During his post-game press conference with Sky Sports, Tottenham Hotspur manager Nuno Espírito Santo stated that his squad was the better team despite the 1-0 loss to West Ham United.
However, these comments didn’t sit well with talkSPORT’s Jamie O’Hara, who was critical of Tottenham for their fourth loss to a London-based club. The pundit went on to say that none of the Tottenham Hotspur squad understands what it means to the supporters to win their London games.
“No positives from me whatsoever,” O’Hara said. “It’s a London derby, and it is the fourth team we have lost to; it’s ridiculous. I don’t know if these players realize what it means to Spurs fans to win your games in London.
“We wasn’t good enough, that’s the fact. West Ham were comfortable; first half, we looked okay; we moved it and passed it alright. We created a couple of good chances – Son had a really good chance where he should have scored – but in the second half, we didn’t have a shot.”
The bearded elf is just Levy’s glove puppet, he’ll say what he wants his boss to hear.
Jamie O’Hara has a point but he’s just Adrian Durham Lite.
All Spurs fans know where our season is heading, we have a manager who is out of his depth, a squad who know he is out of his depth and our best player doesn’t want to be there.
All this said, i believe that Paratici has more influence on the playing style than is being mentioned. Nuno will know how to set us up to be more attacking i think he is being told not to. My hunch is that some stat geek behind the scenes is telling the management team that if you defend, play counter attacking football then your points per game rate will be enough for top 6.
I think they do. Certainly, players like Lloris, Dier, Skipp, Son and Kane do. I think this knowing what a London derby is about is a bit of a red herring. The measured playing style adopted by most modern coaches, including Poch, does not lend itself to the all guns blazing approach of old, especially some of the tackling that went on. There’s no way players making the sort of crunching tackles we saw in derbies in days of old would survive 90 minutes in the modern game.
I would put the problems we’ve had in derbies this season down to team selection (the Arsenal game in particular) and the quality of players we have available. What we lack at the moment is a team that plays cohesively and with the speed necessary to dominate and win a derby match. If you look at the Spammers game, on the day there was not a huge amount to choose between the teams and chances were created for Kane, Son and Skipp that might easily have seen us go 1-0 up. However, at the moment, in terms of player quality there is not much to choose between us and the Spammers and Moyes has got them playing about as well as they can, which cannot be said of NES and us.