Article by Jon LewisIt’s Thanksgiving here in the U.S. and I’ve spent the morning watching Spurs v Tromso, feeling positively and blissfully un-American. It’s for most other U.S. sports fans a big day for the NFL; there are American football games running from 10 AM to 9 PM out here on the west coast.
The game today didn’t matter really, but it was nonetheless revealing. Some things we learnt:
Friedel has excellent positional-sense and has no trouble cleanly fielding balls played right at him.
Naughton is nowhere near as good an athlete as Kyle Walker or Danny Rose he’s nowhere near as skillful as Vertongen, all better choices at right and left back.
Chiriches is good for one simply crazy idea a game, often in the wrong third of the pitch. But he’s also, quite clearly our second best centre back. He scored a goal by making a nice run and getting lucky (which was more than anyone among the front three could muster all game).
Dawson has been a soldier his whole career – a servant to the club. But he’s third choice at best at centre back. He’s too slow and not a good enough passer to play the high line. He seems slow as well to recognize situations and the good teams (and even a bad team like Tromso) exploit that. I can see why AVB wanted to ship him off to QPR last year. And I can see why Dawson refused to go.
Fryers looks fat (I know that TV adds ten pounds) and slow and is just not ready. We need to buy a left back and/or suck-it-up and take BAK back in January. Wow Coentrao would be nice. But why would he leave Real for Spurs?
Capoue looked great early in the season but he didn’t look happy today, especially after getting an unlucky yellow card. I can’t imagine this was the first time he’s had to play a lot of minutes on a yellow, but it looked it was (his first time, that is). I was thinking that we might line up against United with Capoue and Sandro side by side, and with Dembele in front of them. Now I’m not so sure.
Dembele had a poor game (and a nice goal). The American TV commentator doing the game, Brian McBride is, as am I, a fan, but Dembele’s touch seemed oddly off and he played way too slow in a game we could have bossed if we played faster. He and Capoue (and at other times he and Chadli) were too often too close to each other and too often side by side. Our best-11(assuming we can play the eleven best players at the same time) I think has Dembele playing with Sandro and Paulinho or Capoue, but I’m not sure Dembele can be effective as a #10. Today hardly cleared things up – and hardly helped his case to play instead of Paulinho.
Chadli has that effortless, graceful Belgian thing going for him (like Dembele and Vertongen) and that might be why he seems to be doing less than he is … aside from two howlers in front of goal, decent chances he missed horribly, I think he played pretty well. He tracks back (far less went wrong on the left than on the right today, thanks to him and Sigurdsson) and he seems smart. But he doesn’t impact the game enough for my taste.
Sigurdsson is always looking for his shot and given our problems scoring that’s his saving grace. But I don’t see what else he contributes. Last year I thought it was a toss-up between him and Dempsey, whose exit was an opportunity Sigurdsson could have seized … and didn’t.
Townsend is by turns our most exciting and most infuriating player. He runs at outside backs and actually played a bit with his head up, for a change. But he also left the right back adrift on a number of occasions. Making matters worse: he and Soldado are not on the same page, or even in the same universe. Though I know lots of fans love Townsend, he’s not a good enough or a complete enough player to pin our hopes on – I can see why he’s been loaned out a lot – I can see why his best run so far was with QPR, where, by comparison, he looked great.
Soldado looks angry and I don’t blame him. McBride spent most of the game feeling Soldado’s pain, stranded as he was up front with no one to run off of, too easily tracked by two centre backs with nothing much to do besides check his runs. We’ll never know if this guy is any good if we can’t figure out how to play him. (And that’s on AVB.) He’s solid from the penalty spot, but it’s been a while since we’ve needed him for that. He had a sweet move on the end-line and made a nice pass or two. He also had some awful touches, one that cost him an easy chance on goal.
Vertongen looked like a man among boys. The game looked too slow and easy for him. That’s how it should have looked to everyone else for the full 90.
Holtby added energy and a little creativity. He’s an excellent second half sub; we know that. But is he an every day starter?
Lamela looked great against Sherriff and should have started the Newcastle game. Instead AVB waited and then started him on the left in the City game. Lamela was one of the least horrible players on our side that day, but the game could not have helped his confidence. In 15 minutes today Lamela did nothing. I think AVB has handled Lamela poorly and I hope the kid is made of sterner stuff than his haircut suggests he is.
AVB left a lot of players at home (good idea) and played a strange-ish starting 11 (well …). He gave 3 (maybe 2) likely starters next weekend a brief aerobic workout at the end. I doubt he came away from the game feeling much better about things. The real problem is that we won (again) looking bad (again). If David Moyes was watching, I can’t imagine he’s losing any sleep. AVB may well feel more secure in his job than the folks at the Guardian think he does. But judging from what we saw today, he’s got some big decisions to make before he fills out the team sheet this weekend. And it would go a long way towards getting folks off his back if he gets it right.
© e-Spurs 2013 All rights reserved no part of this document or this website may be reproduced without consent of e-Spurs
Danny Rose didn't play on Thursday though
ReplyDelete