Good morning and I mean that most sincerely, folks.
We’re but a day away from our lot offering up some tangible hope. Blackburn have conceded 13 goals in their last 6 games. Which tells even someone as hair-brained as me we need to be attack minded.
fig.’s 1, 2 & 3 = Routes of über simple, yet incredibly intelligent passing from the back-line players. fig 4. Modders plays every ball one of 3 ways, Rafa, Ade or Bale fig.4a = Azza outwits repeatedly, I say, repeatedly their lot and heads for the near post like a heat seeker.
I’m resting Pathe News Boy and Gallas thus leaving us with options on the bench for once that are neither rash or makeweight. I do not expect our master tactician and current incumbent Mr Redschnapps to follow suit. I fact I am convinced he will play King.
This is perhaps, the ‘easiest’ of the four remaining games. Which isn’t to say we take our foot off the gas, that’s not what I’m suggesting. But we must box clever.
Tactically there is no point in leaving Parker and Billy on the bench if you only deploy one of them in the 74th minute should we go a goal down. You need to be able to read the game and deploy one of them to shore up a situation before it happens.
If Blackburn are by some miracle continually making us look threadbare at the back then if there’s a pattern whereby Sandro and Rose are looking vulnerable (perhaps thanks to Bale being in a different post code), then you bring in Parker for Livermore. Not Rafa.
Yeah, yeah Bale on the left on the Tactics Board but we all know that he has ‘his vision’ and Arry doesn’t give a hoot so it’s unlikely to happen. The sad thing is, the most likely to be sacrificed in the event of a substitution is Rafa as he’s a player Arry fundamentally doesn’t understand.
Yet it’s Rafa, if was allowed to stalk that horizontal corridor (or channel) as they call them in Association Football between Bale and Azza off the shoulder of Ade, we’d be in for some magic.
Rafa playing off of Modric and the inevitably roaming Ade allows for some crackerjack creative attacking play in the final third. Yet another reason Bale’s presence here mostly ends up feeling like those moments in the UK Office when David Brent sees a group of colleagues having a laugh and goes over grinning asking what the joke was so desperate is he to join in.
I should, depressingly have the following saved somewhere so I can just cut & paste it every week. Bale to stay out wide and terrorise people. No Benny, but has Arry said to him, ‘push up when you get a chance son’? I hope not. I don’t want Walker doing it either.
Pace is a many splendid thing, but brains are where it’s at.
Azza and Bale need to be fed a third the way into the Blackburn half to a give them time to think as they start their runs as to what their final ball will look lie. They are the players that can potentially do the most damage. They draw markers and pull men out of position. But not when given the ball just 25 yards out.
If you cast your eye at the Barclays Premiership form guide, you see we head up a miserable trio of sides who are in top half of the league table, but in terms of the form table, find themselves courting relegation. Liverpool and Swansea are the other two if you can’t be bothered to click.
The grim reality is that we all know we have the ingredients to make a sumptuous banquet. This is who at home team beat Liverpool 4-0, QPR 3-1, Villa 2-0, Bolton 3-0, Everton 2-0, Newcastle 5-0… yet the stuff coming out the kitchen since the Newcastle game has been inedible.
Ripping performances apart online is all good but I’m not one for booing our our own players or protesting during a game. That’s just poison. But if our lot aren’t managed properly tomorrow then choruses of, ‘We want you to go, Harry Redknapp, we want you to go.’ will be ringing in the the N17 air’ at full time.’
My Tactics :-
JUST F***ING SCORE!
Technically that’s only a tactic. If I could add to it a cheeky- AND DONT’T F***ING LET ANY IN! I think we have a deal!
You sir, are a tactical genius!
And so it starts….http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/17879753
Tiresome. If these players think they are good enough to play in the CL they need to prove that, starting tomorrow. If we don’t finish there, I call them all failures and any one of them who thinks they aren’t personally and collectively culpable for that failure and owe the club something to make up for it can fook off. Sell early (as if Levy would ever do that though), take the cash and give it to our new manager.
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
Two thoughts on this:
Bale has so much smoke blown up his arse (by redknapp and doubtless his agent) that he appears genuinely convinced that he is the new Ronaldo. This is clearly premature. Perhaps the potential is there, but he is by no means the finished product. Unclear whether Bale is reclaimable at this point i.e. would a chat pointing out what happened to Michael Owen and Berbatov perhaps get his head right for sticking it out with Spurs.
But Spurs management, both Levy and Redknapp, have to take a share of the responsibility for disgruntled players, Redknapp for obvious reasons already explored at length on this blog and Levy for evidently not giving a damn about anything but a now increasingly unlikely FA pay-out. This is a really distressing return to the bad old days when we were a player-trading firm more than a football club. We said we wanted to progress, but we kept selling our best players and our net spend was break even or negative i.e. we were making a profit on player trading.
Ambition needs to start at the top. As a long time critic of Redknapp, I was relieved that Levy didn’t give him free access to the check book, based on the state Redknapp had left his last three clubs. But our transfer dealings in the last three years have not been those of an ambitious club.
If you don’t trust your manager to buy players, you’ve got the wrong manager. And when your manager has clearly moved on, mentally, as Redknapp has done, he needs to be replaced, even with a caretaker for the remainder of the season, to show everyone, players especially, that if you’re not for us, you’re against us and are gone.
We want to have ambitious players but we have to show them that we are an ambitious club. Redknapp out now.
Reality is that until we pay for and move into a bigger stadium a significant portion of our budget has to come from transfers. That doesn’t always have to mean selling our best players but it does mean trying to get the best price at the best time, and trying to reinvest wisely. It might be depressing but it is true, and it’s true of 90% of the clubs in the league to a greater or lesser extent.
As I said, I’m happy (perhaps not happy exactly) to see any of our ‘star players’ leave this Summer if we fail to get CL and they think they are too good for us. Because if they were really that good we’d have got CL football with them.
I couldn’t agree more. If they don’t secure CL football they’re not good enough to do so, end of. There’s too many players for my liking who think they’re good enough for regular CL football to do anything but blame those same people when we don’t get it. After all, they can’t all be better than the team, right?
Oh and another thing in Bale’s interview. He mentions ‘keep performing’. I’d suggest ‘start performing again’ might be more accurate. Not been at the races for a long time. As HH so accurately assessed, a very very talented tit.
We will win tomorrow, but the blue scum will finish 4th if they beat the barcodes.
:-(
i’ll just take the win right now :whistle:
We will get the first of our final 2 points tomorrow, I have tickets but I’m going to put in as much effort as the players and “management” have recently and watch it on the telly……
I reckon it’ll be 3 of our final 4 points. They will give us hope, then let everyone down – it’s what they do best.
pwobabley
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