Bogey team

So after last night's tough encounter, which I thought was a decent result given the hostile crowd and the awful bobbly pitch, we move back to domestic football and a Sunday lunchtime kick-off against struggling West Brom.

The Baggies, however, have been a bit of a bogey team for us at White Hart Lane down the years. The last two seasons we've had disappointing draws against them at the Lane. One under AVB, in his first home league game in charge, where BAE's deflected strike looked to have won us the game, only for James Morrison to score a late, late equaliser after we made a complete hash of clearing the ball. Last year, with Sherwood in charge, we were treated to the unique combo of Eriksen and Holtby in central midfield against a managerless West Brom on Boxing Day.

Eriksen scored a sumptuous freekick, but they equalised soon after and once against thwarted and frustrated us for the rest of the game. The midfield experiment of Eriksen and Holtby was never seen again, unsurprisingly.

Even the season before, under Arry, we struggled to a 1-0 win against Albion courtesy of a well-taken Defoe goal (as usual, he hadn't done a great deal during the game, but came up with the crucial goal with a brilliantly quick-witted finish). I remember that game well, because I was there, and we had VDV playing at right back at one point as Livermore and Thudd (?), I think it was, clashed heads and had to be stitched up.

A few seasons before that, in the early days of the Jol era, we were held to another disappointing draw, when Zoltan Gera scored a spectacular goal and Keano scored an equally good equaliser.

Basically, we never seem to get an easy game against them. They always make it tough, and they know how to frustrate us. They're not a bogey team in the sense of having a long hold over us like Chelsea or Utd did, or even beating us very often (I don't think they've won at the Lane, from memory, during their various stints in the Prem). But they always make us sweat.

Having said that, they've not had a very good start and have looked far from convincing. Irvine was a very strange appointment, given he struggled at both Preston and Sheff Wed and was sacked by both. Not really sure how he was an upgrade on Pepe Mel, even though he seems to have nipped the infighting in the bud. Irvine's very far from a tactical mastermind, but they will probably come set up to get a point. The difference between Poch and AVB, though, is our more expansive style gives the opposition chances and invites them to be more adventurous. We also look more like scoring every time we go forward, whereas AVB's pass them into submission, grind them down with a slow build up of pressure style got the results (just), but it was never very good to watch.

Hopefully Poch can combine the winning mentality of AVB with Sherwood's ability to get convincing results, at home, against teams in the lower reaches of the table. Whatever you think of Tim, and I could say a lot I didn't like about him, we always looked a lot more likely to win games (at home) against the bottom 10 than we did with AVB in charge.

Now I've bigged us up, it'll probably be another frustrating 1-0 defeat. Let's hope we play like we did against QPR rather than Liverpool. COYS.