LONDON — The man who turned them down to pursue his boyhood dream, rolling up the Seven Sisters’ Road to add two more to the hat trick he scored last time out, Eberechi Eze the playground bully who reveled in the humiliation of the kids from up the road. It is at this moment that we have to deliver that immortal line from Giorgio Chiellini. “It is the history of the Tottenham.”
What future history books might tell us of this Tottenham team is worryingly unclear at this stage of the season. Spurs shouldn’t get relegated. They probably won’t. Bookmakers will happily offer you quite a bit of money to put yours on Tottenham going down.
Suppose, however, you were looking back in May, trying to explain how a club that takes three-quarters of a billion dollars in revenue has found itself bound for the Championship. What would have been the early warning signs? A hellacious injury crisis. No real sense of an on-field identity after years of muddled recruitment for players whose physical qualities do not offset their technical limitations. A manager in Igor Tudor with no experience of the Premier League, who might have less bounce than a dead cat after beginning his tenure with a hammering at Arsenal’s hands.
“I don’t know where we are going now,” was the cry that echoed from the stadium PA at the final whistle. The gags write themselves.
It didn’t need to end this way, mind. Tottenham hadn’t been the better team at halftime but the game was where they would have wanted it. Eze’s opener was cancelled out within 24 seconds of the restart, Randall Kolo Muani preying on overplaying by Declan Rice to thunder Spurs into a lead they held at the interval. It felt like dicing with danger when Tottenham’s pre-match MC Paul Coyte declared that Arsenal were “worried, nervous as hell” but when the visitors had frittered away another lead you could see his point.
The next steps looked relatively obvious, repeating the gameplan of the first half. Sit deep, soak up pressure and have a spring on the counter when the opportunity presented itself. Prey on those insecurities that keep rearing their head for Arsenal. It’s hardly the Tottenham way but given the talent disparity between Mikel Arteta’s side and hosts that have been laid low by a dozen injuries, it would have been a perfectly valid approach.
Instead, Spurs played as their manager had been urging them to in the first half, when every time you glanced at the touchline, you could see Tudor gesticulating for his center backs to get up the pitch. He wanted to see Tottenham press up against Arsenal, to engage them in one-on-one duels. When his players did as he wanted, the outcome was disastrous. There was no downturn in the number of progressive passes the Gunners completed, 33 in both halves, a negligible upswing in Arsenal’s touches in the opposition third that probably reflects them taking their foot off the gas at 3-1 and only one instant in which Spurs recovered possession in the attacking third.
“We wanted to press high but to press high from the back you need to jump,” said Tudor. “If you are late, you don’t take the ball and run again. We prepared to press high but we didn’t take the ball. We didn’t take the ball.”
For 45 minutes the Gunners got to play the sort of game they relish on European nights, their build-up players able to brush past physically inferior opponents and advance the ball into acres of space. Viktor Gyokeres has less space in some of the warm up drills than he did when he smacked the ball past Guglielmo Vicario to restore Arsenal’s lead.
They never looked like ceding it again. Some of that was due to the composure of Eze and the excellent Bukayo Saka, a lot of it was Tottenham pressing ahead with a gameplan they were incapable of implementing. “Nice to understand where we are,” was how Tudor put it postmatch. A harsher assessment would follow, that this was a moment to “look in the mirror”.
Tudor surely didn’t understand the cruelty in the following line to a club for whom the term unserious might be best applied. “What is this goal of this coach, these players, this staff? To become serious.”
“We need more time to be in the physical moment and situation that we can go strong and take the ball,” was another of the eye-opening remarks from Tudor. Time is one resource that is rapidly draining in this season. There are 11 Premier League games to go and the table is looking dicey to say the least. The gap to West Ham in 18th is just four points. At full strength Spurs have the talent to ease away from these sides but look at the XI Tottenham named Sunday. Would you definitely take that over Vitor Pereira’s?
Since the turn of the year, Nuno Espirito Santo’s side have gained seven on Spurs, Nottingham Forest five. In that time, they have had a non-penalty of -0.46 per game. Forest’s is worse but West Ham’s points trajectory looks to be backed up by the data. Meanwhile Spurs’ looks altogether too sticky.
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It will probably all be just about fine. Tudor said he was hopeful of shaving two off his injury list in time for next week’s trip to Fulham. Cristian Romero’s suspension is up over the international break, though whether his kamikaze temperament is well suited to a relegation scrap is an open question. It shouldn’t be too long until Pedro Porro, Destiny Udogie and Kevin Danso are back. The defense can improve.
The attack? The inconsistent Mohamed Kudus is a way off and even if James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski play again this season, it is hard to believe they will be anything like the best versions of themselves. Spurs might have added one to their tally of 37 Premier League goals this season but that is off the back of by far the biggest xG overperformance in the league. Tudor will need those long-injured stars to immediately return at the peak of their powers to enliven an attack that barely produces one non-penalty expected goal per game.
Framing this as a reality check was an understandable move by Tudor, a high point set by what he termed “probably the best team now in the world”. It is not the new manager’s fault at all but that moment of realization should have come months ago, perhaps the last time Eze and Arsenal were running the goals up against them. Since then a January window has passed by in which pledges of investment resulted in a prospect left back and, in Conor Gallagher, a better version of the sort of up, down low touch midfielder that Spurs were already well stocked with. That is yet another of those touchstones that might be looked back on with such grim
Of course, the picture might never look as grim as it does when you’ve just been beaten again by your greatest rivals, inspired by the man who left you in the lurch late in the transfer window. Right now it isn’t the gap to Arsenal that matters, it is the one to West Ham and Nottingham Forest.
That is looking altogether too close for comfort. Come the season’s end it should be just about big enough. While, however, this is still a team that fulfill those essential qualities Chiellini identified eight years ago, you can never be entirely sure that they won’t find a way to snare another defeat for themselves.
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