InFMous

Having signed an initial two year deal with Spurs on 30/06/2021, Nuno Espírito Santo had an uphill battle on his hands to convince the fans, and even many players at the club, that he was the right Head Coach to try and return the Lilywhites to the top table of domestic and continental football. In a well-publicised drawn out saga, Nuno was seen as a last resort option after the likes of Antonio Conte and Mauricio Pochettino rejected the opportunity, and Paulo Fonesca and Gennaro Gattuso were overlooked for one reason or another.

The job, on paper, looked difficult from the get-go. From the outside, it seemed as if fans wanted the club to be back in the Top 4, and challenging for silverware. With the standard of the playing squad you could perhaps forgive this as an achievable target, but having been without a Head Coach for two-and-a-half months, and with the player unrest building up within the squad (and culminating in a very public interview in which Harry Kane declared his intention to leave his ‘boyhood’ club), it seemed more of a poisoned chalice than a golden ticket. Nuno was immediately greeted with scepticism due to his ‘Mourinho-lite’ image, perhaps due to the counter attacking style adopted by Wolverhampton Wanderers during the tenure of their new Head Coach. Would teams give Spurs as much space to roam? Are they capable of being as organised defensively? Even if the answers to the prior questions had been positive, you still need to sell it to the fans, and in my opinion that was never even attempted. On 01/11/2021, Nuno Espírito Santo was dismissed after only 10 league games. The wrong man at the worst time. I’m here to fix that (and not Antonio Conte).

Nuno was sacked from Spurs following three straight defeats - one in the Europa Conference League to Vitesse, an away loss to London rivals West Ham, and a 3-0 spanking at home courtesy of a hideously disjointed Manchester United (Manchester UFC to some). Spurs are only 5 points away from Top 4, are into the League Cup Quarter Final against the Irons, and are still in control of qualification in their ECL group. Drab performances seem to have killed off Nuno rather than results, although the latter wasn’t that fantastic, either. When they won it was narrow, and when the lost they were generally tanked or just totally inept.

Marching In

I turned transfers off for the opening window as I want to work with the same squad that Nuno had been using. I am glad that in-game there appears to be no personal issues with Harry Kane (which is surely something that Sports Interactive know as fact and could have been hard-coded, but oh well), however upon looking at the squad I’m reminded that the defensive and midfield positions are actually a bit rubbish, at least compared to other teams challenging for Champions League qualification spots. This is the best I could come up with:

Am I confident this will work in the Football Manager 2022 Beta? No. I think it’s a bit of a risk to throw myself into this challenge at all, quite frankly, as for many years I haven’t managed a side expected to do well whilst having actual decent competition within the league. I mentioned that I wasn’t overly keen on the quality of the defence or midfield, so theoretically one option would be to just try and decimate a team with the attacking talent Spurs have and hope to score one more than our opposition. I’ve decided to go all Thanos, though, and attempt to be balanced. I’m expected to deliver attacking, possession-based entertaining football, and I think this tactic matches intent with the reality of the current squad. I intend to keep hold of the ball in the middle to allow Sergio Reguilón and Emerson Royal to move up the pitch, and without having a forced Regroup/Counter-Press or Hold Shape/Counter, the players should be intelligent enough to decide if there is an opportunity to move faster and take advantage, or simply retain the ball and await an opening. We are pragmatic in the middle of the pitch, as I need to ensure a presence within defence and transition, as well as have at least one player from deep supporting attacks. With Dele Alli and Tanguy Ndombele in the middle, I’m confident we’ll see some good contributions from at least one of them. The attack speaks for itself, although having Son Heung-min as a DLF(A) possibly wastes some of his workrate, but he should link up with Emerson Royal and Dele Alli quite well, and hopefully move into the channel enough to make the most of his dribbling ability. Harry Kane is there simply to create and finish chances - I was tempted to use him as a Poacher, simply to guarantee he’d be around the 18-yard box as much as possible, and I may yet move him there, but for now I’d like to see how mobile a CF(A) is in this new game.

As fixtures go, unfortunately the game has decided not to use real fixtures (I honestly can’t remember if I clicked the button…or if there even is a button?), so I’m not playing all the same teams that Nuno did, however we are due to play both Manchester Ultimate Fighting Championship and East London Irons during the month of October, so that’ll be a good litmus test as to how we compare to the poor Portuguese chap. We have managed to avoid Pacos de Ferreira in the final stage of Europa Conference League qualifying (and yes I am sorting the real name fix shortly!), however we’ve drawn our Scottish friends St. Johnstone instead. The fixture list is relatively kind overall though, so I’m hoping for more than 5 league wins, and perhaps taking control of our ECL group once we get there…

August

On paper Norwich City away is quite a kind opening fixture, however we were fortunate to get away with a 1-0 win in an awful match. Slow Lloris saved a penalty early in the second half to keep the scores at 0-0, and I decided I’d had enough of the formation already in the 70th minute, bringing on Bergwijn and playing a 5-2-3 (clearly my go-to for Infamous…), Clearly an inspired change, as Bergwijn scored the winner in the 91st minute. I decided to take the 5-2-3 tactic forward (IF(A) on the left, IW(A) on the right, CF(S) in the middle) but with the same instructions. A partially rotated side then smashed St. Johnstone 5-0 in the first leg of our ECL qualifier, although it’s hard to judge if we looked exciting or were just vastly superior. The return leg yielded a mind-numbing 0-0 draw, so we progress to the group stage. Our first home game in the league was a vaguely entertaining 1-0 victory over Burnley thanks to Harry Kane’s early strike, with plenty of chances created, but our lack of cutting edge could have cost us on another day.

September

After an international break in which we lost Lucas Moura for a few months (to injury, not on his travels), we hosted a Saudi-backed Newcastle United managed by Hansi Flick, and earned a convincing 3-0 win despite playing the last 30 minutes with 10 men after Lo Celso went off injured a few minutes after he came on. What followed was a drab 0-0 in the Europa Conference League against SK Sturm Graz (also in our group are Shamrock Rovers and AMO Apollon Limassol), in which our rotated side lacked any synergy and were actually dominated possession-wise by our Austrian visitors. We looked better in the 80th minute once the big guns came on (I was daydreaming so forgot to make changes earlier), but our hot-and-cold performances leave me wondering if I’m essentially Nuno mark II at this point. The Wolves of Wolverhampton were our foes in the Carabao Cup Third Round, but despite playing our strongest XI we put in yet another faltering performance, however at least we came away with a 1-0 win (courtesy of another Harry Kane penalty) and our seventh clean sheet in a row. We kept faith with the previous squad as we travelled to Goodison to face Everton but we conceded our first and second goals of the season before halftime (a Richarlison penalty and a Michael Keane header from a corner), so I shifted to a 4-2-3-1 just to try something different in the second half, before conceding once more after the break. My favourite moment of the game was when Emerson Royal ran the ball straight off the pitch whilst under zero pressure - at least they seem to have got him right in the Match Engine.

With performances generally being quite poor, albeit usually clinical in attack, I decided to mix things up a bit and at least pretend to look threatening going forwards.:

On paper we’ve simply moved our fullbacks into wingback positions and adjusted a few roles. I’ve given our central defence less license to ‘ball play’ (the Libero may flit between that and a standard CD(D) depending on opposition), as it were, and want to get the ball wide quite quickly and rely on some overlaps to create options in the middle, which is occupied by Ndombele and Pierre-Emile Højbjerg who will be offering most of the legs in the middle. I now expect the team to press when we lose the ball, and counter when we win it. It’s not particularly original, but giving the Spurs squad license to think for themselves is clearly a risk. We actually conceded in our following game against Shamrock Rovers, but put four past the Irish in a comfortable victory. The key month for the save is now upon us…

October

A key month, but the only key I’ve seen so far is the one that opens up the door to our 18 yard box. Our first match sees us get spanked by Manchester United, with Cristiano Ronaldo proving unplayable in this edition of Football Manager. We were awful. Over the international break I pondered my existence, and wondered if this is going to be my first Infamous failure. I panicked and moved Son up top to play DF(A), and moved my other winger role into Shadow Striker. My tinkering was rewarded with a lovely 4-1 win over struggling Southampton, with Son scoring twice and securing Player of the Match from his new role. My final Europa Conference League match, against AMO Apollon Limassol, was a sensible 2-0 away win with a fully rotated side, so we end our stint in this competition top of Group C with 7 points from 9, and looking good to progress. Wolves then came to try and spoil the Spurs party again, this time in the league, but were vanquished to the shadow realm after a confident 2-0 win. We’ve looked a lot more mobile when going forwards, which is possibly due to the increased space down the wings. Who’d have thought? A Paul Dummett inspired Newcastle side fell to a 1-0 loss to our lads in the Carabao Cup, setting up a lovely tie away at Norwich in the Quarter Final (which we will never play). Our final game of the save comes on 30/10/2021, where we travelled to the generically named ‘London Stadium’ in order to be unfairly beaten 1-0 by the generic East London club, West Ham United. A Saïd Benrahma free kick dashed my hopes of leaving on a high, and we were unable to convert from our many good opportunities. These games happen sometimes, I just really could have done without it happening in my final game in charge.

Team Espírito?

Having lived through a sample size of Nuno’s toils with Spurs, I can understand why things went wrong. The squad, at least in Football Manager 2022, doesn’t seem amazingly balanced, and at some point in the near future is due a refresh, especially at the back. Although we won 5 of our 8 league games, the games we did win were against fodder, and we even managed to mess up against our London rivals in the final game. The final tactic I stumbled upon seemed to play better than anything else I had attempted before then, and think with some minor tweaks that it’d have done Spurs some good going forwards. One thing I did not have to contend with was a wantaway Harry Kane, for which I am most grateful. Despite the team’s inconsistent performances (less so results, as these were probably about as expected overall), Kane managed 4 goals in 8 league games, and a further 5 across Carabao/ECL action. Aside from Hugo Lloris (who is definitely far superior in Football Manager compared to reality), it was only really Kane himself who performed well, although the late tactical change did start to bring the best out of Son Heung-min.

In reality, Tottenham occupy ninth position in the Premier League table after 10 games. We are in the same position, however the scheduling seems to have just done its own thing in-game. We have two games in hand at the end of October versus the IRL Spurs. The next two league games on the schedule in my save are showing as Chelsea and Leicester, so there are no guarantees that 10 league games would bring about a greater return than what Nuno managed. We matched the club’s efforts in the Carabao Cup, as we’re both in the final eight, but in the Europa Conference League we are 3 points better off, and actually in a qualifying position as things stand.

I suppose the final way we can judge the success of this Infamous save is whether or not we were playing more exciting football than Nuno’s side. I’d argue that by winning games by more than one goal, and that our goal difference in the league is +7 on our counterparts, that it may seem that way. It definitely took a little while for my side to find their feet tactically, however it wasn’t a snooze fest every time we entered the pitch. I feel quite similar to how I felt during my John Barnes Infamous, wherein we had a better average of points per game but the actual end product was very similar to the results we were trying to improve upon. I’ve definitely not done worse than Nuno Espírito Santo, and I’d also suggest that we’ve done a little bit better, and that’s enough for me. Well done me.