This was a far more robust version of Watford than we’ve ever played before, more robust than the Premier League has seen before this season.
Worse yet, it was Mauricio Pochettino’s eighty-one minute devotion a 3-5-2 arguably cost us the match.
People will be asking this morning why we changed from the hugely successful 4-3-1-2 against Manchester United?
If Poch’s answer is that United didn’t play 4-4-2, then he need to take his head out of his Big Boys’ Bumper Book Of Footy Formations and start looking at what’s best for his own team.
Even when Poch did make changes, it was from the chapter 8 ‘Martin Jol’s Kitchen Sink’, which essentially meant chucking on Fernando Llorente and pushing the wingbacks up.
This was flawed on almost too many levels to be true.
For starters, our 5 man midfield was so muted, it wouldn’t have made much difference if Spurs had been allowed to field field 5 extra players and bring on 4 more strikers.
We saw long balls and plus a continued inability to press anywhere near convincingly.
This is a shape that quite anti-football for this Spurs squad that wants to be imaginative, wants to be eloquent.
Meanwhile, Javi Gracia did nothing but freshen up his players, whilst making the subtlest of adjustments.
We’ll drill down into both what we saw, and what the Opta stats tell us about how the players fared individually in the next blog/s.
What is important – if we’re to make any class of thoughtful analysis – we’ll need to do more than reel out the ‘a bad day at the office, so let’s move on’ line.
I’d prefer to try and understand more than I do, rather than vegetate.
This was Watford’s first win against Spurs since 1987.
I’m curious to know why.
