- Oct 2, 2004
- 48,253
- 47,312
- Staff
- #101
I don't think anyone (and I genuinely mean anyone) has dressed up yesterday as a glorious success. God knows I'm no apologist for shit insipid football either. And I had well versed doubts about Pochettino from the outset of his name being mooted and am still not convinced about him.
But sometimes people get themselves in a downwood spiral of mindset despair because a couple of results and performances are a bit meh/shit. I think there's been a collective case of this of late.
That performance yesterday was never terrible. Even in the first half. Hull scored a long ranger. They had a couple of other chances, which if memory serves me, all came kind of at the same time as a result of the same passage of play.
We aren't always going to have things our own way, even if we are playing quite well and doing more right than wrong.
Most people that I've read have acknowledged that lots of facets were still not great. The pressing from the front, the CM combo, Dier at RB etc. But even in that first half we'd had 61% of the ball, played some very decent approach play, got into some half decent situations (like when Eriksen flashed the ball across the 6 yard box) and were trying to at least be the team controlling the game. We competed and were not bullied out of the game or at least trying to play football. Our work off the ball was generally better, and there does seem to be a decent spirit in the team, which in successive away games has found a way to play and grind out wins.
I know there has been a bit of malaise about our play, but we are a dozen games into a new manager, we have a pretty young squad, many are still playing their first 20 or so EPL games (Dier, Chiriches, Fazio, Mason, Capoue, Bentaleb, Sambouli, Lamela, Chadli, Kane, Townsend). Six of those played yesterday. Still managed to dominate and win against a much more experienced bunch away from home.
Keeping in real means calling what's bad, bad. But it also sometimes means calling things OK when they are OK. Yesterday, even in the first half, we were OK.
We'll have to agree to disagree about the first half because I thought we were awful again and even with all the possession we had we didn't look like creating anything until Eriksen's cross. Just having 61% possession doesn't mean anything if you don't do anything with it and that was the case in the first half.
But I totally agree about the reasons for us being a bit rubbish at the moment. It's still early days and only the most impatient of fans would expect things to be sorted by now. I worry that we still aren't seeing a great deal of progression but hopefully with certain players being dropped yesterday Poch is starting to weed out those who don't do what they're told which will start to see us making some progress.
Ultimately the main plus point at the moment is that even if we're not playing well we're still in touch with those above us (somehow) so if things do eventually click we're in a relatively good position.