Thomas Frank reflected on a 0-0 draw for Tottenham against his former club Brentford.
Spurs have now kept clean sheets in successive Premier League fixtures (and London derbies to boot) with a goalless stalemate at the Gtech Community Stadium. The Bees are an impressive outfit on their turf, but worries about chance creation and offensive intent continue to follow the head coach.
“The positive is that we're going here against a very good home team that you need to respect with the results they've done where they're beating Liverpool, Man United, Newcastle United, Aston Villa, drawing with Chelsea and keeping them on a low amount of chances. They had seven shots in total.
“I think that's a very, very strong defensive performance. I think the back four did excellent, the whole team did excellent, especially Micky van de Ven and Cristian Romero did very well with Igor Thiago and Kevin Schade up there. So that's a positive.
“I think the amount of unforced errors is the biggest negative. That's the bit where you can make too many mistakes on unforced technical errors that then take out eight, nine good half-transitions where you're not getting into good positions and then when we were up there, lacked the cutting edge.
“I think if you as a team are not strong defensively and that's not the same as you can't play offensive football, it's just impossible to compete over a long season, impossible. If you want to end in the nice, good position you'd like to end in. Then of course the offensive part of it, you need to open up enough and do that. I think we still do that.
“Then there's another element, no matter what shape, offensive or defensive you are, you can't make the amount of unforced errors we do today. For example, or our last game against Crystal Palace, that's the bit we need to definitely see if we can improve. Then the next bit is you need to work on the offensive patterns and the structure and keep working very hard on that.
“Then the final bit is probably a little bit some key offensive players out for a game like this, for example. The ones we talked about a lot and then on top of that Xavi and Lucas. So probably that didn't help as well."