CanadaSaint

For me, the only way we can compete with teams with Chelsea's kind of talent pool is to play our high-tempo pressing game, coupled with lots of off-the-ball running and rapid ball movement. One key component of that team concept (Wanyama) is injured, and another (Schneiderlin) was off the pace today. As soon as I saw Ramirez in the line-up, I was pretty much resigned to a loss. For all his undoubted skill, he's not strong on consistent, off-the-ball running and he often wants too long on the ball; his presence certainly brings some dimensions we lack, but it also damages our ability to press and play quick feet-to-feet passes. When we took Cork off we were set up to try to play a high-skill team at their game rather than ours, and the outcome was inevitable. I'm very interested to hear why Shaw was taken off. He could be genuinely injured or ill (again), or MP was keen to see how we'd fare without him, because he might have his eyes on a big cash inflow at the start of the window.

He's still the jewel we always thought he was but I think he needs to work harder at recognizing when an attack is starting to break down so that he can get back in time. Since the Newcastle game he has been caught upfield a little too often for my liking, but a lot of this "reading the game" stuff will come with more experience.

We miss Schneiderlin's tracking back soooooo much, and taking Corky off made us vulnerable to that.

I agree with that, and I'm not sure he should be doing it regardless of his performance. He's not the captain, and even if he was he should only do something like that very infrequently and much more discretely than yelling it from the pitch. But the part that troubles me most is that this reaction was not just a reflection of Rickie's views on Jos's performance in the Spurs game, but of Rickie's views of Jos as a PL player. It has built up over time, as it has with us, and there's an underlying questioning of Pochettino's decision-making - a rather open questioning of it. He wasn't, I suspect, calling for Jos to be pulled just because he was playing badly, but because - in Rickie's opinion (possibly shared by other players) - he shouldn't have been out there in the first place. I'm looking beyond Rickie's actions on Sunday and thinking that they might be an insight into something deeper. Rickie's head didn't seem to be in it on Sunday (not for the first time lately), and I still have the picture in my mind of him trudging off before anyone else, head down and looking quite depressed, after our excellent performance against Man City; he didn't even acknowledge the cheering crowd as he left. Whether this is just a Rickie issue remains to be seen, but this is not a good sign.

Absolutely right. Especially in goal, where there's nowhere to hide while you're trying to figure things out. What concerns me most for Gazzaniga is not so much the form as the regression. That's what can happen when you over-expose youngsters, which is why I have real concerns about throwing Cropper in there.

He did do reasonably well for a time, and earned some plaudits on here. You can't consign his history to oblivion the way you did with yours when you changed your user name.

That's exactly my concern. Gazzaniga looked quite confident in the early days, and that helped him to perform reasonably well. Now he's scared spitless and it shows in everything he does. Sure, it could be argued that Cropper deserves a chance, but the last thing we need is for his confidence to be shattered as well at such a young age. I don't think MP has much choice but to grit it out until one of the senior keepers is fit.

If he can consistently demonstrate the art of timing his run to beat offside, as he did once today, he could become quite a striker.

What "purported dressing room unrest"? Unless I've missed it, yours is the first mention of anything like that.

I know what you're saying. To me it's all down to poor reading. He doesn't time his advance (if he makes one at all) and ends up trying to dive from a standing position. The right way is to time your advance so that you can convert your forward momentum into sideways momentum (i.e., the dive). Doing it that way extends your reach by 6-12", but I don't think anyone's telling him this stuff. Not that they should really have to.

Against Villa Yoshi got done on Agbonlahor's fast break and I'm pretty sure that Fonte would have been done by it too. Apart from that, Yoshi didn't play badly in a team that generally played well - especially as he's been very short of game time, so - to me - he didn't deserve the abuse he received on here. As far as today is concerned, I'd discount most of the poor performances in front of our back four because their emphasis switched from playing their normal game to keeping an eye on the inevitable problems that would come from the Jos/Fox partnership. And, with Lovren playing on the other side, there was no real balance or solid positional play at the back - all compounded by a lack of confidence in the guy behind them. Until Spurs equalized, I though we looked quite good.

Well, that would be two half-fit players on the bench today - Fonte and Yoshi - who would have been immeasurably better than a fully fit Jos. I would be surprised if Yoshi is unfit - he hasn't had much chance to become so, but I guess he may be on the way out of MP's reckoning. I'm finding some of MP's thinking harder and harder to understand with each passing week, but still support him.

The real world facts are that, while we do have a lack of depth (almost all PL teams do), nothing can really legislate for losing between 4 and 6 of them at the same time. And we've been missing three or four of the back five, the springboard for our early-season success, almost since the bad run started. I still feel that - with all of today's poor individual performances, and with Fox in the side - if we had partnered Yoshida with Lovren we wouldn't have lost like that, we may not have lost at all, and we may even have won.

That's a two-way street. Gazzaniga has been brought in "over his head" - at least at this stage of his career, and it could be argued that the results have shattered his confidence as much as the other way around. You want to try that with another young keeper?

Come on, guys, you don't have to invent blame for Gazzaniga. He wasn't at all good again today but he didn't have much chance with that OG - it was through him pretty much before he could move. I'm still trying to figure out WTF Jos was doing there anyway, given that he was supposed to be playing on the left side of the middle two. With Jos in the back four, all notion of positional play goes down the sh*tter - and any (slim) chance that Gazza could have claimed that hard-and-low went with it.

I still feel that he's young enough to become a decent keeper - he played quite well at times last year, although PL may never be his level. But there's no doubt that he's gone backwards and it seems that his confidence is so shot that he's become a line-hugger; he was culpable for the first goal - he didn't even have to catch the cross, just go for it at least. That kind of regression shouldn't happen with quality, specialized coaching, so I can't help but wonder how good it is at this club.

I don't get why Yoshida is being grouped in with Jos and Fox. He's played some good, composed games for us but his lack of playing time didn't help him against Villa. That's no reason to consign him to the same fate as two players who are palpably out of their depth. If Yoshi had been Lovren's right-side partner today we may well have seen a very different result IMO.

It could be that key cogs in our pressing game (and I include the full backs who provide the wide pressure) have been the ones on the injury table. It's also possible that the medical "powers that be" at the club have concluded that the bout of outfield injuries we've suffered lately is at least partly down to the pressing game and the physical toll it takes. I don't think Pochettino's pressing game is gone for good, but that we'll see it much more selectively. Actually, we did that last year because he only seemed to fully wheel it out against the top teams, which IMO accounted for our less than stellar performance against the weaker ones.

Fox certainly has flaws and I'm no fan of his, but the majestic Lovren we've seen for most of the season would have provided more than adequate cover. What turns a challenge into a potential disaster is picking Jos - it introduces a long-proven error-prone defender, results in less than adequate cover for Fox, and causes Lovren to move to a side on which IMO he's less comfortable. One really bad managerial decision cost us that game because I think we could well have won it with a Yoshida/Lovren pairing at the back. The thing that makes it all the more inexplicable is that Pochettino supposedly saw quite a lot of us in the weeks before Adkins was fired, and had every opportunity to see what we've already seen - that the Jos and Fox pairing is a disaster waiting to happen.

There's no sense playing Fonte if he's not fully fit, especially in a 4 games in 11 days spell. But that's not the decision I'd question. It's the decision to play Jos when we need strength on that side to cover for Fox, especially if that means we have to move Lovren to the right. I'd much prefer to pair Yoshida and Lovren - even if Joshi didn't play that well against Villa; he's on a different planet to Jos, and that duo keeps Lovren where we most need him.

If Pochettino did indeed watch a lot of Saints before Adkins was fired and he took over, as most of us did, what on earth would possess him to reunite that catastrophic Jos/Fox partnership? I've been confused by some of MP's decisions lately, but now I just don't like them and wonder WTF he's thinking.

I don't know WTF Jos has to do in order to be removed from the selection reckoning but this is beyond laughable. I'm not even sure what he was doing there for the OG, given that he's supposed to play on the left side of the central two. And he's all over the goddam shop for the third. Did we really go ten games or so conceding only six goals?

I thought we looked comfortable and dangerous - until we conceded the equalizer. And then it went a little pear-shaped. Rickie is peripheral and J-Rod is not that involved, either. Midfield battle, I guess, probably with a piece of brilliance or a mistake deciding it.

I've constantly defended Gazzaniga, saying that he needs time to develop the experience that will unlock his potential. But a cross played in from that far out, which is clearly destined for somewhere just inside the six yard box, and with the defenders having to head back to their own goal in order to get to it, is a keeper's ball. At every level of football, never mind this one. I badly wanted any goals to be "not Gazza's fault", but that one certainly was.

Lambert's doing a lot of ball-watching - waiting for it to come to him rather than attacking it. We seriously need him to get in the game.