5th game in 10 days, this pre-season lark leaves me miffed. Money-spinning aside, hopefully its served its purpose with improving the fitness levels of the players and building team morale, not so much with results but just having all the lads together. Tactics and training field is where it matters at this stage in preparation for when it all kicks off at home to Liverpool. Playing make-shift teams will never give us an indication of much. I’m actually pleased. More than pleased. Two defeats = no over the top over-hyping from fans and no indulgent self-confidence based on thumping wins over sides who are behind us in pre-season fitness (yes, I'm talking about that game against Roma). It’s all been very low key IMO, with the draw against the Barca kids, the Celtic defeat and now this. Absolutely perfect for us.
I didn’t see the game against South China, and from the sounds of it, didn’t miss too much. Little summary of the 90 minutes from Glory Glory’s ‘Enter the Pitbull’. Hope you don’t mind the copy and paste job, guv:
I was there.
No excuses, Hong Kong football is about League Two standard at best so we should have caned them. Lest we forget, last time we played a HK league side it ended up 7-2. As I said, do not confuse Hong Kong football with the China League, which is of a higher standard.
Main problem was twitchy started with a very underpowered side. He obviously thought the youths were technically good enough to perform but South China had a lot of big expat players from South America, meaning they were outmuscled often.
Of the youths, Obika was poor, Rose was not as impressive as his reputation suggested he would be. Bostock was full of tricks but seemed a bit tentative in terms of progressing the play.
The senior players looked disinterested when they came on but I suppose some of them never even expected to feature at all.
With a 30k crowd this was a good chance to build some goodwill but Tottenham didn't play well, hot conditions or not. Poor decision for their second goal but they were already leading at that point and we only have ourselves to blame for not really giving two shits.
Additional:
Rose appeared on the wing for a period in the second half and I was astonished by his relative lack of pace (having been hyped as a pacy type). This was certainly even more apparent when Lennon came onto the pitch. I'm sure regular watchers of the reserves will tell me if this is the exception rather than the norm. Maybe he just wilted in the heat.
We were very poor. JJ was awful and O'Hara had an off day. Livermore at centre-back is not really something I'd like to see again, he looked pretty clumsy. They played just the one up top and even that seemed to bamboozle us.
Naughton was anonymous, Hutton was one of the few who looked like he fancied it, getting stuck into some challenges. Pav had a few long shots which went on target but just stood around mainly. Keane came on and pointed and shouted a lot.
Click here for the hightlights.
UPDATE: Also, according to people out there that followed Spurs, Harry allegedly mentioned that dos Santos has no future at Spurs. ITK from the horses mouth via a Tottenham rep.
The lad always seems to show up late for training and has quite the attitude problem. We'll see how this one pans out, but doesn't look promising.