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Poch: In or Out? - You CAN change your vote

Should Poch stay or go?

  • Stay

    Votes: 657 55.3%
  • Go

    Votes: 532 44.7%

  • Total voters
    1,189

yankspurs

Enic Out
Aug 22, 2013
41,883
71,188
I dont know if i should be reading anything into this. But the clubs twitter and IG(even the new stadium IG account) are radio silent and the NFL is playing the first game at the stadium. With how the club has been promoting the NFL endlessly to just go completely radio silent the day it's arrived at the ground is really weird. Literally nothing and the game is an hour away. Maybe things are happening behind the scenes...
 
May 17, 2018
11,872
47,993
How does a fantastic manager like Poch become a shit manager?

The answer is, he doesn’t

The answer actually is, he does.

His entire USP was based around trust, togetherness and team spirit. We know it wasn't tactical reasons that made him successful, it was his personality and the team bond.

He's seems to have broken or lost most of that, which is probably why we're seeing what we're seeing.
 

rabbikeane

Well-Known Member
Mar 29, 2005
6,884
12,675
Levy's already set us back that long. A new manager wont change anything. A few key players are aging and have no reason to be motivated when they know they've been on the outs for 2 years and are now out of contract. We needed the clear out 2 years ago and Poch knew that. He asked for it. Levy's fucked us over and we are paying the price.

Levy has had his eyes on the bigger perspective and long term future with the stadium building, which clearly had an impact last year when the naming rights deal collapsed and created some doubt on the financial side of it.
Pochettino knew the deal when he took the job, he was told and accepted that we'd have less money until it was built and that at Spurs we intend to use the academy for a lot of the squad building.

No Spurs manager before has had the facilities and been backed as much in player wages as Pochettino - this has been crucial to keep our player group together. And now Levy seem willing to back the manager in the transfer market as well.
I'm sure you say to late, but that's the situation the club was in .. and our limitations are no good reason for the total collapse we see at the moment.
As I'm pointing to elsewhere and question Levy about, is who is in control of the transfers and contracts. Cause we need someone with competence and full focus to stear our football decision - and Pochettino claim he has nothing to say outside of training and game management.
 
May 17, 2018
11,872
47,993
And the players do have a point. They were 2nd on 86 points and got no new contracts.

Who are you on about? The club have consistently handed out new contracts at a far more proactive rate than any other club in the league.

Davinson signed in 2017 and got a new deal the next season.
Davies and Winks both signed new deals a few months back
KWP signed a new deal in May
Lamela signed a new deal last year
Kane signed a new deal last year
Dele signed a new deal last season
Sissoko and Moura just signed new deals.

The only players who haven't are ones that have, from what we're told, refused to or want to leave.
 

JayB

Well-Known Member
Aug 24, 2011
6,652
26,046
Yesterday I was halfway making excuses for him but after having slept on it I'm firmly in the Poch Out camp. I can't ever remember a manager coming back from having the players completely quit on him. I'm disgusted with the players as I feel Poch deserves better than that, but our choices seem to boil down to writing off this season and having a massive clearout for the sake of saving Poch, or moving on with a different manager and trying to salvage this season. Seeing as third and fourth are wide open in the league this season, I think the long-term best interest of the club would, depressingly, be best served by making the change.
 
May 17, 2018
11,872
47,993
Almost thinking paying a subscription so I can read this


The place is a regime and they’re sick of him’ – are Pochettino, Levy or the players to blame for Spurs’ crisis?
Never ever understand why would journalistic work at this age of the Internet of sharing would be gated.

I can read it and I haven't paid for it?
 

ardiles

Well-Known Member
Nov 24, 2006
13,228
40,308
If Poch stays, he has to drop the underperforming players. No time for sentiment. We’re on a downward spiral and he has to stop the rot , even if it means dropping senior players in the squad.
 

Trotter

Well-Known Member
Jan 30, 2009
2,169
3,312
Again, Alderweireld has a buyout and we accepteda bid for Wanyama. That much we do know.

We don't know about any other offers so this assertion for the summer is baseless.

Fans should know by now that selling players takes a lot more than simply accepting a bid. Grown men should understand that there is more to negotiating and agreeing a big money deal is more in-depth than "they offered £10m but we wanted £12m so the deal didn't go through.

Despite whining about us not spending, those with a basic grip on reality know that our wage bill is considerably higher than those outisde the top six. So selling deadwood to teams below us means our players will likely take a paycut should they move. Which a basic levelof common sense would suggest the players might reject the moves.

Much easier to dumb it down to our board refusing offers though.

And maybe you should understand and grasp a basic level of common sense instead of being totally fucking condescending to those that have different viewpoint to you. . This it is not just the past summer window that has caused this, but an accumulation of the last few. To have any player with less than 2 years on contract is suicidal if that player is key. New contract or ship out at that stage, and there were plenty of offers for those contract rebels the prior summer.
Leave less than 2 years, you are totally at their mercy, have multiple key players in same situation, it is a disaster, and combine that with a manager who seems to have no coherent plan in terms of tactics, selections then you have the mess we are in.
This all stems back to the year of no activity where the fatal errors occurred which we are now encountering the consequences of.

And fitting user name, don’t worry I won’t call you, not if I want a decent conversation about anything where a modicum of decorum, understanding and general decency are needed.
 
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glacierSpurs

Well-Known Member
Sep 28, 2013
16,163
25,472
As opposed to free clickbait nonsense?
But it's your choice to click or ignore.

My point is, in terms of journalistic work, I personally find it just makes no sense to place it behind a pay wall if the medium of transmission is the Internet. Internet is primarily for sharing.

And there is seldom any commercial intent from news, reports or opinion pieces after the published stage. It's a different matter if it is a scholarly work or thesis where plagiarism could happen. Or graphical/photographic content for the matter, where they could be repurposed again for another intention which may call into copyright issues.

Unless the website does not published any work at all, and subscriptions go to printed copies where readers read them physically, then IMHO, that's perfectly fine, like how some magazines are.
 

desert spur

Member
Aug 20, 2013
48
89
Almost thinking paying a subscription so I can read this


The place is a regime and they’re sick of him’ – are Pochettino, Levy or the players to blame for Spurs’ crisis?
Pretty sure this is the Athletic's business model. they put provocative headlines behind paywalls. (grain of salt, i've seen some doozies under their banner)
 

guiltyparty

Well-Known Member
Sep 21, 2005
9,023
13,524
But it's your choice to click or ignore.

My point is, in terms of journalistic work, I personally find it just makes no sense to place it behind a pay wall if the medium of transmission is the Internet. Internet is primarily for sharing.

And there is seldom any commercial intent from news, reports or opinion pieces after the published stage. It's a different matter if it is a scholarly work or thesis where plagiarism could happen. Or graphical/photographic content for the matter, where they could be repurposed again for another intention which may call into copyright issues.

Unless the website does not published any work at all, and subscriptions go to printed copies where readers read them physically, then IMHO, that's perfectly fine, like how some magazines are.

Sorry but I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about.The Times makes a fortune from its paywall. As does the Telegraph. They work. The internet may have conditioned people into thinking everything should be free but all outlets will go to the wall without different models.

The whole point of the Athletic is to write more thoughtful pieces and give writers time to go deeper rather than rushing stuff out in an hour. Because these don’t traffic as hard, the paywall is necessary. The fact that people aren’t willing to pay for good journalism is a sad state of affairs

Magazines? Oh that’s a dreamy vision of the future
 

ardiles

Well-Known Member
Nov 24, 2006
13,228
40,308
Apologies if it been posted already


The Athletic
Jack Pitt-Brooke

‘The place is a regime and they’re sick of him’ – are Pochettino, Levy or the players to blame for Spurs’ crisis?


October has been a nightmare for Tottenham Hotspur and we are only six days in. They conceded 10 goals in two games, tipping a shaky start to the season into something that looks like a crisis. Three wins from 11 all season tells a story, especially when those were home games against Aston Villa, Crystal Palace and Southampton.

Spurs look nothing like themselves right now and Mauricio Pochettino is under more pressure than he has been since his first few months at the club, back in the autumn of 2014. Is this the natural end of the cycle, or has something gone badly wrong? There is plenty of blame to be shared round, but how culpable are the chairman, the manager and the squad?

The players
When the Brighton players reflected on their 3-0 win over Tottenham, one thing stuck in their minds: the silence. They barely heard a word of encouragement or leadership out of the Spurs players, especially after their captain Hugo Lloris was stretchered off after eight minutes.

Mauricio Pochettino is rarely challenged by the dressing room, perhaps to the group’s detriment, but the most worrying thing about Spurs’ recent troubles is the lack of fight and hunger on the pitch.

For years this was a team who gave everything on the pitch, who would press hard, out-run opponents, and push until the final whistle. But not this season. Before this week, the story of this season had been about surrendering leads in the second half: against Olympiakos, Arsenal and Leicester, before the shock exit to Colchester. This week things got worse as Spurs folded in the second half against Bayern and then barely showed up at Brighton. Brighton’s players admitted privately to feeling like they had outworked as well as outplayed Tottenham.

Of course you can always look at individual errors and bad performances to explain events, and there have been plenty of both: Lloris’s mistakes against Southampton and Brighton, Jan Vertonghen looking flat-footed against Arsenal and Olympiakos, Toby Alderweireld exposed by Bayern and Brighton, Serge Aurier’s lack of concentration, Tanguy Ndombele being off the pace, Christian Eriksen losing all consistency. But when almost every individual is underperforming you have to look for a bigger explanation. And it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that there has been a clear collective dip this season.

This team was always sustained by the commitment levels of the players, eager to put the Pochettino plan into action right down to the last detail. But when that commitment slackens, the whole structure falls apart. Pochettino said recently that the main thing he wanted to fix in the team was that they should “recover this aggressivity” without the ball.

They have not won an away league game since January 20, the worst record in the division, and their performances since then both home and away have largely lacked the intensity and slickness that were hallmarks as recently as 18 months ago. They have picked up as many Premier League points in 2019 as West Ham and Burnley, and fewer than Crystal Palace and Leicester. Their tally of 22 points from 20 Premier League matches since mid-February is borderline relegation form.

Clearly some players do not want to be there any more. Eriksen had his heart set on a move to Real Madrid. Toby Alderweireld wanted out last year. Danny Rose has nearly left three summers in a row. Jan Vertonghen is in his final year. Ever since Kyle Walker left for Manchester City in 2017, the squad has been aware of the possibility of more money and more trophies if they left the club. Some might blame players for thinking of their careers but it is only natural.

But there is a broader issue than just players thinking about their next move. And that is a pervasive sense of tiredness, mental and physical, within the squad after five draining years. Most of these players — Lloris, Vertonghen, Alderweireld, Rose, Ben Davies, Lamela, Eric Dier, Eriksen, Kane, Dele Alli, Heung Min Son — have been here since Pochettino’s first or second season. And there is a common feeling that they have very little left to give.

Part of this is physical, after years of hard-running football and double sessions. One long-serving player has complained about the “same old sessions and messages”. But it is also mental, after five years of authoritative controlling management and a relentless schedule, with players also complaining at how few days they are given off. “The place is a regime and they’re sick of him,” one dressing room source said. “It’s his way or nothing, there is no balance. The players don’t get the impression they are trusted at all.”

Pochettino has not lost the dressing room, and the players know what a debt they owe to him. But they just cannot keep playing like they used to. “The players are not revolting against him,” said a source, “but they have been driven so hard, they don’t know if they have got anything left to give.”

The chairman
Can you blame the man who has delivered everything he promised?
Remember that Daniel Levy’s ultimate responsibility is bigger even than trophies, results, and the fact that the team conceded seven goals to Bayern Munich on Tuesday night. His job is to safeguard the long-term stability of the club. And that means taking care of more important things than just the up-and-down results of the team.

The priority over the past decade has been the club’s infrastructure and Levy has secured it for a lifetime. In 2012 Spurs opened their new £50 million training ground, and six months ago, they opened their £1.2 billion new stadium. Each of those is rated the best in Europe. Last season, before the stadium opened, they made a record profit of £113 million. Whatever happens next with Pochettino, the players, even the ownership of the club, it will have a guaranteed level of stability and success because of these.

What makes this even more impressive is that Tottenham built this ground without benefactor investment. They had to borrow £637 million to pay for it but more than £500 million of that has been refinanced through Bank of America at low interest rates, securing the club’s stable financial future. The delays in opening the stadium — it was meant to open at the start of last season, not the end — are forgotten already.

“I understand, as I am a fan, clearly you want to win on the pitch,” Levy told the Financial Times last month. “But we have been trying to look at this slightly differently, in that we want to make sure we ensure an infrastructure here to stand the test of time.”

But has it come at the cost of the team?

Levy has always run a tight ship in terms of contracts and salaries, trying to regularly re-negotiate deals with incremental wage increases to preserve his negotiating power. And for years it worked well.

The problem came when the successes of the team outstripped the money they were offered. After a round of renegotiations in 2016, players were disappointed that finishing second in 2016-17 did not lead to another big round of pay-rises.

One source described Levy as “the Mike Ashley of the top of the league”, a chairman determined to get by spending as little as possible. When the squad learnt last year of Levy’s annual £6 million salary, it went down badly with players who have always felt underpaid.

Since then Levy has started to push the boat out on wages, with Kane, Alli and Lamela all signing big new long-term contracts last year, beyond the old restrictions. Kane’s, for example, increased from about £120,000 to a deal that starts at about £150,000 a week and could grow to £200,000. The flip side is that Levy has secured Tottenham’s control over their futures.

Spurs still spend only 38 per cent of their turnover on wages but the club have said they expect that ratio to increase towards 50 per cent. What Levy will not do is turn Spurs into Manchester United, throwing big long-term contracts at senior players just to keep them at the club.

Even on transfers the club has started to spend again after failing to sign anyone through 2018-19, with a £120 million net spend this summer that few would have expected, finally giving Pochettino new players to work with.

The problem is that Spurs had needed a major clear out of senior players, and a new generation of youngsters long before 2019. And that never happened.

You can argue that Levy should have done all this two years ago, to build on their 86-point season, and secure their best players long-term. But if you were expecting Levy to break his principles to gamble for success, you were looking in the wrong place.

The manager
Mauricio Pochettino knew that his sixth season would be difficult. He knew how hard it would be to keep motivating the same players he has had here for years, to keep getting the same level of physical and mental application they gave him when they were younger.

No one is more conscious of the threat of staleness than Pochettino himself. He has been desperate to end this old cycle here and start a new one. That is why he wanted to start moving on senior players years ago, and advocated a clear-out back in the summer of 2018.

Rose, Alderweireld, Wanyama and Sissoko all could have gone, just as Eriksen and Aurier could have gone this year. But only Kieran Trippier and Fernando Llorente ended up leaving.

Now Pochettino is left having to try to get more out of largely the same set of players he has been working with for years, some of whom he wanted sold, some of who are considering their next move. Pochettino also knows that during the course of his Spurs tenure, Liverpool and Manchester City have almost built new teams from scratch. And because they could never get rid of players, they struggled, at least until this summer, to get players in.

This means Pochettino is left with a squad that lacks the youthful vigour it had three or four years ago. It is not Pochettino’s fault that they do not have a peak-level Mousa Dembele, Kyle Walker, Rose or Wanyama any more, and they cannot easily replace them in the transfer market. The state of the squad is what Pochettino would call a “circumstance” outside his control.

So Spurs cannot play like they did when they would drive teams off the pitch with their energy. The style has changed in the past year or so, slightly deeper, slower and less about pressing. And that more adaptable style helped the team to get to the Champions League, a masterclass in flexible management, and an achievement Pochettino is not averse to mentioning.

This season Spurs still have to be pragmatic. That is why there is a focus on recovery between games, to keep the players functioning at a high level for as long as possible. They know these players cannot run now like they did in 2016.

The coaching staff try to keep changing their sessions and plans to keep the players on their toes, although some players are still finding it hard to stay mentally engaged.

Of course you can criticise specific selection or tactical decisions. Like the persistence with the 4-4-2 diamond system, which leaves Spurs exposed out wide. Even Moussa Sissoko admitted this week the team got tired quicker when they play that way.

You can ask whether Pochettino was right to start Christian Eriksen against Arsenal or Olympiakos, or bench him against Leicester or Bayern.

But the whole picture is far bigger than that, bigger than any individual decision or moment or game. And most of the problems Spurs are facing are outside of Pochettino’s control and beyond his capacity to fix.

Perhaps the strongest criticism of Pochettino concerns the mood. He has always been hot and cold, up and down, but increasingly so in recent months. After losing the Champions League final he was so upset that he went straight to his home in Barcelona, rather than flying back to London with the squad, raising eyebrows behind the scenes.

His comments about “different agendas” in the squad did not go down well with the players either, nor did the speculation in the past linking him with Manchester United or Real Madrid. Some players hoped that Pochettino’s latest contract, in May 2018, would guarantee spending on transfers and player contracts that never happened.

Trying to change the atmosphere might be the best thing Pochettino could do. This downturn is not personally his fault. It is what happens when a group of players overachieve for so long until their motivation fades, with reinforcements arriving too little, too late. But if results continue to get worse, then the pressure will all be on him.
 

guiltyparty

Well-Known Member
Sep 21, 2005
9,023
13,524
Pretty sure this is the Athletic's business model. they put provocative headlines behind paywalls. (grain of salt, i've seen some doozies under their banner)

It’s a direct quote.

And all of their articles are behind a paywall. Such provocative titles as “Pellegrini 66-72 Hodgson: Premier League outliers prove age is no barrier”
 

spursfan77

Well-Known Member
Aug 13, 2005
46,680
104,956
Basically from that Athletic piece
- all the players are either fucked from the training regime or old and can’t run as hard as they used to anymore hence change in tactics to accommodate
- half the squad has either wanted to leave or was wanted out by Poch over last 2 years so it’s a very destabilised lot - we’ve needed a major clear out that never came
- Levy pocketing huge salaries while underpaying players has long been a sticking point in the dressing room (one player’s agent compares him to Mike Ashley)
- Poch has been distant from the squad since the CL final. His talking about leaving hasn’t gone down well either and players thought his new contract would come with commitments from Levy that haven’t been kept
- Brighton players commented on the near total silence between Spurs players during the game

Jesus. That doesn’t sound good.
 

glacierSpurs

Well-Known Member
Sep 28, 2013
16,163
25,472
Sorry but I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about.The Times makes a fortune from its paywall. As does the Telegraph. They work. The internet may have conditioned people into thinking everything should be free but all outlets will go to the wall without different models.

The whole point of the Athletic is to write more thoughtful pieces and give writers time to go deeper rather than rushing stuff out in an hour. Because these don’t traffic as hard, the paywall is necessary. The fact that people aren’t willing to pay for good journalism is a sad state of affairs

Magazines? Oh that’s a dreamy vision of the future
For the matter, news agencies content are integrated, which involves alot of other media embedded, and also hence additional effort in their production, to provide readers a more enveloping digital experience. Keyword being experience. Access to more exclusive archive is even offered. You are totally missing the point of my gripe on pure opinionated pieces asking for subscriptions. If it's donation its perfectly understandable. Imagine Instagram private accounts asking you to pay in order to follow them because their photos are more thoughtful and award-winning..

TBH, if online content are not driving traffic, the quality is the issue, and prescribing subscriptions just to brand it as more insightful and premium is IMHO ridiculous. Good journalism shouldn't be in a sad state of affairs though, and if there is such state, it is definitely not caused by cheapskates like me. On the contrary, it is the freedom of Internet that you have to thank for - it has a huge hand in bringing journalism to where it is now. Like how the world of people wouldn't be better photographers if not for the Internet.

Oh, and magazines have more chances of staying then newspaper in the future. But well, like the above, we can agree to disagree.
 

guiltyparty

Well-Known Member
Sep 21, 2005
9,023
13,524
For the matter, news agencies content are integrated, which involves alot of other media embedded, and also hence additional effort in their production, to provide readers a more enveloping digital experience. Keyword being experience. Access to more exclusive archive is even offered. You are totally missing the point of my gripe on pure opinionated pieces asking for subscriptions. If it's donation its perfectly understandable. Imagine Instagram private accounts asking you to pay in order to follow them because their photos are more thoughtful and award-winning..

TBH, if online content are not driving traffic, the quality is the issue, and prescribing subscriptions just to brand it as more insightful and premium is IMHO ridiculous. Good journalism shouldn't be in a sad state of affairs though, and if there is such state, it is definitely not caused by cheapskates like me. On the contrary, it is the freedom of Internet that you have to thank for - it has a huge hand in bringing journalism to where it is now. Like how the world of people wouldn't be better photographers if not for the Internet.

Oh, and magazines have more chances of staying then newspaper in the future. But well, like the above, we can agree to disagree.

Pretty much disagree with everything you’ve concluded, even if some of the info is correct. Weird tangent you’ve gone off on. And nice straw man at the end - I didn’t say newspapers would outlive magazines.

The Athletic is a great experience, far more enjoyable to read and with more regularly in-depth analysis than pretty much any football outlet I’ve come across. And your big beef is you have to pay less than a pint a month for it.
 

pffft

some kind of member
Jul 19, 2013
1,527
5,540
If you've watched football for any length of time, you can often spot when a manager's time is up. Sadly, I'm seeing that with Poch. I was so proud to have him as our manager, the way he spoke, the way the team played, everything. I had hoped he would be here for a couple of decades at least, and lead us to years of glory...and for a while it looked like that might be something that was going to happen.

Something changed a while back, though. The way Poch spoke started to change. The team stopped playing fantastic football. Results started to go against us. I was thrilled to make the CL final, we all were. But we could also all see that something was wrong. Results don't lie over a long period, and for the last year our league form has been absolutely terrible. It's become quite obvious that Poch either doesn't know how to sort it, or is not able to sort it if he does know how.

Poch isn't the man to take us forward, and that's the truth of it, like it or not...and I for one really don't like it. But it is what it is...he's not going to be able to turn it around, and keeping him is only delaying the inevitable. If we want to keep moving forward as a club we need to make the hard decisions, and getting rid of Poch is probably one of the hardest decisions the club will have had to take since ENIC took over. Credit in the bank? Not in top level football. Start going backwards and it's game over.

Do I want Poch gone? Hell no. I want the old Poch back, the one who was a gentleman, the one who put together a team that played quality, exciting football and won games. I don't want the new Poch, the sulky one, the bitter one, the ridiculously stubborn one, the one who talks complete bollocks and hasn't got a clue how to set the team up. He has always had limitations tactically, and his in-game management has never been very good, but what he did have covered, in the main, what he lacked. That is no longer the case.

Whatever is wrong with the team is down to Poch. Whether it's the training, the motivating...whatever it is. Poch is the manager and it's his job to sort it. If he can't do his job properly he shouldn't be in it. Which leads back to the opening line of this post: sometimes a manager's time is up, and you just have to accept it, whether you like it or not. Poch's time is up. I hate it, but it's how it is.

I support Spurs. Always. I've loved players and managers, some of them I will love for ever...but I love the club first and foremost, and although I still love Poch, I love the club far more. If it's in the club's best interests to let him go, then we have to let him go...and sadly, I think that now it is in the club's best interests to do that.
 
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