweaks at key stages in games to get the results - but that the ways to improve players come from those that work closely with them on the training ground. We love Ledley for what he did as a player, but our defending has been a joke this season and whilst that doesn't mean it's all his fault it's reasonable to ask the question about what value he is adding. Sacramento comes with a high reputation and has worked alongside some other big name managers in his time, but he's still younger than some of the playing squad, and combined with Mourinho's own non-playing career it means the two top jobs in the Spurs coaching team are made up of people who never actually played the game themselves, which isn't necessarily the end of the world but it does make me wonder about whether they can impart specific coaching methods to improve footballing skills in the same way that someone like Guardiola has done.
I'll put the questions out to the forum - what do we know about these two? Do we need a heavy hitter to join the coaching staff to compliment Mourinho's leadership? Can we really put ALL of the blame onto sub-standard players or could we be getting more out of them with better coaches and methods?
