Jose Mourinho

fishhhandaricecake said:

Yea agree

Agree, I wonder how far off Roden will be from the level we need, looks a real talent.

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Unfortunately the need for defence solidity is going to put pressure on this young fella because the rest can't do it

I hope Mourinho has learned his lesson: never ever leave Lamela out from the squad when fit to play. Idiot!

ralvy said:

I hope Mourinho has learned his lesson: never ever leave Lamela out from the squad when fit to play. Idiot!

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Lamela was injured yesterday.....

matthew.absurdum said:

Lamela was injured yesterday.....

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Okay, I feel like an idiot, are you happy now?

Nick-TopSpursMan said:

Our biggest issue for me wasn’t just the subs or individual mistakes etc. It was the team mentality throughout the second half.

We coasted through the second half and assumed we had the game won. Instead of keeping the ball and killing the game with clever spells of possession, we dropped deeper and deeper and started lumping it forward, not taking care of the ball. We invited them on to us more and more, despite the fact their biggest threat was set pieces and aerial balls.

Our game management and mentality is quite frankly shit. All we had to do was keep the ball, slow the tempo down, kill the game and then if a really big chance opened up take it. Instead I lost count of the amount of times we forced the ball forward and gave it away, when we had lots of short passing options.

This is something Mourinho has to fix asap if we want to be successful.

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It's a shame as it's something (game management that is) that you could really praise from us in our game before against United. I know it was against 10 men but it's like we valued the importance of keeping the ball really well and not letting them back in it against United way more than we did against West Ham which shouldn't be the case, it should be seen as the same level of importance for whoever we're playing, whether they're elite or seen as dog shit.

ralvy said:

I hope Mourinho has learned his lesson: never ever leave Lamela out from the squad when fit to play. Idiot!

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Oh the irony.

hellava_tough said:

There's a massive irony here.

We can't defend set pieces, but we're brilliant on the counter attack.

So set pieces against us are going to result in a goal; it's just that no one knows which team is going to score

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There’s more than a bit of truth in this.

ajspurs said:

It's a shame as it's something (game management that is) that you could really praise from us in our game before against United. I know it was against 10 men but it's like we valued the importance of keeping the ball really well and not letting them back in it against United way more than we did against West Ham which shouldn't be the case, it should be seen as the same level of importance for whoever we're playing, whether they're elite or seen as dog shit.

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I can't help but feel if it wasn't Bale on the Bench we would have been adding extra defenders or midfielders at 3-0 to see it out. We obviously need to get Bale fit and contributing and that changed the decisions to our detriment. The funny thing is for 80 minutes we looked very good and I was sitting there thinking we could actually win the league given how average everyone else is.... And then Spurs happened and reminded me of why we won't win the league this year.

yido_number1 said:

I can't help but feel if it wasn't Bale on the Bench we would have been adding extra defenders or midfielders at 3-0 to see it out. We obviously need to get Bale fit and contributing and that changed the decisions to our detriment. The funny thing is for 80 minutes we looked very good and I was sitting there thinking we could actually win the league given how average everyone else is.... And then Spurs happened and reminded me of why we won't win the league this year.

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To be honest I could see the argument for both types of substitutions, in terms of attackers and defenders. Of course the belief is sometimes that you bring on defenders and you invite pressure and you can bring on attackers to see the game out or provide a fresher outlet, only thing in this case is that we were already well into the pattern of mostly sitting back and defending so maybe tightening things with more defensive options would have been better but that's all easy to say in hindsight. In fact at the time I know I (like I'm sure everyone else too) was delighted to see Bale come on and I thought the fresh legs of Lucas wasn't the worse idea either, especially with us playing on the break.

There were lots of good things yesterday, but we fell into that pattern of sitting back and letting the opposition play how they wanted again, the type that we saw too often before we started playing a bit better football under Jose more recently. Really hope we eliminate that from our game and find a way to control the game without conceding so much of the play.

I wouldn't really criticise the subs yesterday although I thought bringing Bale on was more of a heart than head decision and showed some complacency. I guess 3 up feels quite safe but Bale's introduction left Aurier too exposed for me. What I really can't get my head around though is the insistence on playing Winks behind Hojbjerg when they're both on the pitch. I can see no logic or sense in that whatsoever. The game changed dramatically when Ndombele went off because up until that point they were having to double team him a lot to keep him under control, which is not something you have to do with Winks.

JCRD said:

The only issue we have is I dont think our defensive players are all that great although big fan of Dier... Toby appears to have completely lost it, Sanchez is meh, Rodon and Tanganga are the future but really not seen Rodon much and Tanganga hasnt started many games

What this may force Jose to do is be even more cautious and as a result impact on our attack... its clearly a balance between defence and attack which we need to improve on but it is not like we go gung ho anyways.

Still annoyed at the result... and imagine the players are royally pissed off as well as Jose

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The goals we are conceding are from set pieces when we have everyone behind the ball so playing more cautiously isn't going to resolve that as we are solid defensively in open play.

Mark_147 said:

The goals we are conceding are from set pieces when we have everyone behind the ball so playing more cautiously isn't going to resolve that as we are solid defensively in open play.

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Are we though?

I feel nervous every time a team attacks. Even in the first half yesterday West Ham created quite a few good half chances.

Mark_147 said:

The goals we are conceding are from set pieces when we have everyone behind the ball so playing more cautiously isn't going to resolve that as we are solid defensively in open play.

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I know our opinions differ and thats fine but dont think we are solid defensively at all. I mean just consider the games, Southampton, Maccabi Haifa and even West Ham. Chances conceded and a fair few against the first two of those teams.

Pressure brings about uncertainty and its like a house of cards, if after pressure you concede then it becomes a mental game as now they have the impetus and we get deeper and deeper. We had to get that fourth goal, I read something from a Spammers player that said they went in at HT and said under no circumstances can they let it go to 4-0 and theyll have a chance... thats why the fourth was vital. Perhaps would have killed the game but 3-0 should kil the game.

I agree with you though that set pieces we are just totally lost at and is a real concern but this has been going on for years.

JCRD said:

I know our opinions differ and thats fine but dont think we are solid defensively at all. I mean just consider the games, Southampton, Maccabi Haifa and even West Ham. Chances conceded and a fair few against the first two of those teams.

Pressure brings about uncertainty and its like a house of cards, if after pressure you concede then it becomes a mental game as now they have the impetus and we get deeper and deeper. We had to get that fourth goal, I read something from a Spammers player that said they went in at HT and said under no circumstances can they let it go to 4-0 and theyll have a chance... thats why the fourth was vital. Perhaps would have killed the game but 3-0 should kil the game.

I agree with you though that set pieces we are just totally lost at and is a real concern but this has been going on for years.

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We were good at set pieces under Poch. Rarely conceded from a corner. Never scored from them either but thats another point!

Amazing comments from the west ham player. They must know we are weak (not that it is a secret!)

spursfan77 said:

Are we though?

I feel nervous every time a team attacks. Even in the first half yesterday West Ham created quite a few good half chances.

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Well compare it to last season when teams were just walking through our midfield unopposed, now we look more compact and much harder for teams to go through the midfield, and we're top goal scorers in the league. We only conceded one from open play before yesterday so we so we're doing something right.

We are improving and klopp took 3-4 seasons and signing VVD and Allison to make Liverpool the team they became. We are on the right direction but next steps are to improve CB and mabye another DM. The rest of the squad is in place, we aren’t far off.

Let’s see if Roden can improve us at CB and Hopefully Jose can keep working on our defending set pieces and crosses or ‘lateral free kicks’ as he puts it as that, penalties and worldies is all we concede from, barely any open play goals which is good to build on.

shelfboy68 said:

Unfortunately the need for defence solidity is going to put pressure on this young fella because the rest can't do it

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He’s wales international I’m sure he can handle some pressure and if he’s aspiring to be a top player he’ll need to handle pressure he’s 22 not 17/18 so I think he could step up quicker than people think, but obviously he’s not as ready as a Skrinjar would’ve likely been.

fishhhandaricecake said:

He’s wales international I’m sure he can handle some pressure and if he’s aspiring to be a top player he’ll need to handle pressure he’s 22 not 17/18 so I think he could step up quicker than people think, but obviously he’s not as ready as a Skrinjar would’ve likely been.

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Skriniar was in a word needed maybe we go back for him summer time

This is probably easier to talk about after watching us completely fall apart rather than a post getting ahead of myself because of a couple of wins but I've listened to a lot of Roy Keane over the last week and a little bit of Neville and I found the insight into how the shaping of a dressing can dictate things to be very interesting as it pertains to the squad we have now built.

What Keane spoke about especially was his early United days when he was coming into a dressing room surrounded by experienced heads and felt what fergie did well was to have a conveyor belt of talent in terms of the ages and make up of the dressing room. He pointed to him coming in with Robson, Bruce the older heads who you would look at and that would really shape the standard you have to elevate to. I truly believe we have built a dressing room which is designed to win.

First of all we finally have some big winners in the dressing room and they're all older players to go along with our manager.

Hart - 33 - 2 Prem medals, 2 league cups and a F.A cup
Bale 31 - La Liga x 2, Champions League x 4, Copa Del Rey, Supercup x 2, World Club cup x 3
Lloris 33 - World cup winning captain
Jose - Portuguese league x 2, La liga, Serie A x 2, Prem x 3, Champions league x 2, Uefa Cup x 2, F.a Cup, league cup x 3, Copa Del Rey, Coppa Italia, Portuguese cup

So if you compared to a little over 12 months ago we have added to the dressing a really healthy amount of experienced winners to the older side of our team including the manager.

Then what you're looking for is standard bearers across the different age ranges in the team. I think the stand out leaders are Kane at 27 and Hojbjerg at 25. This also along with the fact we have the Ivory Coast captain, England captain, France Captain, South Korean Captain, Welsh Captain. We have got leaders all over the dressing room now. I haven't even included Dier who carries a similar spirit. We have that Spine of voices across the team from goalkeeper to attack.

I think that it's been an incredible job done by Jose, Hitchen and Levy to rebuild the dressing room in this way and we're already seeing the benefit of the new competition for places in some players, namely Aurier looks to have elevated his game since the arrival of Doherty.

I know it will be easy to dismiss given what happened at the weekend but we're in the extremely early stages of this dressing room and when I hear Keane talk about what made United so successful, I see parallels in how our dressing room has been built. Our last 3 prem games read 2 draws and a win and that is frustrating but if you look at the football we're playing on the front foot.

I really believe we can challenge for the title this season given that City haven't really sorted their issues and Liverpool have suffered some unfortunate big injuries. Our big question mark is the defence and defences do win you titles so if we fall short, I think it will be easy to point towards the central defence. My hope is that now the structure is in place, we can see Dier really take control of that defence and hopefully either Jose can solve the problems with Sanchez or Rodon can surprise us all and take the spot a lot earlier than many of us predict. We've lost a lot of points already but the start to the season has been crazy. I think we've built a dressing room which will ask questions of one another after that result and resolve the problems we faced yesterday.

I have to say I think we're placing the best football I've seen us play since we finished 2nd to Chelsea and with the coach we have, you'd anticipate he will find a solution to the defensive frailness rather sharply.

Thinking through yesterday's match more, I'm just flabbergasted. How is it that the team that's 3-0 down after half time is the most hungry, the best organised and the most energetic team? It's just makes no sense. The fault is entirely systematic and pray there is a solution for it.
It's not Aurier's fucking fault.