Olivia Holdt hesitates. The Tottenham Hotspur attacking midfielder’s touch is heavy. Against Chelsea, it is fatal. It is another missed chance, number 15, if you are still counting, with less than 10 minutes to go.
It is worth counting: Bethany England’s fizzed header, Holdt’s effort off the woodwork inside 15 minutes, Signe Gaupset’s myriad attempts inside the box before half-time, Cathinka Tandberg’s glancing header in the final 15.
“Against those teams at this level, you need to take advantage of those moments,” said Spurs head coach Martin Ho after their 2-0 Women’s Super League (WSL) defeat by Chelsea. “We didn’t.”
Ho’s voice dripped with disappointment at the fact. The same disappointment permeated the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium at full time and was evident on the faces of the Spurs players in their post-match huddle.
The facts are conflicting.
Spurs’ record is 13 defeats from 13 matches played against Chelsea in the WSL, the worst run of any one team against another in England’s top flight.
Yet a gap of just four points separates Chelsea in third and Spurs in fifth, widened from the one point that stood between the pair in the hours before Sunday’s kick-off. Spurs still have matches against Arsenal, Manchester City and Manchester United to come. Win them and they could yet be back in the Champions League conversation.
But the reality is that of the 50 matches Spurs have played against the WSL’s top four (Chelsea, Manchester City, Arsenal and Manchester United) since their promotion to the WSL, they have won two, drawn five, and lost 43.
Those baked into the Spurs fabric know the drill: when a ripple of triumph looks within reach, when Spurs look on the brink of breaking into the upper echelon, the floor melts into a river of lava. Everything conforms to muscle memory. The drawing board beckons, talking about phase one of the evolutionary cycle again as they invariably fall away.
This was the case under previous manager Robert Vilahamn, who led them to a first domestic cup final in the 2024 FA Cup and a sixth-place WSL finish (the second-best in Spurs’ history) in his first season, only for the walls to cave in by the following February. Then, Spurs embarked on an astonishing tailspin through the WSL table from sixth to 11th, a 10-game winless run that ended in tears on the pitch at Everton’s Walton Hall Park after a 1-1 draw, for the simple fact that the season was finally over.
Such a disintegration seems implausible for this iteration of Spurs under Ho, a project that seems to have finally evolved from its mushy underbelly into a clear and steadfast vision.
The first half against Chelsea demonstrated the distance travelled since Ho’s arrival in July from SK Brann.
The reverse fixture between these two sides in October was a familiar one-sided battle of attrition, edged by Chelsea’s 27 shots, 66 per cent possession, and 68 touches in the Spurs box (Spurs, by comparison, registered just five touches in the Chelsea penalty area).
Sunday’s opening stages were an entirely different affair. The home side were front-footed and dynamic, individual players clearly improving technically thanks to work from assistants Adam Jeffrey and Lawrence Shamieh over the past four months. Spurs registered just over 1.5xG by the time Keira Walsh smartly knocked her shot into the ground and past goalkeeper Lize Kop following a corner.
Ho described the goal as a “suckerpunch”, so too Chelsea’s second, as Alyssa Thompson punished Spurs for a momentary lapse in defensive judgement.
Yet it was telling of Ho’s mental transformation of Spurs as a team that those in the stadium did not flee to the exits. His side have come back to claim all three points from losing positions three times, their most comeback wins in a WSL campaign. They have yet to lose back-to-back matches all season, a stunning shift from a team that endured a 10-game winless run last season.
Much of that boils down to Ho. He is known to watch a match back twice on the night of a game — once non-stop with commentary, then once with a notebook. On the walls of the training ground, signage has been erected listing obligatory standards for both players and staff, from cultural behaviours to more specific actions, such as timeliness. One member of staff jokes that upon seeing Ho, there is a sudden impulse to salute, not out of fear, but out of sheer pride in the project.
The impact on the squad has been swift. As early as September, Tandberg spoke openly about Champions League aspirations. At that stage, Spurs had only defeated Everton (currently ninth) and West Ham United (now 10th).
It was easy, then, to file Tandberg’s sentiments as the delusion of the uninitiated, even if Tandberg is a self-described Spurs faithful. Since Liverpool’s 2014 WSL title victory, a combination of Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester City have finished in the WSL’s top three every season barring two, when Manchester United claimed second and third in the 2022-23 and 2024-25 seasons respectively. Excusing those two flickers of broken hegemony, the WSL’s highest echelon has been an unassailable strongbox, a figment of the rest of the table’s imagination. For all the annual hope that the competitive scales will finally even out, have any of the prevailing winds really shifted in the past four years?
The answer is no, and while Spurs are arguably putting forth the most enthralling case, Sunday was a critical reminder that work remains to be done.
“I’ve said this before and people may see it as negative, but it’s not, it’s realistic,” said Ho, who has overseen draws against Arsenal and Manchester United this season but is yet to register a win against a top-four side.
“In seven months, you can’t change a team that’s finished 11th to be competing in the Champions League.”
The steps to do so, however, are being taken. The appointment of former Arsenal chief Vinai Venkatesham as CEO last season has been invaluable. Three times Spurs have broken their club record transfer fee — for Tandberg, Toko Koga, and most recently for the January signing of 20-year-old Norway international Gaupset. Over the past two seasons, Spurs have added more members of first-team coaching and academy staff, as well as staff dedicated to communications and commercial operations on the women’s side.
“It comes down to more experience,” Ho said. “More experience in the group, across the club in infrastructure and foundation. You then need to evolve and build your squad every year. We have work to do. These players want to be in the Champions League. I do. The club does, but you have to take the right steps. We’re a little bit short at the moment, but I have no doubt in the future we’ll be there.”