profspur

No I don’t watch college football because the NCAA is a cartel that shouldn’t exist and also because I don’t like watching and extended commercial with football breaks.

Seriously, this is the worst kind of petty hypocrisy. I don't do sports betting and in general I think it's pretty awful, but if clubs are sponsored by betting houses and owned by sports book entrepreneurs then you can't have a rule against promoting these!

Has the FA noticed his uniform???

Remember Attacking? It's not just about aesthetics.

I think you’re spot on about responsibility & it being a confidence rather than ability issue (cited you in below to say as much), but I would distinguish between responsibility and blame. The players are responsible but they didn’t choose to set up this way. profspur.substack.com/p/remember-a...

Indeed

I'd rather step on a rake than watch a minute of college football.

My friends in the US were texting me asking where I was sitting so they could look out for me on sad fancam.

Oh for sure, but the question is to what extent the television media have made 'sad Arsenal fan' and 'sad Everton fan' into entire televisual motifs, versus showing fan reactions in the crowd as they always do.

I get banter and all, but putting a camera on people who are feeling low so they can be broadcast for the entertainment of others is kind of shitty. It's common in sport, I know, but not usually made into a live montage or motif of its own. That's just trolling.

Gotta say I find the fetishizing of Spurs' fans 'sadness,' as a TV motif, pretty gross.

I do think that if I wanted to sabotage Spurs, it would be hard to do anything differently from what Lange, Vinai have done so far.

Correct

Yeah, I'd sack them both yesterday.

Relegation? So many unknowns right now. I just have no idea. I think probably we will be OK but that's not based on much.

Remember Attacking? It's not just about aesthetics.

Attacking. Remember it? profspur.substack.com/p/remember-a...

You could argue Mourinho and Conte were forms of overcorrection, but they still maintained a high standard in the top end of the league. The Frank overcorrection was, by contrast, extinction-level catastrophic, and it wasn't a long time coming, it was an acutely bad decision.

The latter was particularly harmful because it also came with a psychologically destructive component foremost for the players but also for the fans. It destroyed the best thing the club had achieved in decades and blamed the very spirit and ethos of the club for finishing 17th.

It's my fault for not always being clear: this is a discussion account but it's usually more of a discussion account for the purpose of error-correction, which means (big surprise to you I'm sure) it sometimes gets prickly. I'm not a mean person, I promise, but I am a dedicated one.

My thoughts basically summed up here: bsky.app/profile/prof...

Not strengthening for Poch and Ange were I think the most high-impact inflection points. Only for the former we were still able to maintain upper-table performance for years, whereas the latter absolutely destroyed us in a more competitive Premier League.

If you cover up a bunch of really highly explanatory true things with a bunch of low-explanatory-value true things, you're not spreading 'more truth,' you're spreading confusion.

'True' is a binary conclusion and beside the point. It's true that I love pizza and it's true that Maddison and Deki are injured--both true!--but that doesn't mean they have equal impact on Spurs losing yesterday.

The point is not that we haven’t made many bad decisions, but that some of those are very clearly more negatively weighted.

Actually I think one of main points of engaging is learning enough to bury bad ideas and bad explanations. Plenty of my own in the graveyard because of engagement with others.

If Spurs are a row of houses, it’s a bit like walking past the one that’s on fire because you’re concerned about the paint that’s been chipping away at 3 others for 20 years.

I understand the appeal of putting Spurs into a Gibbonesque grand narrative of long-run decline, but I think that’s wrong and obscures the force and impact of a few very recent inflection points.

I did engage and with substantive counterclaims. You are actually the person who said I should not engage. Remember?

Troll account

Yep

I think we’re already there, with or without relegation. It was plain as day from the start.

Shouting into the void not productive. Will publish analysis sometime today.