Spurs are the decade’s leading pragmatists, the club most powerfully and consistently associated with tedious defensive football.
It doesn’t sound right, but it’s true.
Ever since the Mauricio Pochettino era wound down in 2019, Tottenham have been defined by the game’s most grinding, hunkering, teeth-extracting principles, from Jose Mourinho to Antonio Conte to Nuno Espirito Santo to, yes, even Ange Postecoglou.
Postecoglou’s brief flash of sentimental adventurousness is perhaps what neutrals best remember of his time at Spurs but the most important period of his tenure was the ultra-safe, ultra-deep, ultra-ugly defensive football that took Tottenham to a 17th-place Premier League finish and Europa League triumph.
It might have been a betrayal of his own philosophy, but when it comes to Tottenham’s last decade, it was heritage stuff.
If it doesn’t feel that way that’s because the club works tirelessly to pretend it is something else.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is a brilliant ground, maybe the best in the country, and from the seats towering over the four corners to the Borussia Dortmund-inspired wall on the south side it’s a stadium designed to encourage entertaining football.
Matchdays always begin with a garish light show and an ostentatious voiceover that - laid over choral Star Wars music, if you can believe it - aggrandises the club’s dazzling past, its attacking principles, and its unerring belief that ‘to dare is to do’.
Thomas Frank does not believe in the club motto. There can be no other conclusion drawn from a performance at the Emirates devoid of spirit or basic intent, built on a flat back five and two defensive midfielders, built on sitting back and waiting for something to happen.
These are early days for Frank and the learning curve was always going to be steep, having only previously managed Brentford, a club outside the media glare and therefore allowed to play conservatively against the bigger sides.
Indeed, understanding that proactivity is essential at Tottenham will be difficult for a manager whose flexibility was a little overstated following several years of low-possession, fast-break football at Brentford.
But absorbing that truth, and truly understanding the Spurs fan base, takes even longer when you factor in the essential disconnect between the idealised Tottenham and the reality.
It is entirely reasonable that Frank would have no idea supporters see defensive football as anathema, see the predominant style of Spurs’ last decade as fundamentally at odds with the principles of the club.
Well, he knows now, or at least he should.
The manner of the defeat at Arsenal was arguably lower than anything experienced last season and Frank, checking the temperature, must now see that assertive front-foot football is imperative no matter the opposition.
If he doesn’t, he is toast.
It is of course perfectly natural that a club so entirely out of sync with its own recent history should end up firing managers as quickly as Tottenham do.
Conte, Mourinho, and Nuno were let go remarkably quickly yet all three of them had more prestigious backgrounds, had more credit in the bank, than the new Tottenham manager.
The same fate awaits Frank - unless a lot changes, and fast.
Spurs fans are beyond tired of negative football, are desperate to witness something built to expand into the size of their stadium. It isn’t Frank’s fault they are already at the end of their tether.
But it is his responsibility to read the room.
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