Tottenham disappointingly slip up at the first opportunity vs Watford
Disappointingly there was no reason for Tottenham to lose to Watford and they shouldn’t have. They did though and there’s no sugar coating it.
Tottenham have no excuse to lose to Watford. People have made some excuses but that’s all complete and utter rubbish. Do Spurs want to win the title or not? Enough of this. Yes, Watford are in good form. Yes, Spurs have a lot of players who took part in the World Cup. Yes, Poch overthought things and made too many changes. No, it’s not acceptable and people need to stop acting like there’s any sort of reason this can be tolerated.
Mauricio Pochettino will have given his boys a rightful tongue lashing following their disappointing display against Watford. They were both uncreative and non-clinical in the chances they did create and it’s not something that they can continue to do moving forward. With the next Premier League match against Liverpool Tottenham would have wanted to keep their momentum going at the beginning of the season and make sure they were comfortable for their match against another big-6 member.
This match has now added extra pressure to that potential match between title rivals and leaves Tottenham 3 points off the pace with the potential to go a full six off if something happens in that match.
Often the thing that seperates the great sides from the good ones and the winners from the competition is that on the days when things go wrong. The manager has messed up his tactics, some players are being rested and nothing seems to be going right is that the great teams find a way to win. This would have been a wonderful match to pull out an uncomfortable 1-0 away win against Watford. With Spurs up from a fortunate away goal it seemed as if the team took their foot off the pedal and they allowed a resilient Watford back in.
For all the recent praise of Pochettino, he overthought this match. Everybody in the world keeps saying that Tottenham need to rest players because of the World Cup but maybe they didn’t. He’s the man who watches them in training every day and gets to see their fitness test results in his office. The noise around Spurs appeared to have worked it’s way in and that’s not something that can be taken lightly. Tottenham were playing perfectly and he should have left the team as it was without making changes.
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The 4-4-2 or perhaps a 4-3-3- with the same players as have played the majority of this season would have done the job in this match. But a system in which Moura is played out of position as a striker dulls the perfect talents of both he and Kane by giving Kane a subpar partner and forcing Moura to do something he cannot. It is nice that the Brazilian is of such character he still forced his way into the match but his advanced position did not get him enough space with the ball early on enough.
The entire defense looked poor and it was rather obvious that the lack of Lloris’ guiding them was felt. Sanchez was poor and Alderweireld did not handle himself well in the new system either. Generally, Vertonghen was the best of the three but in a match like this, the truth is not a single Spurs player covered themselves in glory. One can only hope that Lloris’ thigh injury isn’t serious and his leadership can return as soon as is possible.
Simply put this was a match the Tottenham should have won. They’re the better side and were in good form going into the match. They have important Premier League and Champions League fixtures coming up and this was simply not good enough by any measure.