Spurs fans should fear four years of Mourinho’s small-minded cynicism

[jolsnogross]

Desperate negativity of his approach to playing Liverpool at home is José Mourinho’s management style in microcosm.

“If we tried to play the way we did in the last 20 minutes from the beginning,” he said, “I think we would collapse. Because the players are not used to playing in this style and they are not adapted. I think we did the maximum we could do.”

This is, of course, the founding principle of Mourinho-ball: the opposition are infinitely strong, we are infinitely weak.

The Guardian

 

[Gb160]

Blimey what absolute nonsense.
He answers his own question, then completely ignores it and waffles on regardless.

 

[Seafordian Spurs]

Is some wah wah from the Guardian having a pop at us stone me what a surprise

 

[Gb160]

Is some wah wah from the Guardian having a pop at us stone me what a surprise

Yep, surprisingly brought to us courtesy of Jose's no.1 fan @jolsnogross.

 

[Deleted member 27995]

That's a lot of writing to say in his written opinion he feels he is a shit manager, been easier to tweet it.

I hope that Mourinho uses this to galvanise the squad to play for him. The more the merrier for me.

 

[sebo_sek]

Negative approach that would have worked had it not been for the wastefulness of his players?
Yup, makes sense.

 

[John48]

Yes I agree, I think most Spurs fans are realistic about where we are & thought if we perform as we had done in recent games we were looking at a 3 or 4 drubbing at best. As it was Jose set us up to stay in the game, recognising that their pace would cause us issue & put in basically all of our paciest defenders, so in effect we gave them a game & if our front players had performed anywhere near their potential we could have won the game.

The guys that write these articles seem to assume Spurs fans will only accept attacking play & some sort of free flowing game, even GonS suggested as much & whilst that's the ideal we don't have the players to do that, so I think most are like me & want to see us give the likes of L'Pool or MCity a game & whilst losing is downer I recognise we had our chances & with a bit more belief from some of our players the result could have been different.

 

[beuller]

Dont agree with the article. Thought he set us up well. He's working with what we are right now.

I agree with him, with the players we have available we arent going play with high intensity other than moura and maybe son. We need a leaner squad all having had a pre season.

This club needs to be able to sell players. I never thought I'd say that but fucking hell, not being able to make 15mil from a couple of players is holding us back and making us unable to make little moves in the transfer market which freshen everything.

Stop expecting to get big money for finished players like wanyama etc. Help whoever the manager out, it's getting ridiculous.

And well done Tanganga.

 

[buckley]

A team set up with what's available and on another day with the rub of the green drew or even won that match against what these Same newsmen are saying is the best team in the world . For me when Jose gets his own choice of players in I think we are in for a positive exiting future.I wonder how many of these type of reporters would have the guts to repeat their views face to face with Jose . No I don't wonder I know none nil zilch zero .

 

[Ronwol196061]

If Mourinho would have done this with Kane and NDombele fit I would have agreed but without those two its totally wrong.
Yeah we could have gone on the front foot and scored a couple but more than likely it would have been another Bayern at home.
It's the benefit of hindsight that says if we played in the first half the way we played in the second half...etc
I wonder what they would have said in the 40th minute?????
"FFS BRING ON MORE DEFENDERS!!!!!"

 

[jonnyp]

Desperate negativity of his approach to playing Liverpool at home is José Mourinho’s management style in microcosm.

“If we tried to play the way we did in the last 20 minutes from the beginning,” he said, “I think we would collapse. Because the players are not used to playing in this style and they are not adapted. I think we did the maximum we could do.”

This is, of course, the founding principle of Mourinho-ball: the opposition are infinitely strong, we are infinitely weak.

The Guardian

If we had started with midfielders and left back who can actually control and pass a ball we wouldn't have looked so utterly out of our depth.

 

[CowInAComa]

I thought it was one of our most tactically astute performances for a while to be honest. We can't go toe to toe with Liverpool, no one can, not least without key players. We played a decent game but weren't clinical.

Feels like the writer had this one ready to go for a while and hasn't had the opportunity.

 

[jolsnogross]

I thought it was one of our most tactically astute performances for a while to be honest. We can't go toe to toe with Liverpool, no one can, not least without key players. We played a decent game but weren't clinical.

Feels like the writer had this one ready to go for a while and hasn't had the opportunity.

It was odd to see us drop back so passively when it seemed the press was was on on some occasions, but I agree that the defensive set up was dialed in for the most part. I share the author's concern about being a 'back foot' team in the coming couple of years though, representing a complete shift from what was being built over the prior 4 years or so. I suppose only time will tell.

 

[jolsnogross]

There were plenty of positives in terms of set up and performance, but we shouldn't delude ourselves about how beta we were against Liverpool. The tactics might have fit the circumstances on this occasion, but Mourinho has a history as a reactive manager who plays the percentages, albeit rather well. It's been successful for him. But that time may have passed. Poch played a progressive game on the front foot, albeit imperfectly, and we had season after season of fun and success. It was an unfinished project, but one that exceeded expectations until this season. That's all over now and a big switch to a pragmatic, reactive approach is risky and probably regressive. And if it doesn't succeed it will set us back a long way behind the front foot teams in this league.

There are percentages to hoofing the ball from the keepers hands until it drops vertically somewhere in the opponents half. And sometimes those odds are better than passing out quickly against the best pressing teams. But over the longer term, they aren't. Similarly, you can drop deep and hope to score on the break, needing to advance the whole field to do so. Or you can challenge higher up and make things happen there.

Maybe everyone can't play the current en vogue winning way, and someone needs to break out from it to find another way. But I doubt the tactical 'genius' of always being reactive, and playing long (and high!), is going to be it.

 

[popstar7]

For all its many faults I’m a wooly, liberal Guardian-reader by nature. Their football coverage is fanzine-level dogshit though. Wouldn’t want to give money to the Times or Telegraph but their football writing is massively better than the Guardian’s.

They employ Barney fucking Ronay ffs.

 

[Locotoro]

I appreciate that we needed to play that way to get a result.

I'm just saddened that we are in this situation rather than being the team that others have to change for.

 

[E17yid]

What’s this about? I’ve heard the Ndombele and Sissoko comments but not the Kane or Sessegnon quotes

“Already in his short Tottenham career Mourinho has told Moussa Sissoko that he lacks the discipline to play in central midfield, accused Ryan Sessegnon of lacking physicality, criticised Tanguy Ndombele for getting injured too much and claimed that Tottenham cannot play their normal game while Harry Kane is injured, even though they managed to reach a Champions League final without him.”

 

[TheHoddleWaddle]

In other news, a small minded and somewhat cynical journalist, writes an article laced with small mindedness and cynicism.

 

[Cinemattis]

Desperate negativity towards José Mourinho’s approach to playing Liverpool at home is Jonathan Liew’s writing style in microcosm.

He’s dozing you with words, slowly drowning you with tonnes of unnecessary phrases when he could have written his whole article in one simple sentence: “I hate José Mourinho” (and possibly added “I don’t care too much about Spurs either” to fill some more space).

Mr Liew knows many, many words - but what he doesn’t know about football would fill volumes.

 

[Pellshek]

I'll take all the gallons of small-minded cynicism you're selling if we could just fucking win something.