Town were defeated 2-0 by Spurs at Wembley, in a game that had few surprises and once again showed how hard it is for smaller teams to compete against the best in the Premier League.
Town weren’t particularly bad, and to lose by only two goals is no disgrace, but this game never felt like a proper contest and Spurs could have scored more if they weren’t preserving energy for their European game next week.
Here are some of my thoughts about the game…
A gulf in quality
There wasn’t a single player in Town’s starting eleven that would have been able to get into Spurs team yesterday. When every single opposition player is better than every single one of yours then there’s not much you can do, so defeat felt inevitable.
If Town can manage to stay in this league for a few more seasons then we may be able to either buy or develop the kind of player that can open up even the best teams’ defences. But currently, we don’t have that kind of quality. In the Championship I always felt like Town could beat any team on their day, not always, but when we were at our best. In the Premier League, there’s always a chance of an upset but you need luck as well as form to overcome the gap in quality between teams.
Do we have a plan B when we go behind?
Town started with a very positive approach against Spurs, then after a few minutes, we changed the system because we looked incredibly vulnerable on the break. We pulled back the fullbacks, the wingers got pinned back too, and it looked like we were playing with a back six at times. This helped to reduce Spurs’ threat but meant we had almost no attacking threat.
Playing defensively against the best teams is fine when we’re level or ahead, but when we went behind it looks like we’re playing damage limitation football instead of trying to get something from the game.
This season we’ve really struggled to get back into games once we’ve gone behind, and that’s partly because we don’t have an effective “plan B“ to switch to when we’re behind. If we try to play attacking football then we’re too open and we get picked off, if we sit back and defend then it’s easy for the opposition to dominate and close out the game.
The sad truth is that there isn’t a magical formation or tactical system that will help us win games against teams that are better than us. I wonder if we should practice a playing more direct, or to put it in other words “Gerrit forrard Town!”.
Playing the top six is a bit boring
When we won promotion I was very excited about the prospect of playing the top teams in England, but most of this season’s best moments have come when we’ve played the teams around us. The win against Man United is the obvious exception, but we can only really expect that kind of results once or twice a season against the top teams.
The atmosphere when we play the top six away is clearly a problem. When fans get used to seeing their teams playing the likes of Juventus and Real Madrid it seems they can’t be bothered to create an atmosphere for little Huddersfield’s visit. Wembley was another stadium that was half empty after 75 minutes, beating the traffic is clearly more important than beating Huddersfield Town to most fans.
On Twitter, there was a suggestion that the big six should go and form their own elite European league and leave the Premier League to everyone else. While this is probably unlikely in the short term, it might actually improve English football to have a genuinely competitive domestic competition and then have the best English teams compete with opponents of the same level every week.
The next five games will define our season
Now we’ve got Tottenham out of the way, we enter a run of games against teams that we’re capable of beating. Here are the games we’ve got coming up:
- Swansea at home
- Crystal Palace at home
- Newcastle away
- Brighton away
- Watford at home
None of these games will be easy, but we’ll need to pick up points in most of these games if we want to survive. Two wins and a draw might be enough to keep us up, but winning three out of these five games would almost certainly be enough to give us another season in the Premier League.
If we fail to get enough points from these games to stay up we won’t’ be finished, but we’ll have to try and get something from the trickier games in our run in. Chelsea, Everton, Man City, and Arsenal are our last four opponents and it’ll be a much bigger ask to take anything from these games.
You need to explain this ‘Herriot forward’ tactic. Can we do it with Mounie on the pitch? Or does it need DePoitre? What about when it comes straight back? How has that helped? Who do we get closer to big man up front to give us a chance of keeping it? Pritchard? Ince? If we can’t answer these questions then nobody will be able to tell whether Tis a tactic or just a panic measure.
Hi Gavin,
Thanks for your comment. I think playing hoofball shouldn’t be our main tactic, but if the game isn’t going our way then playing direct could be a way to change things in our favour. Depoitre’s more physical than Mounié but both are good in the air. The problem is that we rarely have players looking to feed off their flicks and knockdowns. Burnley are great at playing this way, which isn’t always fun to watch but it can level the playing field a bit against superior opposition.
Cheers
James
I reckon you’re pretty well spot on there! My only disagreement would be in stating that I don’t think we will ever be a major force in the Prem, since we will never be able to compete with the financial elite – unless Hoyle sells out to an eastern multi-billionaire who is prepared to support us … do you happen to know anyone of that ilk? More to the point – would you actually WANT to know or have someone like that running the place? Sorry, I’m getting a bit long in the tooth, but much prefer to see us battle as we currently do – albeit with a greater variety of tactics and additional more skilfull or quicker-thinking manpower to hand!
… and how much longer will Wagner stay around?- till end of next season? Then what?
Thanks for commenting Phil.
There were rumours on Twitter that Dean Hoyle’s going to sell the club to a wealthy Chinese group. Not sure if it’s true but I’d be very sad to see Hoyle leave, even if we could then splash the cash.
Man fans will remember the fallout from Barry Rubery’s time at Town, so won’t be too keen on owners with plenty of money but no ties to the club.
We won’t keep Wagner forever but I hope he stays a bit longer and turns us into an established Premier League team.