I really hate to be that guy, since i had a shitton of respect for pochettino coming into this season, but what he's been doing with this team is absolutely unacceptable. The summer was very poorly done, and whether thats pochettino's fault, levy's or baldini's i have no idea, but the end result is we have no players who can play in our band of 3 behind the striker in our standard formation other than the starters, and with our starters playing, we end up wasting lamela because he gets tasked with playing the much more supporting almost wide midfield role that is crucial to pochettino's system. And now we get to what pochettino is doing so wrong. Never did he make any adjustments to deal with the fact we had a right back playing because of injuries who couldn't hack the position, and he continually refused to do anything like play a wing player who can offer more defensively (lennon) or try someone else out at rb (lennon, chiriches, or walker-peters from the academy). And all of this is before we get to today's mess. Pochettino's apparent strategy today was that Villa was so bad that it didn't matter if we were outnumbered in midfield, or if we had anyone defending other than our two centerbacks, so he played basically a 4-2-1-3 with three out and out strikers up front (much as chadli has been nominally called a wide player this season, he's really playing as a second striker who provides nothing but late runs into the box, a la rodriguez for southampton last year). Unfortunately, villa put up more of a fight than he expected and (probably predictably) overall dominated the midfield at the start of the game, forcing eriksen to drop deeper in the first half (he completed 8 more passes than any other player in the first half). Our defense was also continuously exposed because all of the width in the lineup was expected to be naughton and rose, so with no covering player ahead of them anytime we did manage to possess for a little while when we lost it villa was routinely breaking 2v2 or something similar. And this is ignoring the fact that getting outnumbered wide was allowing villa to pump crosses into the box, especially earlier in the game. And yet pochettino allowed this to continue, with his only change before the 70th minute in a relatively like for like change with lamela replacing eriksen in the 10. The only real result of that was that he didn't drop into the midfield as effectively, so we struggled even more to possess effectively, and we no longer offered the same threat on set pieces. And although finally bringing on the one striker who shoudl be statring gave a very temporary spark, i see very little evidence this game wouldn't have finished 1-0 or worse if benteke hadn't gifted us a man advantage. And even with this man advantage it took terrible marking on a corner and a lucky deflection to score.
Oh and all this is ignoring the most blatant thing that adebayor has been one of the worst players in the league while kane has whenever he gets a chance looked exceptionally good, but ade continues to start almost every game while kane is very clearly considered our third striker.
Basically fuck pochettino. He absolutely refuses to adapt from his week 1 lineup even when there are clear problems. And fuck whoever screwed up so badly over the summer, whether it was pochettino, levy, or baldini. Everyone involved in this complete bungling of running a team needs to go unless they show very very quickly that they are actually competent