If these games matter, does us beating Spurs indicate our clear superiority over them?
2019/20 Rivals - Spurs | Bergwijn out for the remainder of the season
- Thread starter AkaAkuma
- Start date
Imagine if Moura won the Charity Shield with Spurs, he would be demanding a victory parade.
No, that's not what I said. I implied that the number of points we get from home games will increase as compared to last season
This is a prediction supported by the overwhelming mass of football-results data going back for decades. You, on the other hand, base your posts mainly on blind bias and ignorance.
What? Bayerns starting line-up featured the mighty Nollenberger (22, no Bundesliga caps), Singh (20, no Bundesliga caps), Will (20, no Bundesliga caps), Johansson (19, no Bundesliga caps), Arp (18, handful Bundesliga caps at Hamburg), Davies (18, 6 Bundesliga caps) and Kehl (18, no Bundesliga caps) and the handful of first-teamers that started or played later on probably to some degree even tried not to get injured before the Supercup vs. Dortmund this Saturday and the Bundesliga.
To lable this as "my first trophy with this club" seems proper weird, he might actually be trolling. This is still pre season. Say a few years have passed and after winning a proper trophy - let's say it's just the FA Cup for now - would any Tottenham player be caught saying "I'm delighted to win my second trophy with Tottenham after the 2019 Audi Cup" with a straight face?! Being positive is all well and good but a statement like "Happy with the performance and win. Our preparation is going well and we're confident for the upcoming season" would surely suffice? The more I think about it I actually think he was trolling.
It's obviously not a trophy and it's just a generic tweet from Lucas.
It’s a trophy - yes or no?
I’ll help you - the answer is yes.
So people can take the pi$$ all they like but he’s not really done a lot to deserve it.
As for the weakened Bayern side this is still a lot stronger than a full strength Kristiansund team, and the Madrid team they beat 1-0 would wallop United.
See I don’t even think the quality is that bad. The backups were largely first teamers for us last season - so in my mind the quality is pretty darn good. Especially now with Ndombele helping out the midfield depth.
I’ll totally admit that our fullbacks/wingbacks need improving although listing the likes of Liverpool kind of highlights the point. Their depth is no better than ours they just got luckier with injuries.
Plus saying Son saved us last season is kind of funny. Like yeah a really good player played really well for us - am I supposed to apologize for that?
I do think this is based in some intrinsic truths.
Playing at an actual home stadium rather than dealing with the drama of the last two years playing at Wembley/not knowing when the stadium would be done surely affected results and it definitely affected the crowd and atmosphere.
The fact we have a squad that has actually had a real pre-season and real rest going into a season without the stadium drama I’d expect better results without transfers.
I still want/expect a few more in though.
We will have to agree to disagree in terms of quality. Their depth is better in terms of quality imo, plus their first team is much better than your own.
No, but if Kane gets injured again you're going to be placing the same reliance on Son and it would be surprising if he could manage to sustain that level again. The point is that being able to rely on a few rather than putting eggs into one basket is useful. City have it by being able to go to Sane or Mahrez aside from the first team or Jesus instead of Aguero. Obviously they're an extreme example as a title winner but they are what all of the teams vying for CL and the title should be looking to obtain or aspire to.
Pool have better midfield depth, but say VVD or Robertson went down for an extended period of time they'd suffer massively. They were so lucky with injuries. While we had one of the worst injury records in the entire league.
City are ridiculous and are a model that is completely unreplicatable. Even Oil Baron teams like Chelsea can't copy the model. No one else can look at it and try to replicate it. The infrastructure at the club is 1) super shady and 2) not really copyable and it starts with how they even put the wages on their books to circumvent FFP.
To say Spurs need to act like City is laughable.
This reminds me of the occasion many years ago when Newcastle fans were celebrating winning their first tournament for years as they had won a few rounds in the Inter Toto Cup to qualify for the UEFA cup. People laughed. Though to be fair they were competitive games, & the equivalent of winning the Champions League compared to this joke so called Cup.
You do realize United beat Spurs in pre-season?
And that despite Spurs great victory in the magnificent Audi Cup that United won as much or more with Moyes, LVG & Mourinho.
Your negativity towards the team you support is over the top, even if we aren't near as good as our fans want the club to be.
I don't think anybody would disagree that playing at your own stadium, rather than Wembley, is preferable. The question is how much advantage it really confers. A lot of the benefits of playing at "home" are that the other team has to travel, sleep in a hotel rather than their own beds, and play on an unfamiliar ground in front of a crowd mainly consisting of your supporters. All that happens whether you play at Wembley or your own stadium.
For the five years of the Poch era, their home point totals and difference between their home and away point totals are the following:
14-15 - Home total 33, +2 over away total
15-16 - Home total 36, +2 over away total
16-17 - Home total 53, +20 over away total
17-18 - Home total 43, +9 over away total
18-19 - Home total 38, +5 over away total
So for the two years Spurs played at Wembley or mainly at Wembley, they actually had their 2nd and 3rd best home performances, both absolutely and - crucially - relative to their away performance. The comparison to away form is important because it accounts for the fact that Spurs was probably better overall in 17-19 than they were from 14-16. There just isn't a lot of evidence that your home form suffered the last two years. It was certainly worse than in 16-17, but that year looks pretty anomalous. The average home form across the WHL era under Poch was about 41 points and +8 over your away total. The average home form at Wembley was 41 points and +7 over your away total.
Following the same model as another club but at a lower level isn't laughable.
Ok maybe it is (although we are still embarrassingly far behind our rivals and with a board that seem to care little for doing anything about it).
But by the same token the stick being taken by Spurs and Moura for celebrating winning a pre-season trophy (and it was a trophy, people mocking it should look up the definition of trophy) is also way over the top. It shows how far we've fallen that the best we can do is mock Spurs who are a way better side than us.
The same people on here mocking Moura would be jumping to the defence of any United player who did the same, and there would be some, do not worry about that.
Yeah we need more depth in general, but I don't think we are as reliant on Kane to the degree that we need a backup striker. Instead we should use the quality forwards we have such as Son and Lucas. The argument of what if x player gets injured can be put towards any team except City imo, and even Liverpool doesn't have any real quality replacement for their front three.
But just like any other team we should try and strengthen our weaker areas, and right now that is fullback for us. But we can't expect to have like for like cover in every position, that is completely unrealistic for any team that doesn't spend like a medium size country.
Yeah that's how things work, and as Spurs fans we have to accept the banter from things such as this. I probably would have said the same myself. At the same time I think it's completely fine that Moura celebrates winning something, it brings some good feeling into preseason (although that can quickly change with a loss in a game that actually matter).
I think there was an overall distraction especially last season when every week there was a delay or new set of questions pertaining to the stadium and the team where no one knew where we'd be playing week to week and month to month.
I'd also argue the crowd at Wembley was absolutely not primarily Spurs supporters. Especially last season when supporters were less motivated to go as there was a lot of disappointment. Plus everyone knows a location like that attracts A LOT of day trippers and just general tourists.
What model is that exactly and how would Spurs follow it for example?
All your points seem reasonable to me. But it didn't show up in particularly bad home form for Spurs relative to the entire sample of WHL years under Poch.
I think you can expect a lift playing the new stadium but it honestly might be on the level of 1-2 points over the course of a year relative to playing at a place like Wembley, not some kind of massive boost. Of course, that can still be meaningful given that only two points separated 3rd and 5th last year.
Audi cup ffs
There is a lot of shite getting spouted on here over a random tweet, get a grip, friendlies mean feck all apart from match fitness, but I fail to see the problem with what Lucas tweeted.
The run of good results to keep Spurs afloat in early 2019 while Kane was out was accompanied by some pretty tragic performances and probabilistically unlikely goals. It was the whole reason that the ridiculous and unfair "better without Kane" meme started among statistically illiterate ingrates who barely watch Spurs.
What I'm trying to say is that surely you understand what he means by players performing at the very top of their ability saving Spurs and it being an unsustainable phenomenon.
I reflexively wanted to disagree with the idea that playing at Wembley didn't have a negative impact on Spurs but this is pretty sound logic averaged over a relatively large sample of games.
Last edited:
Son did the same the previous season when Kane was out, I don't think it was that exceptional. He is just a good player who is very capable of scoring goals. Early 2019 we didn't play our best football, but at the same time, although most of our goals came late we could and sometimes should have scored earlier. It also wasn't just Kane who was out, at times we had our 4 top goal scorers out (Son, Moura, Alli and Kane) at the same time. If we can keep our squad in a better state we shouldn't need to rely on an individual piece of brilliance from for example Son as often, and that certainly should be possible. Hopefully we will have other players such as Alli who can step up more often this season after a rather poor season.
Why can't other clubs stand still and let us sort our shit out first? Highly disrespectful of them of to continuously try to improve.
Who should I hope we sign from Lo Celso and Fernandes? I don't know much about either.
There have been good periods of results without Kane, for sure. The season before last was not particularly lucky either. The team genuinely performed well in his absence. The period at the start of 2019 was a struggle for the results though.
And then there was the second absence of Kane last season in which Spurs played a run of about 7 games, winning just 1 and scoring a grand total of 3 goals. This is the counterpoint to the idea of Spurs without Kane being better and an example of what can happen without his goalscoring influence.
The frustrating thing about Kane's 2019 was that when he was injured the first time, the team continued to scrape wins, and then as soon as he returned, the defence went to shit and so did the results, despite Kane scoring fairly consistently (in his first game back, he scored a lovely goal against Burnley? but Spurs lost the match so it was quickly forgotten).
By the time Kane got injured the second time, the "better without Kane" meme had already taken hold, even among Spurs fans in some quarters, so nobody took any notice of how abject the PL performances were with him gone again. The end to Spurs PL season without Kane was truly awful (which is often glossed over when people are looking for a singular scapegoat for the CL final).
Sorry for being a bit "rambly" on the subject but I was so annoyed to see even some Spurs supporters starting to turn on Kane towards the end of last season. Turning, within half a season, on the player who helped kickstart the current Spurs ascent to the top tier alongside Poch and who has scored over a third of all the squad's goals for four seasons is Real Madrid tier behaviour. Some fans (perhaps a lot of them are bandwagon Reddit types) have become very entitled very quickly it feels.
And, yeah, Son's a great player. Lucas might turn out that way too (lost among all the recency bias and a few standout games is the fact that he hasn't actually yet turned in an extended run of high level performances for Spurs so I'm not running off with the hype train just now).
Last edited:
Yeah annoys me when people say we are better without Kane. Kane is by far our best player and makes us much stronger with him in the side.
Agree with everything you said. Kane is in my view our best and most consistent player. To be fair, no doubt lots of Spurs fans also jumped on the idea that we are better without Kane, but I saw more oppo fans claiming we would be better without him, who probably don't watch as much Spurs and jumped on the stats-wagon of ppg with and without. And I even saw posts that we would be stronger by selling him and reinvesting the money.
Moura blows hot and cold, but I think he has consistently improves his overall game and especially his pressing last season. I feel this season might see him perform more consistently (at least that's what I hope, but I've been wrong before)
Based on not much more than who Pochettino seems to want the most (because I've seen little of either player in action) I'd say Lo Celso.
Nah Eriksen is your best player imo, he makes your attack tick and when he's off form you struggle big time. I was one of those a few seasons back who declared Kane as your most important player until I realised a season later that Eriksen was the magician behind it all. He's a fabulous player.
My feeling is that while Eriksen is one of the best attacking midfielders in the world, Kane simply is a step above, and is in my view the best nr 9 right now. My feeling is that if Kane was in the last year of his contract and pushing for a move somewhere, that club would have made him their priority, something that doesn't seem to happen with Eriksen.
Kane and Eriksen are the two world class players Spurs have. There isnt a club in world football that wouldnt be interested if this window Kane had come out and said he fancied a different challenge. A striker that even not at his best and struggling with injuries that will still get you close to or beyond 20 goals. And in a form season closer to or more than 30.
Spurs have other good players, just not on the same level as those two. Son, Vertonghen(seriously underrated), Alderweireld.
Will be interesting to see how Ndombele gets on this season, I expect first season probably pretty average. Much like Fred for us in his first season.
Spurs have other good players, just not on the same level as those two. Son, Vertonghen(seriously underrated), Alderweireld.
Will be interesting to see how Ndombele gets on this season, I expect first season probably pretty average. Much like Fred for us in his first season.
Disagree. Kane is significantly better and more consistent than Eriksen.
When Eriksen's off form we struggle because we lack creativity from midfield (Ndombele should help lessen the burden now) as our other midfielders are more just work horses. But Kane is a proper gold dust, world class striker who is perhaps the best in his position in the entire world. His all round game combined with a ridiculous hunger for goals makes him comfortably our best, if Kane was leaving I'd be hitting the panic button if but if Eriksen leaves I'd be comfortable with Lo Celso/Fernandes replacing him.
I very much agree. IMO Kane is best striker in the world, bar none.
Spurs massively lucked out on Kane, a genuine world class player who came out of their youth ranks. Don't think they'll get such a break in another generation. Its a pity that Kane's emergence coincided by their relative parsimony due to the stadium building. If Kane was surrounded by other wc players they could've contended and even won a couple of titles. I see the Leicester year as a missed opportunity for both Spurs as well as Arsenal.
Kane is better than Eriksen.
There are still people who think you guys would be better off without Kane
I don't even think it's close. I honestly believe Kane is in a tier of players above Eriksen.
Don't know why anyone would think Eriksen is better, other than because people might have a preference for more technically gifted players. But you simply can't ignore the fact that Eriksen is a bloody inconsistent and often frustrating player, shit at times last season I wanted him dropped, despite our total lack of other options.
Eriksen is one of our best, but Kane is the star man at the club for good reason.
Those people are properly weird. They're also the same who jumped on the 'Son is better than Kane' bus when he had a good run of form, whilst ignoring the stretches of time when Son was doing nothing.There are still people who think you guys would be better off without Kane
It always feels like there's a small minority of people who can't accept Kane as a top player and feel a need to play him down. Maybe because he can be a bit awkward on the ball and he's not your traditional idea of what a football star should be, but he's easily one of the best I've seen play for Spurs.