Very sensational title, but not exaggerated. The impatience of Premier League fans has reached a jaw-dropping level.
There are already two different voices in Tottenham's fan base.
“promising football & season”（充满希望的赛季）
"Ange out"
Is Postecoglou up to the post of Tottenham manager, and with more than 300 days of performance and in the long run, it may be too early to judge whether the Australian has done the job well.
First of all, looking at the results of Tottenham's last five coaches, Postecoglou has averaged second only to Conte in the first 32 games he has led in the first 32 games.
Figure 1
Mauricio Pochettino and Antonio Conte are two completely different managers in terms of coaching style and team dynamics: Conte led the team to a very strong start to fourth and was unable to maintain that performance next season, while Pochettino stumbled in his first season, but then built his style step by step to reach the Champions League final. It will be interesting and interesting to see who will follow in the footsteps of Postecoglou when he appears to have brought promising football to Tottenham in his first season in charge?
In the following article, we will provide a review of Postecoglou's tactical system and the outlook for the coming year.
Postecoglou's Tactics
Postecoglou's 4-2-3-1 spindle can be roughly divided into the following points:
1. The width of the formation is narrow
2. Adducted wingback
3. High mobility in player positions
4.underlap、halfspace
Figure 2: Postecoglou's tactical principles
The picture is taken from the home game against Aston Villa on November 29, 2023. In the top half of Figure 2, you can notice the position of the two full-backs, Pedro Polo and Udoki, forming a three-man midfield line with Rodrigo Bentancur at the back, with Lo Celso and forward Dejan Kulusevski pressing forward. In the second half of Diagram 1, Lo Celso and Udoki often swapped places, but the dynamic formation was still very clear 2-3-5, trying to create a threat with more numerical superiority in the front court, while also causing discrepancies in the communication between the defenders.
Figure 3
Having a five-man attacking option meant that Tottenham could create a constant triangle up front (the top half of Diagram 3), creating a local advantage of playing more and less, an advantage that was evident in the first half of the season, and Postecoglou also called for a quick flow of the ball into midfield, ideally through quick crosses from wingers and constant halspaces from midfielders or full-backs, creating confusion in the defender's box and strikers scoring from the spot-kicks (bottom half of Diagram 3).
Tottenham's record of having scored four own goals this season is the best proof of this.
Tactical issues
Trying to gain an offensive advantage with such an aggressive stance comes at the cost of a high risk of switching between offense and defense.
图4：man-mark
As the season progresses, more and more teams try to configure the same number of people as Tottenham Hotspur's backfield, carry out high pressing and blocking lines, and when Tottenham loses the ball in the backfield, they can carry out 3v3 quite threatening defensive counterattacks, especially emphasizing the high mobility of player positions, assuming that the situation is that the center forward Richarlison or Son Heung-min flows to the backcourt to receive and loses the ball, and the picture of the counterattack by the frontcourt players is too beautiful to look at directly (the second half of Figure 4).
Or Brighton centre-back Paul van Haek marking James Maddison to the back (the top half of Diagram 4), clearly defining the defensive responsibilities of each player through an extreme man-to-man configuration and reducing communication and other accounting errors.
The adduction of the full-back is also one of the points that can be targeted, because the full-back is not in the orthodox position, when the defender gets the ball, quickly throw the ball to both sides for the central defender to make up for the defense, leaving a large space in the center for a point-grabbing shot, which is a great test of Tottenham's ability to defend in the middle.
Newcastle United magnified the above disadvantages infinitely, and restrained them with beautiful tactics to defeat Tottenham 4-0 at their home stadium.
Figure 5: Newcastle United's man-to-man setup
The 4-3-3 formation on Newcastle United's books in this game is actually more like a 3-4-3 situation after coming on the pitch. Alexander Isak was responsible for covering goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario's pass to Yves Bissouma, Anthony Gordon and Harvey Barnes were in central defence, and Son Heung-min could be seen trying to pick up at the back, with Dan Barn, who was in charge of marking, dutifully following up front. Without a passing option, Guglielmo Vicario was forced to try the high-risk, long-distance passes that he was not good at, and that was what the teams were aiming at – forcing Tottenham into long balls.
Even if you break through the front court, you can see that both Newcastle United and Arsenal are trying to compress the defence, or even use five or six men to match the five-man combination in the front of Tottenham. If you follow Tottenham's games this season, you can see that Tottenham have struggled against a three-centre-back system or a team with good defensive discipline such as West Ham, and it is always in the second half to open up the situation.
Diagram 6: An extremely compressed defensive line with a five-man line against the Tottenham frontcourt
In addition, the lack of creativity on the wingers is also a shortcoming aspect of Tottenham's frontline at the moment.
Ivan Perisic was reimbursed early for the season after suffering an arrow injury to his knee in training at the start of the season, new signing Mano Solomon is plagued by a knee injury and there is little hope of playing for Tottenham again this season, Richarlison's frequent injury absences have forced Son Heung-min to play as a central striker, and Brian Hill seems to be out of Postecoglou's plans.....
Leaving the above aside, the only wingers are Dejan Kulusevski, Brennan Johnson and Timo Werner, who is on loan in the winter window, but Brennan Johnson and Timo Werner have very similar playing styles and positioning, making the opponent more predictable when attacking from the wing, which is naturally easier to defend.
How to improve
In the just-concluded north London derby, it was actually seen that Postecoglou had made some changes.
The Gunners defended in a dynamic 4-4-2 formation, with Kai Havertz and Martin Odegaard up the front in charge of Cristian Romero and Mick van der Ven respectively.
One of the small changes is that there is no longer a focus on the playmaking at the back. It is not uncommon to see Pierre Hojbjerg trailing back with centre-backs to form a back 3 when Tottenham form a numerical advantage at the back, instantly unpressing with a variety of passing options (Diagram 7).
Figure 7
The editor believes that in the future, it can also be based on this change, and there is no need to be overly obsessed with the narrowing of the two central defenders, but to take the initiative to open up the width.
More width means more space at the back for midfielders to use, plus take advantage of the high flow of players to actively create small overloads, and at least ensure that there are enough people to counter-attack when the ball is lost, rather than facing the opponent's defensive counterattack with inferior numbers, increasing the defensive responsibility of the central defenders.
As for the winger problem, it seems that it can only be solved by relying on reinforcements in the summer window.
A set-piece problem?
This section has been the hottest topic of discussion among Tottenham fans in recent times.
According to the FBref website, the first thing to see is the air combat data of the players in the team, and the starting central defenders are shown below. Full-back Udoki's aerial combat stats are just above average, and Pedro Polo can't bear to look at them directly. In midfielders such as Son Heung-min (1.83m), Dejan Kulusevski (1.86m), Brennan Johnson (1.86m), Rodrigo Bentancur (1.87m) and Pierre Hojbjerg (1.86m), most of the players who are over 180cm tall are not even average.
In other words, Tottenham has the third-highest average height in the Premier League but only barely close to average aerial combat ability, which is undoubtedly a disadvantage in defending set-pieces.
Figure 8: Tottenham's starting centre-backs in aerial combat
Looking at the free kick (including corner) performance distribution chart published by The telegraph based on Opta's data analysis, the intersection points obtained by taking the middle value of each axis can be divided into four areas, the higher the right, the better the performance, and the lower the left, the worse the performance. In this table, Tottenham's position is not far from the center of the chart, but it is not as bad as it could be, at least it remains average.
However, it is worth noting that these goals conceded were almost concentrated in the second half of the season, which meant that the opposition was gradually finding a defensive formation against Tottenham free-kicks, which was a warning sign.
Figure 9: Scatter of free kicks (including corners) by Premier League teams
Despite the recent free-kick defence problems, does this mean that Tottenham must hire a set-piece coach as soon as possible?
I don't think so!
Having spent a lot of space in the front, the editor pointed out that he has observed Tottenham's tactical flaws this season, and there are more than one to list. As a result, instead of correcting the shortcomings of these open-play that Tottenham are good at to make it sharper, instead hiring a set-piece coach to strengthen a set-piece with an average level, I think this is a bit of a reversal of the cart.
Postecoglou was interviewed after the Derby game and was asked about defending set-pieces. He also bluntly said:
If I thought fixing defensive set pieces was the answer to us bridging the gap then I'd put all of my time and effort into that. But that's not where we're at.
I think it's a bigger, broader picture than that, but our defensive set pieces for those two were very poor. But there's a lot more than that to fix.
Reading between the lines, Postecoglou has categorically rejected the idea of hiring a set-piece coach.
prospect
In the past, Tottenham's most well-known coach was Pochettino, Uncle Pochettino's journey was not easy, leading the team to stumble in the first season, and finally finished fifth in the league with 64 points, and since then it has been improving year by year, and even led Tottenham to almost win the long-awaited European trophy.
Figure 10: Pochettino's year-on-year record in charge of Tottenham
In the first season, Postecoglou arrived in a new league, led new players, started the season with good football and a wave of 10 consecutive unbeaten runs, but the mid-season began to see a wave of injuries to key players and participation in the international competitions of the Africa Cup of Nations and the Asian Cup, which I believe will have a big impact on a team that has just entered the rebuild. But the 58-year-old Australian uncle led Tottenham to play good-looking attacking football, and got rid of the outside world's impression that Tottenham only played defensive counterattacks in recent years.
In addition, Tottenham's good financial spending situation, whether it is in the current FFP and PSR, or the upcoming fiscal spending ceiling threshold in the latest quarter, Tottenham's investment in the stadium in recent years, the business philosophy of "quantity as out" (it can be said to be a door), is expected to usher in some positive results, and have more room to strengthen in the transfer window.
However, the recent phenomenon observed by the editor is that the 10-game winning streak that has started the season now seems to have caused some fans to have high expectations, and these expectations are constantly backlashing at Postecoglou's insistence and hope to bring the football philosophy to the team.
This is undoubtedly the most ironic, chilling, and undesirable outcome.
The impatience of Premier League fans has reached a jaw-dropping level!