Tottenham lost to Vitesse last night in the European Conference League and as expected, some of the more senior players failed to perform to the level they are expected to.
One of those senior players was, of course, Dele Alli and he has once again shown why he is nowhere near the Tottenham first team.
I had thought about doing a hit piece on the former England international but then I remembered some comments from our old number one Paul Robinson and rather than waste my time writing about Alli and his poor display I thought I would let Robinson’s comments do the job instead.
Please note these comments were made before the game yesterday.
Robinson said to Football Insider: “I think Nuno had big plans for him when he came in.
“He worked with him on the training ground and gave him an opportunity at the beginning of the season. But, the fact of the matter is he is not where he needs to be.
“He hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t know whether he needs a move, some fresh surroundings but he needs re-ignite his career in some way. It looks like he’s lost his love for football. He is going stale at Spurs.
“He has not played well consistently in a long time. I think the time has come for him to move on.”
These words from Robinson could have seen him with egg on his face if Alli had done the business last night but instead, those comments have aged rather well. There is nothing that I can disagree with and I may just keep hold of them and stick them out every single time Alli puts on a Spurs shirt.
Sad that it has come to this but the 25-year-old only has himself to blame.
He is not where he needs to be. Indeed. He should have been plying his trade at Harrogate for years now. Waste of space.
I don’t want to be too tough on our players but watching the blatant disinterest and lack of effort from him last night really riled me up.
Playing in the PL, he offers nothing. After he was benched, we started performing much better in the league. So in the ECL, it was his time to show he’s got it, but he lost duel after duel, ball after ball and did nothing.
Mourinho haters will still insist that it’s all his fault that Dele is a busted flush.
I still dream of either Jose or Conte coming in and being given free rein to kick all the losers to the curb and replace them – not with 100M players, but with players who will fight for the shirt with genuine pride, shout at each other and not simply down tools when the grass isn’t cut juuuust right.
You know there’s an ENIC agenda and minions at work when a sensible comment like this gets down voted.
Sad bleeps
Alli should be sold but won’t be because Levy knows that his value has dropped substantially and Levy will think that if his form somehow returns he could be sold at a higher value. But of course Alli won’t ever be as good again, certainly not at Spurs. Levy needs to learn the concept of cutting your losses. He won’t though.
Agreed. Would anyone in the Premier League pay £10-20m for him?
The likes of Dele, Winks, Dier etc is the perfect and clear example of how Baldy Levy tenure failed big time as chairman and co-owner of Spurs, this team won’t win anything while Levy is in charge simple and he wants £3.5 bill to leave. the question is how do you solve this conundrum? The question is for the sane fans not the deluded and Levy lovers.
How do you solve a problem like Levy? The musical!
Vitesse are no mugs and if you’re going to put a team together of players that don’t play together then you’re going to find it tough going. They’d just beaten Feyeonord and I can guarantee that they are better than the rabble we put out.
I’m not surprised and I’m also concerned that Nuno isn’t able to
motivate the ‘B’ team to prove themselves. It’s with the players, the team picked abs the manager and a half decent opponent. Not the end of the world but nobody impressed at all.
We have zero depth “you’ve been Levy’d”…😂
He’s toxic. Terminate his contract now
Unable to watch the game but reports tell the story of another lifeless display in a European competition.
There is and has been undoubtedly a pattern of poor, even unacceptable performances going back to the Poch days when playing supposedly lesser teams around Europe. Many games similar to last night’s have seen us struggle to get results and the question has to be why ?.
There has to be something more than a lack of motivation or desire to perform , you would have to talk with players to get to where the problem lies, but in this case we have a fractured squad that are not performing to their full capabilities. Nuno has not got the squad’s full support and that is not good to make progress, he has to address this so called first eleven second eleven thought process that seems to exist within the group, as all players need to believe they will get a run of games through a season.
Having said that there is no doubt some of the squad such as Dele, Winks and Dier amongst others should have gone in the summer. I would love to say the club are moving forward but we are not.
At the beginning of the summer transfer window I thought we needed to shift 5-6 players who had been playing in and around the first team. Last nights watch was beyond abysmal. After watching that spiritless performance by our newly established “second” string team I realise that 5-6 was a conservative and somewhat optimistic estimate. Despite shedding some deadwood there are still 7-8 who are not nearly good enough and really must go. Four played last night, some seem to be permanently injured and others cannot even get a loan spell organised. Desperate times even without analysing the managers decision to play this team in a competition we had some hope of winning. Apart from the obvious disrespect to Vitesse A and our travelling support the NES strategy last night was risky and the full extent of the risk could show as early as Sunday against West Ham. Lose that game and it will look like a very poor decision indeed. Nuno not doing it for me with regard to selections and on field responses to glaring difficulties. Failure to top the group in the ECL will also mean extra games against a team relegated from the Europa League-but that’s only if we manage to finish second in our group which is by no means a given as things stand.
Given his lack of options on the bench, I think Nuno should have switched Bergwijn to the right and Gil to the left at some point in the second half because the ‘inverted winger’ system was not working well. Not impressed with his in game management so far.
If Levy can get £80m for him in Jan I think we should let him go
Who’s going to pay 80m for Alli?
Nobody mate.. Dele is now valued at 27 million at transfermarket.. A massive fall from grace. If we sold him when H first started calling him out then we would have got 80-100 or more for him.
£90m or no deal!
That’s what Levy will be wanting knowing him, the gormless little muppet.
LOL… Be lucky to get his true value which is 27 mil.. I’d sell him for that… Same as Winks whatever he’s worth.
Dele is 27 mil, and Winks is 18 mil.. Sell both. No time for carriers.
Can we change his song….
We’ve got Alli, Dele Alli,
I think we now all understand,
He only cost £5mill
He’s worth £5mill STILL
Why didn’t we sell Alli?
That was a hard watch. Today’s football is a squad game and we don’t have one. It is also about having footballers, but we gave the ball away without good reason too often last night. It wasn’t a wake up call, we’ve been like that for some time. When a team presses us we struggle to get out. There was no long ball option though, like we changed to v Newcastle. We gave it away playing the short game and the long option.
We were just too lightweight and nice as well. We needed Hojbjerg. We needed Dele, Sanchez, Davies, Rodon, Bergwijn, Lo Celso and Tanganga to step up. They didn’t. Lo Celso looked like he was pulling the strings but his final ball was so poor.
I thought the boy Dane was going to cry when he got booked. He’s got to learn to call the goalkeeper a ‘cheating (insert derogatory term)” and move on. Someone should have told him that at U/12s. The Dark arts of football are not nice, but they are needed. Maybe that is the issue, he is a boy. To play men’s football young lads needs a bit extra. Whether it is electric pace (Giggs, Owen, Rashford) or skill and a killer strike (Greenwood), I haven’t see anything from him at the moment when he has played. At least Markandy turned a player in the few minutes he was on (clutching at straws here!). Hoddle blamed that on the service from the players, but sometimes you have to make things happen on your own. That is what makes players stand out at that age.
The ref was atrocious, the number of fouls he missed was beyond a joke. Winks was done a treat by Bazoer in the second half, and he just ignored it. There was quite a bit of afters too, but the camera didn’t show all of it. We owe them in 2 weeks time, but we’ll need a different team.
Fair play to the Vitesse fans, they were brilliant. That is what going to football should be about, not looking at your smart phone or videoing a corner! Is there any chance we can get an atmosphere like that at the Never to be sponsored stadium?
Absolutely right about the paucity of the squad. Can you imagine any club with top four aspirations putting out a second team as poor as ours/
When you watch us perform like this, you realise how little Levy understands about the footballing needs of a serious football club, but then we are not a football club but a property company.
The game was awful if you are a Spurs fan but the atmosphere, as you remarked, was fantastic. As for Alli, if he never pulled on a Spurs shirt again, I would be happy. His time has come to an end with us, and I doubt he will ever return to being the player he was. He appears to have little interest in plying his trade and performs like a spoilt child. Levy thinks by playing him, his transfer value will increase but like most of Levy’s transfer ploys, this isn’t working. Every time he plays, he looks a worse player, thereby diminishing his value. I have always thought that there was a player in Lo Celso, but he disappointed me last night. I counted several occasions when having lost the ball, he just stood standing with his hands on his hips instead of tracking back. He seems to play with great tenacity and skill when he plays for his country, but for Spurs, his form is very intermittent. With the exception of Gil, I thought the rest of them were dross.
Lo no show at Spurs has always been 💩. He, Alli, Winks all need moved on, and what compounds the issue for no show is that he cant play 1 EPL game for us a week… the SFO needs contacted..!
Yeah I never rated him from the start tbh, he flattered to deceive and was just Levy buying cheap brand baked beans instead of heinz in Fernandez.
Some people waxed lyrical because he’d go on a dribble now and again but do little else, except fall over. He looked out of depth in the PL and is now playing at the right level in the Conference League, and he still looks dung.
It was remarked last night we had 9 internationals in the starting line up, and it reminded me of Roy Keane who said ‘who doesn’t play international football now? If you can control a ball you play for your country!” We have internationals……just the wrong ones.
I thought the same about Lo Celso, even last night he ran past 3 players and set up Gil, who hit the bar. Unfortunately, moments like that are all too rare.
I think it was Hoddle who signed Helder Postiga and Mourinho said he was never going to be a success in England. He was right. The Prem requires you to be technically competent, both Ndom and Lo Celso are, but the demands of the league require stamina and strength. Unfortunately, Ndom lacks the former and Lo Celso the latter. As a result neither are the right fit for English football (or Dutch from what I saw yesterday) and that rests on recruitment. £100m well spent! Add that to the Clarke, Sessegnon, Bergwijn, Doherty, Royal and that is close to £200m that was mismanaged.
Dele has been toast for years. Poch, Southgate, Jose, Nuno and 150 million football fans can’t all be wrong.
I agree in general but still hold out some hope for N’Dom. He came at a bad time with the Levy purges of various managers, I’m starting to forget how many now! So probably wondered what he’d let himself in for. TBF he wasn’t the only player who wanted out of this sh it show and manager search fiasco.
But he played some good games for Jose when things were settled and I’m hoping the same happens now under Nuno. We can only refer back to his last game which was on Sunday where he played 90 mins and was MotM. Pointing to both improvements in his attitude and fitness. Now lets see if he can keep that up…
I want him to be a player, but let’s see in 10 games time. West Ham, Utd and Everton in that. I have yet to see him play well v a top half team. My issue isn’t his ability, but his fitness and his heart. Ndom did get 35 minutes rest between each half on Sunday too!
Lets wait and see and hope for the best.
There is only one culprit when it comes to recruitment. Leaving aside the players you mentioned, how about the players we missed buying with Grealish being the stand out lost opportunity? If a club always sells it’s best players, it will never achieve much in the way of honours, and yet there are still fans praising Levy’s acumen and negotiating skills which never ceases to amaze me.
Agreed. I try to forget the likes of Grealish, Fernandes, Willian, Moutinho, Suarez, Upamecano, Mane….possibly Dias, Skriniar and Dybala, otherwise I’d be really miserable!
Oh gawd that list gives me the hump.
Bit early to be writing off Royal I think.
I like my full back to offer an attacking threat, I have seen little of this, even against Newcastle. I thought the woeful Joelinton had the better of him and although not the last, he got rinsed by Zaha v Palace time and time again. I would dearly love to be proven wrong about him.
Washed up at 25, with all his early promise it was almost impossible to see Dele end up like this.
Like a meteor streaking across the sky brilliant to watch but gone in a flash.
He needs to play up top, just off a world class striker! His options are limited. The deeper he plays the worse he is.
I thought Rodon and Japh and Sanchez played well at the back. Bryan was the only one really trying going forward, he’s going to be great for us… Not really fair to judge the younger lads like Dane.. Those Vitesse players were roughing up and fouling us, and then hitting the deck at the slightest touch. Our senior players like Dele Winks Davies LoCelso unsuprisingly not good enough yet again.. They should be smashing that team by multiple goals.. Fairies and wimps plus serious lack of skill.. Infuriating to watch when no aggression or will to win.
Shocking performance from a team looking quite strong on paper. Unless absolutely necessary because of injuries or bans, those players should be kept away from our league 11, with perhaps the sole exception of Gil.
Allegedly Winks said he’d stay and fight for his place…January is almost here Winksy, bye and take Dele with you. Embarrassing.
And also the exception of Rodon too, the lad deserves a chance in the first 11.
No chance.
He doesn’t score enough own goals.
His face doesn’t fit with the Levy team selection, Potter will get Joe in Jan and make him a star.
He doesn’t speak Portuguese either like Dier, or should that be “Dire” does.
All day.. Rodon deserves a run over Dier for sure.
Nobody can say he hasn’t been given chances. Poch, Jose and now Nuno. They can’t all be wrong about him.
With the World Cup around the corner you’d think he would be doing everything possible to raise his profile.
Let’s hope Newcastle take him along with Winks.
I keep reading this thing about Dele and Newcastle, why would they want him?