Paul Merson compared watching Tottenham now with watching Arsenal in recent seasons.
Sky Sports pundit Paul Merson has compared watching Jose Mourinho’s Tottenham side to their north London rivals Arsenal in recent years.
That’s in terms of being a soft touch defensively, leaking goals and providing entertaining matches but being easy to attack against.
He said: “This is not really Jose Mourinho’s sport. I’ve followed Mourinho’s entire career, and I’ve seen him with worse teams than this, able to shut up shop and not concede goals. What I’m watching now does not look like Mourinho. They are in end-to-end games too much.
If I’d watched Tottenham for the last 10 weeks, and someone asked me: ‘Who manages this team?’ – I wouldn’t have said Mourinho if I had 1,000 guesses. Watching Tottenham recently is like watching Arsenal of the last seven or eight years. Everybody loves a team that doesn’t win anything!”
It happened to Mourinho towards the end of his time at Manchester United; the style of play was boring and muddled but they were leaky in defence as well.
That’s an awful balance and as Merson says, it is completely out of keeping with how Mourinho has been for the majority of his career.
Tottenham have been hit by injuries up front but not really at the back, Mourinho of old would have got a solid platform to build from by now.
Add in that Mourinho is up to his old tricks in terms of risking rubbing up certain players the wrong way and it’s easy to see why the fans might be getting frustrated.
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