West Brom to Offer Unique Challenge for Spurs
By Ryan Wrenn
Spurs’ visit to the Midlands to take on West Brom on Saturday afternoon could pose one or two tricky problems for Mauricio Pochettino and his ascendant squad.
There is something strange going on at West Brom, just as there had been at Crystal Palace and Stoke over the last few years: it seems as if they simply don’t want to play football.
That comes off as a bit cynical – and it is. It’s just that it’s hard to call what’s happening at West Brom proper football. Watching any team coached by Tony Pulis can be a chore. Mining it for genuine moments of quality can be nearly impossible.
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Pulis’ preference for robust defenders, classic wing play and long balls make him look like a throw-back to that old stereotypical brand of English football, the kind that was going out of style before the World Cup win in 1966. That’s not exclusively a bad thing, but it has a tendency to mean less possession, more negativity and generally a lot of wasted chances.
Nevertheless, West Brom seem destined for a comfortable mid-table finish, and it will be thanks in no small part to this brand of anti-football. Pulis had previously saved Crystal Palace from near-certain relegation using precisely these methods, and prior to that had kept Stoke City in the Premier League far longer than anyone expected.
The problem with his method, and what contributed to his parting of ways with both of those clubs, is that this brand of football has a definite mid-table ceiling. It simply won’t produce enough results to crack into the Premier League’s elite.
But it also won’t get you relegated. That’s a good enough reason for most Premier League teams, and especially this relatively uninspiring West Brom side.
It used to be that you could rely on the likes of West Ham to use a similar set of tactics, but even Sam Allardyce’s tried-and-true methods have slowly been going out of style. Nowadays even the lowliest teams are relying on something a bit more sophisticated to get results.
All of which means that the team Spurs will be up against on Saturday is, broadly speaking, unlike any other in the Premier League today. Whatever edge Pochettino finds in this game, it won’t be one we’ve seen him use before.
The problem is that so much of Spurs’ game is oriented around pressing that it becomes something of a weakness when the opponents has absolutely no desire to build up play on the ground and out from the defense. Pulis has no deep-lying playmaker or ball-playing centre-back in this squad, and he doesn’t need them. He has his players punt at the first opportunity, preferably with some accuracy but by no means is that required. West Brom actually leads the Premier League in inaccurate long balls according to WhoScored with 44.4 such attempts per match.
The wingers – likely James McClean and James Morrison on Saturday – are expected to track down these long balls and send them to the towering Venezuelan forward Salomón Rondón in the center.
Thankfully, Spurs are far less vulnerable to this kind of play than they used to be. Eric Dier’s deep midfield play means that the centre-backs are permitted to play a bit wider and cover for the forward runs of the full-backs. Even if Spurs are sometimes still vulnerable to lofted crosses from the wide positions, this refitting of the defense will serve the team well at the Hawthorns.
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In attack, West Brom’s tendency to askew build-up play in favor of getting the ball forward as quickly as possible mean that a lot of the high-press, reactionary football Spurs prefer is thrown out the window. It won’t be a dramatic transition, but Érik Lamela, Heung-Min Son and Christian Eriksen are all going to have to play much more direct games than they’re used to.
That’s not necessarily a downside, but it might be an opportunity for Pochettino to field more vertically minded players like Clinton Njie or even Andros Townsend. Spurs can do without Lamela’s two-way creator/destructor role or even Son’s participation in build up play. It could be that hard running out wide is all Spurs will need to pacify this Albion side.