True or false? 'Spurs are easy to play against'

By Tricky
April 11 2006

After the weekend game Manchester city Manager Stuart Pearce commented: "We found them an easy side to play against, getting balls in to feet in the box. They allow you to play football."

So is this a home truth?

Here are my views on the above statement...

Part of this is how teams set up to play against us - Chelsea, Man U, Arsenal & Wigan don't respect anyone and just simply go out there and play there own game. But Wigan, Everton, West Brom Etc primarily stop the opposition playing and try and score from breaks or set pieces. we really struggle when teams are compact in the middle of the park as its almost impossible to pass through them and we revert to the long ball to Mido...or even worse the long ball to Defoe.

We spend hours, days, years passing the ball across midfield looking for a chink in the defence as they sit there with 9 or 10 men behind the ball, then someone gets hustled off the ball, or a pass gets misplaced and we get caught out. And once your a goal down to sides who play like that your in real trouble as you must chase the game, committing more and more men forward meaning your more likely to get caught out again. It's not pretty, but it can be effective. A well marshalled side with a combatative midfield unit will keep you in the premiership.

The better teams can keep the ball and keep banging on the door until they find a weakness and score (Chelsea have done this all season) and once this style of team is a goal down they revert to plan B, generally a big target man with two wide men who can collapse back into a 5 man midfield when they don't have the ball (See Everton for examples of this) this season we've not been good enough at keeping the ball to put these teams to the sword as often as we should, partly because of the teams age, mainly (IMHO) due to the unbalanced midfield, not having a natural left sided midfielder makes everything that bit harder.

We've picked up a lot of points from games where we've not played well, mainly as we've not been allowed to play well, but finally played a perfect
pass or two and stole the points. Teams like Chelsea allow you to play well (and we performed admirably in both games) because they have the attitude that no matter how well you play, we can be better and score more.

If we can add some more patience to our play against the negative sides, and fill the gap in the first team with better players then next season we can hopefully progress again.