Spurs are top so clearly Mourinho should change tactics…

Sarah Winterburn

Jose Mourinho should ‘show a little adventure’, apparently. But first…

 

A classic of the genre
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a headline. It can only be MailOnline:

‘Just seven points split the Premier League top 10 and it’s never been so tight amid a chaotic season… so will Tottenham sit top after manic festive fixture list or will Liverpool or Chelsea overtake them? (And can Man United and Man City catch up?)’

It’s honestly quite beautiful.

 

Man Utd transfer pickle
Where to start with this clicky-clicky nonsense from the Daily Star website?

‘Man Utd’s January transfer plan could go out the window due to two current stars’

It’s blatantly just a ruse to make ‘Man Utd’ and ‘transfer’ in the same headline as it literally offers zero news or insight; all the other words in that headline could literally be anything. If Mediawatch worked at the Daily Star we would slip in a ‘pickle’ or an ‘elephant’. Why not?

We are told that United could abandon their January plan to sign a winger and a centre-half (even though Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and common sense both tell us otherwise) because of two players. And who are these two players who could send these non-existent plans off course? Odion Ighalo and Jesse Lingard, obvs.

Quite why Ighalo – a player always expected to leave in January who has played nine full Premier League minutes this season – would need replacing with another striker is unclear. It makes about as much sense as Lingard’s possible departure forcing United to ‘add another central midfielder’. He’s not a central midfielder and he has not played a single Premier League minute this season, but otherwise the logic is sound.

Everything is out of the window. Including the concept of journalism.

 

Man Utd transfer elephant
Mind you, that nonsense fades into the background when you actually Google ‘Man Utd transfer news’ and land on the Express website:

‘Tottenham star Harry Kane might have changed mind on Man Utd transfer’

The entire premise of the article – and we do mean ‘entire’ – is that Tottenham are much better than Manchester United so Kane may now be happy to stay with the club he loves who are top of the league rather than join the club he does not love in eighth.

And it will probably get more clicks than anything on Football365 today. For f***’s sake.

 

Expected nonsense
Some classic ‘old man shouting at the clouds’ in The Sun on this glorious Tuesday, with Dave Kidd moaning about ‘expected goals’, which he describes as the metric ‘which tells us what people who take football too seriously reckon the score of a game should have been’.

It really doesn’t.

Expected goals (according to Opta) ‘measures the quality of a shot based on several variables such as assist type, shot angle and distance from goal, whether it was a headed shot and whether it was defined as a big chance. Adding up a player or team’s expected goals can give us an indication of how many goals a player or team should have scored on average, given the shots they have taken.’

Nothing to do with what ‘should have been’. And it’s absolutely not a metric designed to judge one match, so Kidd claiming it is a ‘load of old tosh’ because it got 104 of 107 score-lines ‘wrong’ is ignorant nonsense. Or more simply, a load of old tosh.

 

My Little Pony
Elsewhere in his column, Dave Kidd implores Jose Mourinho to ‘show a little adventure’ at Anfield on Wednesday. Because of course an away visit to a team unbeaten at home since April 2017 is exactly the right time to ‘show a little adventure’.

Kidd describes Wednesday night as a ‘chance to put daylight between Spurs and Liverpool’. Hmmm. We suspect that Jose Mourinho will be more than happy to simply keep pace with champions Liverpool. We’re sure that Kidd has checked the xG and realised that Liverpool should really be ahead of Spurs.

Kidd derides Mourinho’s lack of ambition in the 0-0 draw with Chelsea last month as Spurs remained unbeaten in the Premier League since the opening day of the season. Yes, he really must regret that.

‘Mourinho’s favoured midfield trio of Moussa Sissoko, Tanguy Ndombele and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg were the unsmiling doormen as Frank Lampard’s men failed to muster a shot on target until the 81st minute.

‘Against a full-strength Liverpool, a repeat of that would be the only sensible approach. But against this patched-up side?

‘Is there no chance of a little more attacking intent through Giovani Lo Celso? A start for Dele Alli? Even Harry Winks as a deep-lying playmaker?’

That’s literally the midfield that beat Manchester United 6-1 and Manchester City 2-0 so changing it for the toughest away trip of the season would be utterly incredible. A start for Dele Alli? Behave.

Maybe Kidd just needs to admit that his January claim that ‘just seven weeks in and the argument that Tottenham were hiring a new-model Jose Mourinho already looks flawed’ is the argument that actually looks flawed. It’s okay, Dave; we were all wrong. Own it.

 

Stark
‘Pep Guardiola has thrown his support behind his former assistant Mikel Arteta as the pressure continues to mount on the Arsenal boss,’ is an accurate representation of Guardiola’s comments on Arteta. Thanks Mirror website.

As for the headline…does this look or sound remotely like a ‘stark warning to Arsenal amid Mikel Arteta’s struggles’?

Still, at least the ‘stark warning’ was genuinely made ‘amid Arteta’s struggles’. Unlike the ‘Mauricio Pochettino’s comments on managing Arsenal as pressure mounts on Mikel Arteta‘, that were made in bloody 2018.

 

A cunning plan
Hindsight is 20:20 but why did they not try this against Fulham?

 

Recommended reading of the day
David Squires doing his thing

Daniel Storey on Arsenal

Graham Hunter on Neymar, Messi, PSG and Barca

Mediawatch Jose Mourinho

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