Burn after reading. Tottenham Hotspur have not enjoyed their matches against Nottingham Forest the past few seasons, and today was another disheartening performance at the City Ground. Tottenham looked second best from the opening kick, conceded a brace to Callum Hudson-Odoi and an absolute cracker from Ibrahim Sangare, and shambled to a 3-0 loss to Forest on Sunday.
The stats are grim: Forest out-xG’d Spurs 1.91-0.37, and out-shot them 15-6 despite the possession being basically even. Tottenham actually looked somewhat okay defensively — two of the goals were flukish — but once again looked completely lost going forward with no creativity, terrible passing, and a complete lack of ideas of what to do when the ball got near the Forest area. This was against a Forest team that started the match in 17th place and that’s on its third manager of the season.
It was bad, folks. Real, real bad.
The loss drops Spurs down to 11th in the table, well off the pace for anything close to European qualification, and not exactly setting a good tone as they head into the crowded festive fixture period. There was not much to like today.
Here are my match reactions.
Match reactions
The past few matches have seen Spurs take advantage of over-matched opponents through movement and incisive passing. The opening part of this match felt like a real regression. Spurs just looked off the pace from the opening kick.
Simulating contact doesn’t feel like a Sean Dyche thing, but Forest’s players got away with two pretty obvious dives in the opening half hour while also giving cheap shots off the ball to Spurs players (e.g. Murillo’s super dirty shoulder barge on Xavi).
Archie got dispossessed on Forest’s opening goal, but Vicario did him super dirty. There’s no reason for him to make that outlet pass when Archie was under pressure. That goal was 70%-30% Vicario’s fault, imo.
I know it’s the fan’s job to support their team and harass the away players, but god, Forest’s crowd was just miserable, booing and screaming every time one of their players got touched. Obnoxious.
No way to sugar-coat it — an awful first half. Ball progression was… okay, not great but okay, but there again did not appear to be a plan on how to get the ball into areas where Spurs could generate an attack. Richarlison completely invisible, Kolo Muani isolated, Simons neutered, Kudus intractable. Pretty gross stuff.
Look, I’m obviously not a professional head coach of a Premier League football team but I’m not sure Ben Davies and Joao Palhinha are the guys you want to bring in when you’re down 2-0 midway through the second half and haven’t generated much of anything by way of offense. (Bergvall I give a pass to)
This was a bottom 10% Guglielmo Vicario performance. He was very, very bad. Same goes for Richarlison, who didn’t attempt a single pass in the first half. Nobody was very good in this one, but those two in particular stood out.
Pedro Porro lost his head midway through the first half after he got (dirtily) popped in the mouth by Elliot Anderson and never put his head back on. He was raging out there and was taken completely out of his game.
The worst part about this loss is that Forest never seemed to get out of first gear. They weren’t very good. Spurs were just comprehensively worse in every facet of the match, and that’s pretty damning on everyone involved, including Thomas Frank.
What did we learn from this match? I don’t think much. We know what’s wrong with this Spurs side, and we know that Tottenham have put in this kind of performance in matches a lot more often than they have looked good. Spurs were outplayed and out-managed today by a team just above the relegation zone today. An extremely disheartening match to have to suffer through on a Sunday.