Speaker 1
Hi. Just to put the other perspective on that, those glowing review, pre-reviews just really made me wonder how bad the other panels are.
Speaker 4
Let's start at White Hart Lane. Shall we bother you were there for Tottenham 0, Arsenal 1? How was it? It
Speaker 1
was good. I mean, it was an interesting game. It was kind of, it started off feeling, I was there to write a sidebar. So you pick out the event of the day and sort of write about that. And that 40 minutes gone, I was thinking nothing, there's nothing, I don't know what this is. I don't know what's happening here. It was intense and sort of feisty, but feisty in a kind of pulling people back in the center circle way. It was, it was full on pulling niggly kind of fouls on the transition and that kind of thing. And then steadily a picture began to form and it started to become more and more obvious that this game was going to be decided by a set piece. Because there were no other narratives out there except last season's thing and it seems to speak to so many elements of these two teams. And I kept saying to Dave Heitner, this is going to be this corner, isn't it? It's going to be this one. And there's Ange standing there, you know, sad, like very much kind of divorced dad at sports day on the touchline. like I'm here for you even though it's raining. And it just happened as you expected. And it was a strange game, because then I knew we'd all focus on that. And while the obvious thing is one team that overtly practices set pieces, one with a set piece, another team with a manager who has pointlessly, you know, set himself up as the anti set piece coach guy. I mean, why would you do that in a league where there is a danger you could be seen as something of outside the elite? Perhaps you haven't quite been there before. There's a bit of anti-Australian prejudice. Why would you set yourself up as the Luddite? I don't know. But I kind of wrote him a report. It's not really about the set piece because Spurs do work on those and they do have a new coach who works on them for them. It's not like they just rock up and everyone says get on the back stick. It's just that Arsenal are better at those details and they're better at all the details and set pieces are just one detail. So they're better at the structure is better, the selection is more coherent. I didn't quite buy that Arsenal had this terribly depleted midfield and it was a miracle win in the cauldron of hate because Thomas Partey and Giorginho is a really good midfield and is better than Spurs' midfield. Particularly when you don't pick a midfield that also helped and I just thought probably it wasn't a good game for Poster Koglu, and it was a very good game for Arteta, who simply unleashed his efficient machine and they deservedly won. And it was a very good game,
Speaker 4
Wilson, for Saliba and Gabrielle. And they had to do a lot of defending and there is obviously a conversation about Spurs not being able to break down on defense but you know when you add Ben White and Timba who is such a unit to that they're very very good.
Speaker 2
Yeah I mean I've seen the best team defensively last season and it looks like they've really doubled down on that. They do have that real solidity they are very hard to score against. But as you say, that also fits a pattern of Spurs this season. I don't think reality would have to be very different for Spurs to start the season with four wins out of four and us all be saying how brilliant they are. And yet, they've had at least 60% possession in all four games so far, but they seem to struggle to convert that to chances. Then they struggle to convert chances into goals. And because they're Spurs, they've always liked to concede in a stupid way. And I mean, Barney's right for all the set piece talk, I mean, you know, narrative wise, it was always going to be a set piece. And they brought in, he's an assistant coach called Nick Moriarty, who he has responsibility for set pieces, but he's not a set piece coach. For all that, you don't need a set piece coach to tell you that getting under the ball in the way Romero did and then not bringing any kind of challenge on Gabrielle when he's six yards out is not going to help. You don't need a set piece coach to tell you don't let everybody pile on top of your keeper when he's already not that commanding. So this just seemed very basic stuff that they, they got wrong, but that's been the way of this season. You mentioned pressure on PosterCogley. He had that great start of 26 points from his first 10 games, but they've taken 44 from the last 32 league games. Now, I think, Gary O'Neill made this point yesterday, because he's obviously on a bad run that Wolves ended last season very badly, started the season pretty poorly. That you have to look at the season as a whole and it doesn't really matter where in the season you get the points. And that's fair up to a point. But 32 games is almost a season. You project that out at the 44 points, you get to 52, which is what West Ham got last season. And Spurs, given their stadium, given their investment, given their expectations, would think they would be doing quite a lot better than West Ham. So I think that is starting to become a problem.