Tottenham Hotspur are left bruised and broken after yet another painful home defeat. The players wilted again when facing the pressure of a game they really needed to win. There is now a long wait until their next match. Time to stew, time to reflect, time to consider the next move.
The big question (the only question for the time being, really) concerns the future of the head coach. Do Tottenham have the right man in place to guide them out of this mess and away from the relegation zone? And if not, who can they find to take over?
It is not an attractive job. It takes a brave man to jump aboard a sinking ship with a plan to repair it. Especially here in the second half of the season, weeks after the winter transfer window closed, without much time left to change the momentum and the mood.
The pressure on the Tottenham hierarchy is enormous. They know how cataclysmic relegation would be, a stain on the record of everyone associated with it. They know the team in current form, which has them sliding irrevocably down the Premier League table, are heading towards the Championship. At the same time, they respect the current coach. They genuinely wanted him to get it right when he was chosen. And they are certainly aware that simply replacing him is no panacea. There are no obvious wins, no easy, low-risk options, out there. Rolling the dice is no guarantee of anything.
Sound familiar? The situation that Spurs are in right now is eerily similar to where they were six weeks ago.
Back then, of course, the game in question was a 2-1 defeat against Newcastle United on February 10. After it, the hierarchy finally decided, with 12 days until the next match, that it was time to gamble and move on from Thomas Frank. He was dismissed the following morning. By the end of that week, Igor Tudor had been appointed on a contract until the end of the season. The hope was that he could spark a revival that moved the club out of this mess.
Six weeks later, Spurs find themselves in a position that is far too familiar for comfort.
This time, the bruising home defeat was Sunday’s 3-0 against Nottingham Forest, one of their rivals in the relegation battle. They now have even longer than on that previous occasion — three weeks, in fact — between that fixture and their next one, a trip to Sunderland on April 12. But the fundamentals of the decision, the risks, the trade-offs, are the same.
It is Groundhog Day at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Of course, there are differences between then and now.
This is an especially difficult time for Tudor on a personal level, having learned post-match on Sunday of the passing of his father, Mario. Naturally, there is a lot of sympathy for him, and everyone wants to proceed with sensitivity.
In terms of Spurs’ specific situation, the most significant difference is that their position is even more perilous now than it was on February 11, when chief executive Vinai Venkatesham and sporting director Johan Lange called Frank and asked him to come in for a meeting. The failure of the Tudor appointment to date — five league games, one point — leaves Spurs on the very brink of the drop zone.
When Frank was sacked, they were five points ahead of 18th-placed West Ham United, still with 12 games left — almost one-third of a Premier League season. Today, they are just one point ahead of their third-bottom London rivals with only seven to play. Almost half of the matches that were remaining when Tudor was appointed have been used up, with almost nothing to show for them.
Back when the Croatian replaced Frank, it felt that this was the decision, more than anything else, that would define Venkatesham and Lange’s time at the club. If it worked out, there was still a positive future ahead of Spurs, one where they could find a new long-term manager in the summer and write the 2025-26 season off as an anomaly, with Tudor just a footnote to the story.
Such an ending feels a more remote possibility now. And it may be that the only way to get there is to roll the dice again, to go back into the marketplace and try to find another manager who can spark the improvement out of the players that Tudor has not been able to find.
Lifting these players will be a difficult thing to do.
Their confidence is on the floor. They have not won a top-flight game since December. They look as if, in the league at least, they have forgotten how to win. And while Tudor has brought some improvements in fitness and physical intensity, they still struggle to create chances. And tend to crumble when things go against them, as they showed in the home defeats to Crystal Palace and Forest.
Even the optimism engendered by drawing at Liverpool and winning the second leg of their Champions League last-16 tie at home to Atletico Madrid back-to-back feels beside the point after Sunday.
Much of this is out of the manager’s control.
There is not a lot of creative quality in this squad, although given the injuries to James Maddison, Dejan Kulusevski, Wilson Odobert and Mohammed Kudus, it is natural to wonder whether Xavi Simons might have featured more. But until more players come back, there is only so much that any coach can do.
This, too, was part of the debate over Frank before his eventual dismissal last month: whether any manager, or rather any available manager could get better results out of this limited squad in a short period of time. Spurs eventually decided to take the risk of finding out. So far, that has not paid off. But with only seven games left, and the unthinkable now becoming very thinkable indeed, can they really afford not to try to find out again?
Tottenham do at least have time. That next game is still 19 days away.
Their training centre is a quiet place right now. The few players not injured or away on international duty have been given some time off. Only at the end of this week will Richarlison, Conor Gallagher, Destiny Udogie, Joao Palhinha, Antonin Kinsky and Souza return. Then they will be joined by those released early by their countries.
Spurs could theoretically take the rest of this week to reach a decision on the right man, whether that is Tudor or someone else, and still give him two weeks with the squad before that match in Sunderland.
Maybe international football will help, and players will return to north London with a different, more optimistic mindset. Maybe the last thing these guys need right now is to be reminded of the club’s situation.
The public impression of the Tottenham hierarchy this season is that they have been slow to act, that part of this problem was caused by delaying a decision on Frank’s future for too long, having only hired him away from Brentford last June.
Maybe if they had been more ruthless after the 2-1 home defeat to West Ham on January 17, they could have found a different replacement, and given him more time (after that one, Spurs were still 10 points clear of West Ham with 16 league matches left, a scenario with far more comfort than they have now.) But Frank got four more league outings before he was finally sacked.
That was a situation Tottenham never wanted to be in. Nobody wants to be gambling on a manager to keep them up. Now, six weeks later, the very same scenario has rolled round again, just with more peril.
If the hierarchy do take a deep breath and roll the dice again, every Spurs fan will be hoping they land on a better outcome.