Say What?

Mauricio Pochettino knows where the blame lies for the Ben Davies debacle, while he’s happy to reveal that another of his charges is not just a piece of furniture.

Slaven Bilic loves little and large, but not for long, while Jose Mourinho hits peak irony and Pep Guardiola talks forward rotation.

Here’s the latest instalment of Say What?

Punchbag Pochettino

The Fantasy world went into meltdown last Saturday afternoon when the news that Ben Davies would not be starting for Spurs against Swansea City began filtering through.

Phones were thrown, laptops hurled and Twitter pitchforks brandished.

It wasn’t just that 342,849 managers had made him the most purchased player of Gameweek 5.

Although it was. It was absolutely that.

Nor was it that his 20.3% ownership made him the third most popular Fantasy Premier League defender, but it was completely that as well.

Who to blame?

Well, there was a buck passing by, and it happened to stop right next to Mauricio Pochettino.

“ If you don’t play well, if you don’t create chances, if you concede a lot of chances and drop two points then maybe you can criticise me for not playing Ben Davies or Mousa Dembele.”

A surprisingly large 3.0% of the FPL population weren’t happy about the Dembele decision, but the rest of us couldn’t have given two Christian Fuchs.

It was all about the Bavies.

“Three days ago we were saying how fantastic the team was after a fantastic victory against Dortmund. Now we draw after not conceding one single shot on target from our opponents and people are saying we were disappointing and need to improve.”

Nope. People were saying ‘where’s my Ben Davies clean sheet?’ Although a significant set of others were also wondering why they’d sold Romelu Lukaku.

And brought in Harry Kane.

And captained him.

So has Poch picked up the buck, turned it around in his hands a few times and then thrown it back at ‘people’?

“We didn’t win because I didn’t select them. I don’t know who is panicking over this.”

Well that’s refreshing, if probably sarcastic. And nobody’s panicking, as it turns out.

Just as long as he doesn’t do it again which, by the sound of it, won’t be happening anytime soon.

Dele Alli, meanwhile, has gone two Gameweeks without a goal, prompting Pochettino to roll out the ultimate insult.

“He was a little bit like Harry Kane in August.”

Burn.

“We just have to help him, support him and push him every single day. Then, with the talent that he has, it’s sure he will score again and play well, no problem. The player is not only what we see on the pitch. He is not a number. He is not just furniture.”

To be fair, some players are furniture. Sead Kolasinac is most of IKEA, Phil Jones a set of shelves that is one tap away from collapse and Raheem Sterling an office chair on wheels that is going to the corner flag whether he wants it to or not.

“There are a lot of things that affect them, that are around them and when you are young. It can be from zero to 100. You need to find your balance. But I think it’s only time. Time for him to find his balance because he is still 21. He is so young.”

So the 32.2% of us who own Alli need to be patient. He’s young. These things take time. There are no quick fixes.

Four days after Pochettino told us this, Alli scored in the Obscure Drink Cup.

“I am so happy with him. It’s true that everyone can do better but I am happy. It is a period that he needs to find his balance but I am so happy, his performance was good. He tried and scored and that is fantastic.”

Four days. That’s it all it took.

That’s not stopped nearly 140,000 managers giving Alli precisely no more time in their teams this week – a decision that might come back to haunt them when Spurs travel to West Ham for the Saturday lunchtime kick-off.

And talking of the Hammers…

Bilic in two minds

Javier Hernandez and Andy Carroll – the finest little and large combo since Donald Trump’s hands and his ego.

Slaven Bilic seemed to think so, anyway.

“Definitely they can play together, they are complimentary players. That was the plan when we got Hernandez. We didn’t buy him just because of that but also one of the reasons why he was great for us was because they are two players that can play with each other. The little and large striker, it’s not that you don’t see that in football anymore, a lot of teams play with two strikers.”

So convinced was the West Ham boss of his dream team up front that he even started making inadvisable comparisons.

“It’s maybe not exactly like that but you have Fernando Torres and Antoine Griezmann. Griezmann is the one who is floating, Torres is the more direct.”

After two matches playing together, the results are in and the West Ham boys’ end product is definitely floating, as in…well, you catch my drift. And at least the comparison with Torres is about right – the Torres who played at Chelsea, that is.

A look at the stats makes it clear that the little and large partnership is doing little for Hernandez – he’s managed just two goal attempts, both off target. Jose Fonte has had more than that.

And Carroll? He’s had nine, but neither have scored, which is hardly surprising when they’ve managed just one attempt on target between them in two matches.

Equally unsurprising is that Hernandez, previously this season’s must-have cheap striker, is being ditched in droves, with more than 170,000 getting rid this week alone.

But Bilic was clear – ‘definitely they can play together’ he said, back then.

And now?

“It is almost impossible. It is very hard to put them in their ideal positions as two strikers, which looks good on paper and is easy to do that but then it is hard to have three at the back, plus Michail Antonio, Marko Arnautovic and Andre Ayew, it is almost impossible.”

Fair play to the manager for admitting his mistake. And it’s working – since Hernandez was pushed wide, his output might have bombed but the team is on the up, with four points and two consecutive clean sheets.

Once Spurs are out of the way this weekend, the Hammers have a nice run – SWA, bur, BRI, cry – to keep up the good work, and for Hernandez to continue taking it for the team.

“OK, Chicharito is not playing in an ideal position but I spoke to him, he is a great lad and we have priorities and we need you there. He is doing the job, that was a priority now we have to keep the stability, we can’t lose it.”

That’s a clear message to the 21.3% of managers still clinging on to Hernandez – your man is going nowhere. As in going nowhere fast.

However, there is a ray of hope for those holding on to their Little Pea – Big Andy Carroll’s injury record.

If Phil Jones is a set of wonky shelves, Carroll is an entire unit of them.

So little could well replace large, and start scoring again, at the first drop of a big Geordie hat.

Pot and kettle in colour storm

“I think the Premier League is becoming very defensive. I think many teams try to play with five in the back, plus two or three in the middle, some teams four. In some matches the two teams, they try to match each other and play in the same system, and in 0-0 and 1-0.”

It’s so true. And so tough for progressive managers who seek to find their way around entire fleets of buses parked across the goal in order for their attack-minded, devil-may-care instincts to be allowed to flourish.

It is, however, a bit rich for that quote to be coming out of the mouth of Jose Mourinho, the bus conductor supreme.

But Jose’s a changed man this year. His team have scored as many goals, 16, as Man City in the league, he’s only walked out of one post-match interview so far and he’s even stopped hanging out his players to dry in public.

“When players make a big mistake and everyone knows they did it, players are the first ones to know they did it. They don’t need any more criticism from the manager than they get from the fans or the media. It’s just being pragmatic and common sense. Jones made a bad mistake for Stoke’s second goal. Did I kill him? No. Is he going to be on the bench on Sunday? No. Life goes on and that’s the way I do it.”

If you listen carefully, you might hear a hollow laugh at Mourinho’s newly-discovered benevolence coming from someone who looks eerily like Luke Shaw, but the past is a different country where Shaw isn’t the third-choice left-back, behind even the right-footed Matteo Darmian in the pecking order.

However outrageous Mourinho’s selective amnesia might be, his current taste for giving away his plans is well worth remembering.

So we have this:

“The Premier League now is becoming very trendy with five at the back. So the best way to play against that is to play five at the back yourself.”

Which leads on to this:

“So we need this and in the Premier League and the Champions League I have to choose the players in relation to the quality. When I know I’m going to face one of these defensive walls, Victor (Lindelof) is probably the best to come with the ball, to attack spaces in midfield, to fight people in between the lines.”

Which suggests that a) the 1.4% of you still holding out for Lindelof to get a Premier League debut might finally get their wish and b) it might not come at the expense of Phil Jones if Mourinho goes with three centre-halves when faced with ‘one of these defensive walls’.

Time will tell, but with Liverpool, Spurs and Chelsea to come before the end of Gameweek 11, the only team parking the bus in the near future might well be United themselves.

The case for the attack

One manager who seems almost allergic to talking about defences is Mourinho’s crosstown rival Pep Guardiola.

And with the attacking riches at his disposal, who can blame him?

This season, he reckons he might be able to get the very best out of them.

“Of course last season we had a problem to score goals. But it was in fact more to do with the players that play inside, that surround our striker. Players like David Silva and Kevin De Bruyne, they are more playmakers. They are more talent players that assist rather than score goals. And now with the last games with Rash [Sterling] with Leroy [Sane] in the last game against Liverpool and Gabriel, they are more inside. They don’t play so wide as they did last season. So maybe they will help our strikers to score more goals.”

A quick look at the recent records of Sergio Aguero (four goals and two assists in his last two matches) and Gabriel Jesus (four goals in three) shows that there is no ‘maybe’ about it at all.

That has led to an unseemly stampede, like a Black Friday ruck over a Tesco flat screen TV, to bring Aguero into our squads, with a monstrous half a million (and more) settling on Sergio this week alone.

A rather more sober, if still significant, 116,000+ have sided with Jesus, although 25,203 have gone from the Brazilian to the Argentinian in a bold sideways move.

City’s schedule remains excellent. They have to face Chelsea away next week, and there’s a visit from Arsenal in Gameweek 11, but it’s otherwise plain sailing all the way through to early December.

And Pep’s new-found taste for fielding both his star strikers – they’ve started all but one league match together this season – is another great reason for jumping on board what is an increasingly over-laden bandwagon.

But this is Guardiola we’re talking about.

“Maybe one day we decide we’ll only play with one striker and sometimes with Gabriel (Jesus), and sometimes with two. Sometimes we’ll play with neither. Maybe Sergio and Gabriel won’t play and we’ll play a false nine. It depends on my ‘silly’ decisions.”

That last sentence might be a nice line in self-deprecation, but it’s fooling no-one.

“They are going to play sometimes together, sometimes one, sometimes the other one. And maybe when I want a lot of control or they are not in top form, maybe we are going to play none of them. We are going to see. But in the last games, with the crosses, it is so important to have two strikers in the box.”

Aguero was rested for the Cara-What-Now Cup in midweek, Jesus played the full 90 minutes. The former, therefore, looks nailed-on to start Saturday’s slaughter-in-waiting against Crystal Palace.

In fact, Guardiola is even predicting exactly how many matches Aguero might be involved in this season.

“I’ve said many times, he’s going to play a lot of games, but sometimes he’s not going to play. I know it’s something special for a player who’s never been rotated and has always played with the previous managers, but in my case he’s going to play like last season – a lot of games. I think he played, when fit, maybe 90 per cent of the games, especially in the important games.”

I think it’s fair to say that most managers would take 90 per cent right here, right now.