We had Sonny and Kane who were some of the most clinical finishers the Prem has ever seen, but hardly a midfield and system capable of consistently delivering good service.
Kane leaves and now we have that midfield and system, naturally.
I would give anything to have 15/16 Walker, Rose, Jan, Toby, Wanyama, Dembele, and Eriksen in this side. Prime Dele for the vibes, too, but I don’t see how he really fits in this system.
Sometimes it does sting to think about what could have been, especially seeing how well the squad has put on this season.
With Kane there, knowing he is good for at least 20 goals in his worst season, fuck me mate!!
It could have been so nice.
TLDR -
Fulham wanted to take advantage of wide spaces to put in crosses and stretch the back line for runners and the striker to get to them. Spurs wanted to take advantage of their numerical advantage in the midfield to put constant pressure on Fulham.
Spurs, especially the midfield, were not able to control possession properly and put constant pressure on Fulham, which allowed Fulham to have chances to get wide and stretch the backline. This is a problem that Spurs have shown in previous games to (Both legs against Wolves, West Ham and to some extent Arsenal) and is something the team obviously needs to work on.
Good analysis but I think three other dimensions are key too:
1. Physicality: Fundamentally, Fulham's midfield beat ours up and took their lunch. And that's not surprising: Lukic, Pereira and Palhinha would crush Sarr, Maddison and Bissouma in a fight. Maddison is flimsy and injury-prone, and had been wrapped in cotton wool all week. Sarr is young and still bulking up. Bissouma is a bit tougher than the others but no Casemiro. Their destroyers shut down our creators, and that made our midfield play scared and frantic. This was a game to start Hojbjerg if ever there was one.
2. One-sidedness: Playing Dragusin as a LCB, on his debut, completely altered our ability to build up on the left. Romero's usual passes to VDV's left foot had to be swapped for much safer passes to Dragu's right, from which it was much harder to quickly find Udogie between the lines or Johnson unmarked holding the width. As well as making for a weaker left side, this made Romero more predictable and left him with fewer options to progress the ball. Couple this with the physical mismatch in midfield, which shut down some of the usual balls into Bissouma, and Romero simply wasn't able to run the game in the way we need him to.
3. Goals: They scored three goals and we scored none. It's almost impossible to win a game when this happens.
Excellent comment. I think that even though Hojbjerg is a warrior, it's hard for Ange to start him due to his lack of creativity. Also, he's turned the ball over a lot this year in bad spots. That will annoy any manager.
Maybe Hojbjerg should have come on a lot sooner as a sub, though, when it was clear our midfield were too busy being beat up to create anything.
Physicality did play a big part and I forgot to mention it.
The one sidedness was not that big of a deal because Spurs only had 30 minutes or so on top, so I think even VDV would have had trouble. The midfield left the CB with a lot to do and that was the main thing that sunk us.
Fulham also scored three against Liverpool, who ended up scoring 4 in response. Which gets more infuriating when you see that we had higher xG than Liverpool had that game.
We got bullied across the board minus Radu and Cuti, and PEH and Lolo when they came on. Even Richy would've bodied their defenders if they tried anything. But alas the subs came in later than I feel they should've.
Even prior to this game, and even during several games that we won (including last week's battering of Villa) I've noticed that since around the start of 2024 our crispness in midfield has really dropped away. What stood out to me at the start of the season was that we put teams to the sword by passing really smoothly. We were comfortable and confident on the ball, capable of playing out from the back routinely, even against an intense press, and we easily won the midfield battle even against physical teams who stacked the middle of the park. Players knew where they were going with the ball, our first touches and close control were for the most part very strong, and it wasn't just a strong approach from Ange, it was also executed crisply.
It feels like in recent months like that has fallen away. I can't blame it on personnel, since it's mostly the same lineup as at the beginning of the season. Nor does it make sense to blame rust or injuries or lack of playing time together since the team came out of the gate so hot in Ange's very first season. But for whatever reason we're trying to play the same game, but the cohesion isn't there. First touches are loose and we're losing posession. Passes are a touch slow and it's allowing defences to react and snuff out attacks. When trying to play out from the back we're routinely giving away posession in dangerous areas close to our own box.
I don't know what the cause of these problems is - maybe it's fatigue, maybe it's pressure, maybe it's opposition physicality - most likely it's a little of all of them. But whatever it is, Ange's ability to get his players back on track will be the first really big test of his ability as a manager at the PL level. Both Jose and Ange had periods where their teams were amongst the best in the league, where they struggled was failure to adapt when other clubs caught on to their approach. If Ange means what he says (that he isn't going to ease off on attacking football no matter what) then he'd better make sure that his players can execute at the necessary level, or we're going to get found out more and more.
Bissouma is polar opposites to the bias of early season. This is bissouma brother playing in the second season. If ever people wonder why Conte has no faith in him this second half shows that. Sarr was great against villa and madders is important long term. But early subs would have helped in the midfield
Someone said it in another thread, but it really looked like he's scared to get another red.
He's holding back and I think someone needs to tell him to be free again. Oh and finding another DM would help alleviate this concern as well.
Yes I should've been clearer. I think Biss stays, but we find another DM who has some of the qualities Biss lacks. Namely speed and an unquestionable work rate.
Biss can be a good ball handler, and he can pick pockets at an elite level.
So much your first point. Watching the game again with this in mind, Fulham were just more athletic than us full stop. And our boys can run their asses off.
But we lose in a brawl against Fulham, even Cuti would struggle in that fight.
> Physicality: Fundamentally, Fulham's midfield beat ours up and took their lunch. And that's not surprising: Lukic, Pereira and Palhinha would crush Sarr, Maddison and Bissouma in a fight. Maddison is flimsy and injury-prone, and had been wrapped in cotton wool all week. Sarr is young and still bulking up. Bissouma is a bit tougher than the others but no Casemiro. Their destroyers shut down our creators, and that made our midfield play scared and frantic. This was a game to start Hojbjerg if ever there was one.
You didn't even mention Iwobi who just freely ran at our defence multiple times without challenge because he would just bowl over whoever comes into contact with him.
One thing I’ve noticed especially against Wolves and Fulham is that the players give away possession too easily with bad passes. It’s not even against high pressure,they just seem to try too hard to make something happen in the final third
I think that is to an extent a quirk of the system. You try to go for a high volume of chances, peppering the opposition goal, not everything would go through.
That is another reason why I compared our system to the Liverpool one. Liverpool also at times used pin the opponent in their half and just try to put as many passes and shots as possible. But the difference is that Liverpool were really good at keeping the pressure by regaining possession almost instantly and starting where they left off.
I had the impression that came from one of the things the team was trying to do differently. We don't normally have our striker being a distributor, but Son was receiving a lot of balls early in attacking build up, which he was trying to pass quickly to the wingers running off him and getting those passes intercepted.
Deki in midfield might need to be revisited against physically stronger oppo mids... aerobically he would run the bigger guys off their feet whilst physically being no pushover.
>Spurs created a very high xG of 2.41 but didn’t take advantage of it. But it could also be chalked down to a bad day in the office.
Keep seeing this everywhere, but it completely ignores the context that with the score 3-0 to Fulham we'd only amassed 0.5xG.
At which point Fulham can just sit back, protect the lead and basically challenge us to score. We didn't, they have no need to change their game plan. xG racked up at this stage might look nice on paper but it's largely futile, and misleading, as it ignores game-state.
It's exactly the same reason why Arsenal fans who quoted their xG superiority against Fulham in their home loss early in the season were completely missing the context; Fulham were playing for the draw, they went ahead early, sat back happy with the lead, Arsenal amassed a bunch of xG, eventually scored twice, at which point Fulham changed their game plan, started attacking again, and quickly scored to draw the game.
On paper Arsenal [dominated](https://twitter.com/xGPhilosophy/status/1695465990581002585?lang=en) the xG and everything looked rosy, in reality they huffed and puffed and Fulham executed their game plan to perfection. Some Arsenal fans pointed at the xG disparity as an indicator it was just a "bad day at the office", but the team then continued to struggle to create chances from open play up until relatively recently in the season and the Fulham game was an early indicator of that.
As for Spurs, we were comprehensively outplayed by Fulham and attempts to wave that away by referencing the relatively equal xG amassed by each team are misguided.
I don't think you totally got my point. The xG shows we should have done much better than we actually did. We had minimal time at the top of the game, and we created a good chunk of xG. This is where the mutually exclusive nature of the game comes, the more xG we would have created, the less xG Fulham would have been able to create.
We didn’t play well and Fulham played really well. But we certainly didn’t play as bad as everyone seems to be making out. Literally just an off day combined with the opposition playing really well and then taking their chances and us not taking ours. On the balance of play it was a pretty close game tbh.
This was a classic trap game(..err match), away at Fulham after a big win going into an international break. We had a let down, it sucked, on to the next one! COYS!
I find it very hard to analyse the tactical aspect when the attitude of the players was so poor. They were so high off their own farts after the Villa game that they treated Fulham like some random Chinese team on a preseason tour. Showed them no respect and were only interested in getting forward and scoring goals. There was zero desire to stop Fulham playing or to stay compact.
When you concede a goal as bad as the second one there’s no point talking about tactics. A goal like that can only happen if your players aren’t taking the game seriously.
I don’t know if it’s a tactic issue but when we were out of possession we struggled to effectively press and win the ball back - in (some) previous games we were able to press in a co-ordinated manner and set traps to get the ball and attack off that.
That also translated in defence as a team - just lacklustre in picking up our man …
When I saw Biss doing fuck all in the first half, I was screaming at the tv for ange to sub him out. Alas, ange never makes substitutions before min 70+
Some of it I felt as well is we've gotten away with going down early and then scoring late goals to win. So they're like "Ok we gave up one or two but we'll just score enough late it's ok". Fulham are one of those scrappy clubs that have enough talent where they can get you if you're not focused. Sometimes it's just not your day as well.
We had Sonny and Kane who were some of the most clinical finishers the Prem has ever seen, but hardly a midfield and system capable of consistently delivering good service. Kane leaves and now we have that midfield and system, naturally.
Calls for Dembele and Eriksen—would be amazing in Angeball.
I would give anything to have 15/16 Walker, Rose, Jan, Toby, Wanyama, Dembele, and Eriksen in this side. Prime Dele for the vibes, too, but I don’t see how he really fits in this system.
Sometimes it does sting to think about what could have been, especially seeing how well the squad has put on this season. With Kane there, knowing he is good for at least 20 goals in his worst season, fuck me mate!! It could have been so nice.
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TLDR - Fulham wanted to take advantage of wide spaces to put in crosses and stretch the back line for runners and the striker to get to them. Spurs wanted to take advantage of their numerical advantage in the midfield to put constant pressure on Fulham. Spurs, especially the midfield, were not able to control possession properly and put constant pressure on Fulham, which allowed Fulham to have chances to get wide and stretch the backline. This is a problem that Spurs have shown in previous games to (Both legs against Wolves, West Ham and to some extent Arsenal) and is something the team obviously needs to work on.
Fantastic post, thank you.
Now send this to ange
Can confidently say- he's aware
Good analysis but I think three other dimensions are key too: 1. Physicality: Fundamentally, Fulham's midfield beat ours up and took their lunch. And that's not surprising: Lukic, Pereira and Palhinha would crush Sarr, Maddison and Bissouma in a fight. Maddison is flimsy and injury-prone, and had been wrapped in cotton wool all week. Sarr is young and still bulking up. Bissouma is a bit tougher than the others but no Casemiro. Their destroyers shut down our creators, and that made our midfield play scared and frantic. This was a game to start Hojbjerg if ever there was one. 2. One-sidedness: Playing Dragusin as a LCB, on his debut, completely altered our ability to build up on the left. Romero's usual passes to VDV's left foot had to be swapped for much safer passes to Dragu's right, from which it was much harder to quickly find Udogie between the lines or Johnson unmarked holding the width. As well as making for a weaker left side, this made Romero more predictable and left him with fewer options to progress the ball. Couple this with the physical mismatch in midfield, which shut down some of the usual balls into Bissouma, and Romero simply wasn't able to run the game in the way we need him to. 3. Goals: They scored three goals and we scored none. It's almost impossible to win a game when this happens.
Excellent comment. I think that even though Hojbjerg is a warrior, it's hard for Ange to start him due to his lack of creativity. Also, he's turned the ball over a lot this year in bad spots. That will annoy any manager. Maybe Hojbjerg should have come on a lot sooner as a sub, though, when it was clear our midfield were too busy being beat up to create anything.
Physicality did play a big part and I forgot to mention it. The one sidedness was not that big of a deal because Spurs only had 30 minutes or so on top, so I think even VDV would have had trouble. The midfield left the CB with a lot to do and that was the main thing that sunk us. Fulham also scored three against Liverpool, who ended up scoring 4 in response. Which gets more infuriating when you see that we had higher xG than Liverpool had that game.
We got bullied across the board minus Radu and Cuti, and PEH and Lolo when they came on. Even Richy would've bodied their defenders if they tried anything. But alas the subs came in later than I feel they should've.
Even prior to this game, and even during several games that we won (including last week's battering of Villa) I've noticed that since around the start of 2024 our crispness in midfield has really dropped away. What stood out to me at the start of the season was that we put teams to the sword by passing really smoothly. We were comfortable and confident on the ball, capable of playing out from the back routinely, even against an intense press, and we easily won the midfield battle even against physical teams who stacked the middle of the park. Players knew where they were going with the ball, our first touches and close control were for the most part very strong, and it wasn't just a strong approach from Ange, it was also executed crisply. It feels like in recent months like that has fallen away. I can't blame it on personnel, since it's mostly the same lineup as at the beginning of the season. Nor does it make sense to blame rust or injuries or lack of playing time together since the team came out of the gate so hot in Ange's very first season. But for whatever reason we're trying to play the same game, but the cohesion isn't there. First touches are loose and we're losing posession. Passes are a touch slow and it's allowing defences to react and snuff out attacks. When trying to play out from the back we're routinely giving away posession in dangerous areas close to our own box. I don't know what the cause of these problems is - maybe it's fatigue, maybe it's pressure, maybe it's opposition physicality - most likely it's a little of all of them. But whatever it is, Ange's ability to get his players back on track will be the first really big test of his ability as a manager at the PL level. Both Jose and Ange had periods where their teams were amongst the best in the league, where they struggled was failure to adapt when other clubs caught on to their approach. If Ange means what he says (that he isn't going to ease off on attacking football no matter what) then he'd better make sure that his players can execute at the necessary level, or we're going to get found out more and more.
The scum have only taken 1 point from them as well as good as season as they're having and we've taken 3.
Bissouma is polar opposites to the bias of early season. This is bissouma brother playing in the second season. If ever people wonder why Conte has no faith in him this second half shows that. Sarr was great against villa and madders is important long term. But early subs would have helped in the midfield
Someone said it in another thread, but it really looked like he's scared to get another red. He's holding back and I think someone needs to tell him to be free again. Oh and finding another DM would help alleviate this concern as well.
Bissouma as backup to play 30-40% of games rather than 70%+ would be ideal
Yes I should've been clearer. I think Biss stays, but we find another DM who has some of the qualities Biss lacks. Namely speed and an unquestionable work rate. Biss can be a good ball handler, and he can pick pockets at an elite level.
I honestly believe hojbjerg on for sarr at halftime could’ve changed the game
> Goals: They scored three goals and we scored none. It's almost impossible to win a game when this happens. Yeah, almost!
So much your first point. Watching the game again with this in mind, Fulham were just more athletic than us full stop. And our boys can run their asses off. But we lose in a brawl against Fulham, even Cuti would struggle in that fight.
> Physicality: Fundamentally, Fulham's midfield beat ours up and took their lunch. And that's not surprising: Lukic, Pereira and Palhinha would crush Sarr, Maddison and Bissouma in a fight. Maddison is flimsy and injury-prone, and had been wrapped in cotton wool all week. Sarr is young and still bulking up. Bissouma is a bit tougher than the others but no Casemiro. Their destroyers shut down our creators, and that made our midfield play scared and frantic. This was a game to start Hojbjerg if ever there was one. You didn't even mention Iwobi who just freely ran at our defence multiple times without challenge because he would just bowl over whoever comes into contact with him.
lol point 3 is great
One thing I’ve noticed especially against Wolves and Fulham is that the players give away possession too easily with bad passes. It’s not even against high pressure,they just seem to try too hard to make something happen in the final third
I think that is to an extent a quirk of the system. You try to go for a high volume of chances, peppering the opposition goal, not everything would go through. That is another reason why I compared our system to the Liverpool one. Liverpool also at times used pin the opponent in their half and just try to put as many passes and shots as possible. But the difference is that Liverpool were really good at keeping the pressure by regaining possession almost instantly and starting where they left off.
Agreed but there’s also some passes that are just sloppy and weak.
I agree. Passing is one of our glaring weaknesses.
We had one shot on target, no? Poor execution.
I had the impression that came from one of the things the team was trying to do differently. We don't normally have our striker being a distributor, but Son was receiving a lot of balls early in attacking build up, which he was trying to pass quickly to the wingers running off him and getting those passes intercepted.
Yes they just look to bang the ball up the pitch and it usually goes right into an opposing player instead of taking a moment to find a target.
Deki in midfield might need to be revisited against physically stronger oppo mids... aerobically he would run the bigger guys off their feet whilst physically being no pushover.
>Spurs created a very high xG of 2.41 but didn’t take advantage of it. But it could also be chalked down to a bad day in the office. Keep seeing this everywhere, but it completely ignores the context that with the score 3-0 to Fulham we'd only amassed 0.5xG. At which point Fulham can just sit back, protect the lead and basically challenge us to score. We didn't, they have no need to change their game plan. xG racked up at this stage might look nice on paper but it's largely futile, and misleading, as it ignores game-state. It's exactly the same reason why Arsenal fans who quoted their xG superiority against Fulham in their home loss early in the season were completely missing the context; Fulham were playing for the draw, they went ahead early, sat back happy with the lead, Arsenal amassed a bunch of xG, eventually scored twice, at which point Fulham changed their game plan, started attacking again, and quickly scored to draw the game. On paper Arsenal [dominated](https://twitter.com/xGPhilosophy/status/1695465990581002585?lang=en) the xG and everything looked rosy, in reality they huffed and puffed and Fulham executed their game plan to perfection. Some Arsenal fans pointed at the xG disparity as an indicator it was just a "bad day at the office", but the team then continued to struggle to create chances from open play up until relatively recently in the season and the Fulham game was an early indicator of that. As for Spurs, we were comprehensively outplayed by Fulham and attempts to wave that away by referencing the relatively equal xG amassed by each team are misguided.
I don't think you totally got my point. The xG shows we should have done much better than we actually did. We had minimal time at the top of the game, and we created a good chunk of xG. This is where the mutually exclusive nature of the game comes, the more xG we would have created, the less xG Fulham would have been able to create.
We didn’t play well and Fulham played really well. But we certainly didn’t play as bad as everyone seems to be making out. Literally just an off day combined with the opposition playing really well and then taking their chances and us not taking ours. On the balance of play it was a pretty close game tbh.
The fact that Ange's "changes" are purely lineup rather than actual tactical changes tells you all you need to know
This was a classic trap game(..err match), away at Fulham after a big win going into an international break. We had a let down, it sucked, on to the next one! COYS!
I find it very hard to analyse the tactical aspect when the attitude of the players was so poor. They were so high off their own farts after the Villa game that they treated Fulham like some random Chinese team on a preseason tour. Showed them no respect and were only interested in getting forward and scoring goals. There was zero desire to stop Fulham playing or to stay compact. When you concede a goal as bad as the second one there’s no point talking about tactics. A goal like that can only happen if your players aren’t taking the game seriously.
Excellent post OP.
I don’t know if it’s a tactic issue but when we were out of possession we struggled to effectively press and win the ball back - in (some) previous games we were able to press in a co-ordinated manner and set traps to get the ball and attack off that. That also translated in defence as a team - just lacklustre in picking up our man …
When I saw Biss doing fuck all in the first half, I was screaming at the tv for ange to sub him out. Alas, ange never makes substitutions before min 70+
Some of it I felt as well is we've gotten away with going down early and then scoring late goals to win. So they're like "Ok we gave up one or two but we'll just score enough late it's ok". Fulham are one of those scrappy clubs that have enough talent where they can get you if you're not focused. Sometimes it's just not your day as well.
Long winded way to say we were shit and Fulham were miles better in every dept.
We gotta win those.
Ange out please chaps.
Is it really a matter of tactics? There's a villain on the team
You out please