Game Spurs 3:1 Villa Hard fought. Teams better watch out for Villa. Of course, first week matches are often odd. Teams have weeks to prepare which favor upsets and better than expected play from lower ranked teams.
Bet a lot of players get caught out by this in the first few weeks. It's a new rule and they all have years and years of substitutions only happening at the 4th official.
Villa were solid in the first half, but ran out of gas in the second. Eriksen's introduction made a huge difference and we just overran them in the final 20 minutes. Their CB Mings was excellent, he must have headed every ball into the box.
Villa could well do well as a newly promoted side. Mings has been excellent (and if you're not paying proper attention to commentary, his name can be misheard so that their centre back partnership is Marx and Engels which is AWESOME), they have a good goalkeeper and the ball sticks when they get it up to the centre forward. Perhaps they lack a bit of quality in some positions, but they could do well. As for us, Kane hits the ground running. That August curse seems a long time ago... Ndombele very promising debut coupled with how seamlessly he fitted in in pre-season. Eriksen changed the game though, what a player.
Yup. This was a demonstration of how important high fitness is. And, man, if Eriksen stays, his pairing with Ndombele is gonna be amazing.
Agree all the way around. Though my one caveat is that if Spurs had Son on the pitch instead of Lamela, I don't think it would have taken 73 minutes for Spurs to score.
it wasn't just that they had less gas, they had far more to do. our movement off the ball (and of the ball) was so much better in the second half. I was very much afraid that it'd be a replay of the first half - ten minutes of great pressing and movement, but once they'd weathered it we made it much easier on them than our possession stats might imply. They defended well in the second half, too, but it was far more desperate than controlled.
Equally importantly, despite being behind with less than 30mins to play, we were far more controlled than desperate. Relentless pressure, everything done at pace with purpose; maybe I wasn't so calm (probably the same for most fans I suspect) but those players just knew there were goals coming.
I really think the change came before that. While Spurs were more controlled in the second half, and Eriksen's addition really made the difference, to me the game changed when Ndombele started to become more involved. That was somewhere around min 30, or maybe 35. Once he became more involved, Spurs looked more dangerous, had a couple of shots on goal, were penetrating Villa's box from all angles.
If that was an experiment to see how we play with and without Eriksen, the results are pretty impressive. I wonder where Lo Celso will fit in?
Interesting stat from today. Apparently Spurs have come from losing positions at the half to earn all three points 36 times since the beginning of the Premiership – more than any other team.
Poch was asked about it in the postmatch presser. He just wasn't selected. "We have lots of good players. Can't pick 'em all" - that's quite paraphrased, but it's the upshot. Loads of speculation going on, and you can get any of a dozen interpretations on any of the bigger message boards. Who knows?
I am hopeful for Spurs to become a team that can genuinely rotate a lot of good players so that they can be competitive for several pieces of hardware.
The Vertonghen omission and Eriksen benching are Poch sending a message to the players that if they are not going to commit to the team contractually, they will not be automatic selections. We saw him do this with Toby 2 seasons ago and also with Rose when he criticised the club's transfer policy.