However, more recent high profile wins for Spurs such as the 4-1 victory over Manchester City and 5-1 thumping of Bournemouth has resulted in many starting to take a lot more notice of Maurico Pochettino’s impressive looking side.
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The North London club are only three points behind the top four and the Argentine is confident Spurs are capable of securing the chance to play European football next season. Manchester City think they just have to turn up against the lesser sides and it doesn’t always happen, as we saw on Sunday at Aston Villa. They’ve also been there and done it, which counts for a lot.
Tottenham are now the most effective club at blooding academy graduates into their first-team squad, with 32 per cent of players club-trained according to Uefa’s definition of a player who has spent at least three seasons between the age of 15 and 21 with his employer team. What they did at the Emirates was phenomenal.
Even though Spurs have added Toby Alderweireld this summer, and the likes of Ben Davies, Danny Rose and Kyle Walker have all been in good form, Pochettino still considers Vertonghen to be the most important part of his backline.
‘The key for them is their best players need to stay fit.
“I think it will be up to Pochettino to lay down the gauntlet to his players and set them a few high tasks in trying to achieve that”.
It’s a head-or-tails one here for me. Meanwhile, Manchester United never looked like scoring against West Brom until Jesse Lingard got them out of trouble with a stunner.
“At this level you’ve got to maintain it throughout the whole season”.
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This is, of course, a simple and inexact projection… which is a good thing for Chelsea; if the Blues continued to pick up 1.08 points per game LESS than they did last term (surely they will improve, though?), they would end the campaign on a measly 45 points – but at least it would have been enough to finish 13th last season and avoid the drop! There’s still a long time for Chelsea to make up that gap and, while it’s a hard, hard one to call, I fancy Chelsea to just edge it.
