I think that people forget that for the first few years Wenger actually got a lot of praise for keeping us in the top four and semi competitive whilst operating under austerity. I remember plenty of articles praising him, just as there are articles praising Pochettino. Give it another 7 years and chances are that Pochettino won’t be being praised for this any more.
I don’t know if that’s entirely the case as they got 86 points last season and have probably the most well drilled team in the league. If they want to take the next step and win the title though, they need a couple of quality signings to give them that chance IMO.
I honestly have no idea why Spurs and Liverpool are suddenly seen as clubs that should be challenging for the title and their success is being measured as high as title challengers, while really they should just be happy with achieving Champions League football.
I think a lot of it will depend on how quickly Spurs adapt to playing at Wembley. They didn’t have a good time of it there last season.
They’re going from playing on the smallest/second smallest pitch in the league to playing on the second biggest! The tactics they usually employ are harder to implement on a bigger pitch.
Even if they get over that though, I still don’t see them as serious title contenders.
I think that’s potentially a more logical cause. Can anyone even say what the difference in pitch size is? And which pitch size is more prevelant in the PL and how do their results stack up away from home on a big pitch/smaller pitch basis.
I dunno it seems pretty logical to me that if your playing against a team on a smaller pitch it’s gonna be harder to break them down and/or find that extra half a yard to take a shot…
When your struggling to break a team down is the old adage not to “stretch the play”? If you have less width in the pitch by definition you can’t stretch the play and create gaps in their defence as well as if you were playing on a pitch that’s slightly wider
Unless you play professionally on both sizes of pitch I think it’s a bit hard to judge
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard a few members of our famously almost impossibly hard to break down defence of the George Graham era say they owed a lot to the smaller Highbury pitch