AVB’s ‘Bale 2.0’ and adapting ‘Bobby Soldier’

Article by Mark Viales

Give it to ‘Bale 2.0’. He’ll save us. Our insistence to sway to the right and overuse our new starlet is worrying. Townsend is not Bale…yet. He terrifies defenders, but ultimately, like Bale in his early days, is often crowded out and closed down. Townsend has had more shots on goal than any other Premier League player and scored just one goal. Needless to say the lad is trying, perhaps too hard in fact, and looking at last season’s clips of his predecessor banging them in from all angels, he looks to have taken it upon himself to try and emulate the ‘Welsh Galactico’. Has it worked? The short answer is ‘no’. No one expects Townsend to step into the Welshman’s shoes and win every game on his own. Andre Villas-Boas has invested heavily in the side and whilst there has been improvement in most areas of the park, Bale was irreplaceable, just as Modric was irreplaceable and even to a certain extent, Van der Vaart. When Spurs lost each of those players they never recovered. They have never replaced them with a like for like player.

Spurs seem to have an ever adapting side, changing in tactics and formation to suite the players at hand. With AVB, however tactics have not been changed, but rather the personnel. AVB has been trying to replicate the style he used for Porto in their domination of the Portuguese and Europa leagues. This has worked to a certain degree as shown through the club’s possession and chance creation stats, however the other side of the coin shows that goals are still hard to come by.

So who’s to blame for this? Is it ‘Bobby Soldier’? Or the lack of service he receives from our expensive and expansive set of creative guile recruited in the summer? Perhaps it’s the lack of understanding of Soldado’s style of play, or maybe it’s that he’s still getting to grips with the physicality and speed of the Premier League. But what is for certain, and remains true, is that we are more than 10 games in and Spurs still have one of the worst goal scoring records in the league.

The defensive style teams are playing against Tottenham practically nullify their attack as they congest the space Spurs insist on penetrating through. For all the creativity and supposed style they posses, they are not getting the ball into the right areas for Soldado. The fox in the box lays best through interchangeable passes in and around the area with support off him for quick one twos, although he has found himself crowded out time and time again, so much so that the other Spurs players hesitate to use him as an option.

Does this make him a bad player?

We can certainly see that he is frustrated in the system we are currently using and I wonder if AVB is waiting for him to adapt to the new role, or he could be waiting for January to swing by to add further to the jigsaw puzzle he is assembling.

Typical with the Spurs sides over the years has been inconsistency. Whether it’s been a
fight to finish in the top half of the table, or breaking the ‘Sky Four’ domination which has plagued our TV screens for the past decade or so, it has always been a key theme associated with them. Building up momentum with promising results, only to suffer inexplicable lapses of consistency which so often lead to their demise.

Granted Spurs are still not so adrift from the leaders so as to say that they are in crisis, or even that major changes are needed to be able to consider themselves, like many others do, as potential dark horses for the title.

Do they need more time to adapt? Will it suddenly all click together with Tottenham toppling opponents three or four nil? Or will it all come crashing down with mid table mediocrity come the end of the season? Or will they simply achieve what they originally set out to do which was to finish in the top four?

The Premier League has never been riper for a new picking with the managerial merry-go-round affecting the top sides and the shifting of the immovable mountains of Manchester. If the mountains do crumble, new peaks will look to take their place, and should Spurs’s snowy peaks edge out in front, it could lead to some joy in seasons to come for the ‘Sleeping Giants’

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