Turnover in Tottenham, Joe Gelhardt, and Sean Dyche Getting Creative

Thoughts from October

Antonio Conte is Back in London

Tottenham finally pulled the trigger, firing now former manager Nuno Espirito Santo and replacing with him with Antonio Conte.

Basically everything about Nuno’s tenure, which only began four months ago, went wrong. He was hired on the last day of June and had an abbreviated preseason (This only happened so abnormally late because Tottenham struck out on hiring the same Mr. Conte before they elected to go with Nuno). He had to endure a summer-long saga surrounding Harry Kane’s potential departure. Nuno clearly tried to play a more attacking brand of play with Spurs than he did during his successful stint at Wolves, but the result was flat from start to finish. He also picked strong favorites on the team and lost many players’ confidence with impressive efficiency. Sometimes, everything goes wrong!

Now, Antonio Conte is in charge of picking up the pieces. Tactics aside, I can say with some confidence he will figure out how to get results from this Spurs side for the rest of the season. Conte won a league title at each of the last three clubs he coached. Crucially, these teams were all engineered differently despite playing in roughly the same formation. His Juventus sides relied on the brilliant midfield trio of Paul Pogba, Andrea Pirlo, and Arturo Vidal exerting their control in games. At Chelsea, his teams prioritized defensive solidity led by N’Golo Kante in the midfield, while Eden Hazard was given full control of the attack. Conte’s Inter was an offensive juggernaut which effectively played two wingers, Achraf Hakimi and Ivan Perisic, at the wing-back positions in a 3-5-2 with two legitimate strikers, Lautaro Martinez and Romelu Lukaku, and dared the opposition to score more than them. At each stop, he’s shown his ability to adapt to the talent in his squad. Spurs won’t win the title this year, but they have more than enough talent and time to pull themselves up from 9th and contend for a top-4 spot.

The wrinkle that needs the most attention with this new appointment is Conte’s relationship with Club Chairman Daniel Levy. One of the key characteristics of Conte’s management over the past decade is that he wants absolute control over decision-making regarding his squad’s composition. Conte left Inter Milan by mutual consent this summer when the club’s financial situation forced them into selling the two best players from their title-winning squad. They didn’t (and truthfully could not afford to) heed his input, so he was out.

In the other corner, Levy is not exactly agreeable about these same decisions. Levy has a history of making choices in the transfer window that don’t suit any of the involved parties’ wishes but his own. For instance, Harry Kane wanted to leave this summer to a willing Manchester City, but Levy refused to sell him despite Kane’s price tag probably sitting at its peak. Levy did something similar with Gareth Bale and Luka Modric at the end of their time with Spurs, holding them both one extra year at Tottenham even after both players expressed their preference to leave. These situations only fall under one specific brand of Levy’s, uhh, stubbornness, but are emblematic of the scale at which he is comfortable making choices in the transfer window.

Following his appointment, headlines released expressing that Conte has control and a large budget for the upcoming transfer windows at Tottenham. We also have a good decade of evidence on the two major players involved suggesting it is certainly not going to be that simple. The summer will be fun.

Joe Gelhardt and Boldly Keeping the Blinders on

19-year-old Joe Gelhardt made his second Premier League appearance for Leeds against Wolves a couple weeks back, where he logged 29 of his 43 career minutes in the competition.

While we will all need to see more on him against this level of competition to understand where he is as a player developmentally, he just about singlehandedly fueled Leeds’ comeback to tie and escape with a point.

For someone operating with effectively zero Premier League experience, Gelhardt is not nervous. He has an uncanny indifference to his surroundings with the ball at his feet. With the ball at top of the box, at no point does he consider releasing a pass, or the possibility that one of the 7 defenders closing down on him might win it back. It’s very possible the plan here was for him to dribble all the way in. He wasn’t far off!

Ten minutes later, Gelhardt opts for this approach again, completely shaking two defenders and drawing the foul from the third to win a penalty.

There are several opportunities to find a teammate here as he gets crowded by defenders. He doesn’t consider any of them, even for a second.

Already showing flashes of a legitimately dangerous dribbler, I’m excited about Gelhardt’s possibilities as a player. I hope he never picks his head up and figures out how to pass the ball.

Burnley, Finding a Spark as Strangely as Possible

Burnley broke their transfer record this summer and signed Maxwel Cornet from Lyon in France. At Lyon, Cornet was a dynamic wide player who would play mostly on the wing and fill in at left-back when needed. Incidentally, he just came off of a 2020/21 season which he played entirely at left-back to help cover for injuries in Lyon’s squad. While he produced a decent number of shots for a wide player in his career at Lyon, he did not play as regularly as he probably would have liked. Last season was the first of his career where he broke the 2,000 minute mark for minutes played, and he had not started more than 19 league games in a season until last year. This missed time had more to do with him struggling to establish himself as a permanent starter than injury issues; he averaged 30 league appearances a year in this span. His numbers at Lyon reflect this, his most successful year produced 7 goals and 5 assists in 2018/19.

Upon arrival at Burnley, Sean Dyche took one look at Cornet and said, “Yes, this is a starting Premier League striker”. It seems to be working? Cornet has played more than half of his minutes for Burnley at center-forward in a 4-4-2, and he already leads the team with 4 goals despite starting only 5 of 11 games. Cornet’s on a hot run of finishing at the moment and his rate will slow down (half of the shots he’s taken have gone in and that is not sustainable), but the run he’s been on has been invaluable for a Burnley team stuck in the mud even by their own sluggish attacking standards.

Dyche’s interesting choice to play Cornet this way is one which makes me wish he would try coaching elsewhere. He’s been extremely successful at Burnley considering their lack of resources competing in the world’s wealthiest league. The source of the archaic brand of play Dyche employs at Burnley is fairly unclear. Has it been a product of dealing with their resource deficit, or is this is truly the way he thinks a good team should play? Either way, he’s a manager who has consistently made functional decisions which pay little mind to trends and newer strategies in modern football. Maybe he would make a team with more talent play exactly the way Burnley does. But he also might find himself innovating with players who are more gifted than the ones he’s had who wind up fighting relegation each year. It’s unlikely that we will discover the answer to this any time soon because Dyche is on contract at Burnley until 2025, but I can still dream.