Sunderland face Tottenham Hotspur at the Stadium of Light on April 12th.
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If ever a team has needed a new manager bounce, it’s this current iteration of Tottenham Hotspur.
The North London outfit find themselves in the kind of genuine peril that few would have assumed possible at the start of the season, and after Igor Tudor’s catastrophic 44-day tenure was brought to a premature and merciful conclusion over the weekend, they now find themselves just one point clear of the relegation zone.
Teetering precariously on the brink of the void, Spurs have moved swiftly to replace Tudor, and it was confirmed on Monday that their next unfortunate victim - sorry, head coach appointment - is ex-Brighton and Hove Albion boss Roberto De Zerbi. The Italian’s first game in a seven-fixture run to stave off disaster comes against Sunderland a week on Sunday.
Now, evidently, as far as Tottenham were concerned, something had to change. Tudor wasn’t so much sleepwalking into calamity as he was sprinting headfirst towards it with a lit stick of dynamite in each hand. But the question now is whether De Zerbi is really the right man to salvage his new club’s Premier League status. Is he a firefighter, or have Spurs unwittingly hired another pyromaniac?
Well, if past comments from Lewis Dunk, who played under the 46-year-old at Brighton, are anything to go by, things could yet get worse before they get better. Reflecting on De Zerbi’s arrival on the south coast during an interview in 2023, the towering centre-back said: “If I am being honest, the first couple of weeks were horrendous…
“I wouldn’t say horrendous, they were baffling. The first meeting when he went in, I was so confused – who to look at, what to listen to, and you slowly pick up. Basically don’t listen to the manager, wait for the translator to speak and you get there in the end.
“Training changed dramatically. We worked on a lot of different stuff and the first couple of weeks were a really hard transition. We were fourth in the league when Graham [Potter] left and we were flying with him and it was a strange time for him to go and then Roberto came in and it was a carnage two weeks.”
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Granted, this time around De Zerbi should have no such translation issues, but Dunk’s comments on his wholesale changes and the disruptive effects they had don’t exactly bode well for a Tottenham side who need instant results. There is no safety net here, no preseason to acclimatise. This is high wire stuff and the consequences of a misstep could be dire.
From a Sunderland perspective, however, any lingering disarray would be very welcome indeed. The Black Cats must have been licking their proverbial lips at the prospect of playing a Tudor side with five defeats in seven to their name, but perhaps the only thing more enticing is facing a team who are still recovering from the Croatian’s brief regime, helmed by a head coach who supposedly deals in his own signature brand of chaos.