Spurs are gone. The last plausible chance of avoiding the most ignominious relegation in Premier League history rested with a new-manager bounce under Roberto De Zerbi and emerging with something from the Stadium of Light.
They leave Sunderland with nothing except another compelling reminder of just how many villains this story contains.
It will not, quite obviously, be De Zerbi’s fault when this wretched team is deservedly and decisively relegated. It will not really be Igor Tudor’s. It will be Thomas Frank’s quite a bit, but not entirely and probably not even mainly.
It will not even be entirely on this current crop of inadequate players, several of whom are, bless them, absolutely trying their very best.
It’s just that their very best is really quite sh*t.
Spurs will be relegated this season and deservedly so. But the chief architects are not on the pitch or in the dugout but in the padded executive seats. Daniel Levy’s mistakes have been compounded and doubled down upon by inadequate successors who can’t even point to his accomplishments. And there were many.
But 10 years of letting the playing squad drift and now, finally, rot and decay has caught up with Spurs. And almost all of that was on his watch.
His claim that he would only be appreciated after he had gone has come alarmingly true. And it’s probably the case that had Levy still been in position Spurs would not be going down this season at least.
He would not have allowed Frank to tank the team quite so hard and for quite so long. It was obvious in November that he was done for, and had Spurs moved then for De Zerbi or someone of similar ilk, then the very deepest cuts of this catastrophe would probably have been averted.
But probably only postponed, really. This has been coming. The sheer extent to which Harry Kane was keeping this team upright has become startlingly clear with Spurs’ collapse and his success at Bayern Munich.
“Keeping Spurs out of relegation trouble” isn’t quite as Ballon d’Or attention-grabbing, it turns out, as “Propelling Bayern to the Champions League” but it was no less an achievement.
Since he left, Spurs have had a wild (and on more than one occasion wildly fortunate) 10-game start under Ange Postecoglou in which all things seemed possible. But since then the all things have been, in the Premier League at least, almost exclusively sh*te. They were a mid-table team at best for the rest of that season. A team that should have been in relegation trouble in his second season. And one now doomed to that fate in the third post-Kane campaign.
The Europa League win, magnificent and cathartic as it was, cannot mask the wider, deeper failings of everyone involved from top to bottom. Especially as it seems more and more to have been accompanied by a Spurs fan somewhere out there holding a monkey’s paw.
The chronic lack of or misdirected investment in the playing squad needs studying. Spurs were, somehow, blessed with the outrageous good fortune to have the best striker in the world fall into their lap from their own academy, and another of the world’s best forwards arrive for a bargain price and inexplicably fall hopelessly in love with this stupid club and spend the best 10 years of his career here.
What did Spurs do with that outlandish good fortune? Absolutely f*ck all. Squandered. P*ssed up the wall.
And now the consequences of that are hitting home incredibly hard.
This defeat, in its own way, felt somehow even worse than the fearful hammering from supposed relegation rivals Nottingham Forest three weeks ago. That could almost be dismissed as a freakish outlier even in Spurs’ season of despair.
This defeat – a much closer, narrower one in a far tougher fixture – cannot. The most damning thing about this defeat is that for an hour Spurs were okay. Marginally the better side, even. Sunderland weren’t quite at it, and Spurs definitely were.
It’s not even hard to imagine a universe where Spurs did in fact win this game, and that’s not something that can be said about many of their games. There exists, for instance, a universe where Richarlison attempts a shot rather than a backpass with any one of three presentable chances. Or where Brian Brobbey doesn’t get away with quite so many yellow-card offences. Or where the collective response to an opposition goal on 60 minutes isn’t “Well… that’s that, then”.
But this is not that universe, and it isn’t going to become that universe. The terrifying thing for Spurs isn’t that they didn’t get a new-manager bounce, but that they did. This was it. And it wasn’t anything like enough.
They played adequately well for an hour in a scrappy game. It was better than anything they’ve served up in the Premier League this year. But it was nowhere near better enough.
And the response to conceding precisely the sort of goal doomed teams concede – a cruel deflection leaving the blameless Antonin Kinsky an agonised spectator as Nordi Mukiele’s speculative shot spun and arced and bounced into the net – tells us everything we, in truth, already knew about this Spurs team.
They don’t have the minerals.
There was still a third of the game left when Sunderland scored, but everyone knew that the game was over. Sure, Sunderland don’t lose when they score first and Spurs certainly don’t win when they concede first, but you’d expect what remains for now a Premier League team to at least look like they thought the idea of getting something out of a game you’re losing 1-0 with half an hour still to play wasn’t entirely absurd.
This Spurs team can win games. But to do so they need the entire game to go pretty much flawlessly.
They cannot react to any kind of setback, and setbacks are baked in to football even when you aren’t alarmingly bad. There simply isn’t time left for Spurs to have the multiple perfect days they require.
Spurs really are a heady, unstoppable combination of powerfully sh*t and undeniably unfortunate. They do seem to invite setbacks. The goal, obviously. And the neverending injury crisis continued with Cristian Romero leaving the field in tears – we’re assuming, perhaps unfairly, over doubts about his own World Cup hopes rather than any real concern for the fate of his soon-to-be former club – after being shoved into Kinsky by Brobbey.
Even when Spurs appear to get a bit of luck, it kicks them in the arse. They were – absurdly – awarded a penalty in the first half here. When VAR inevitably and uncontroversially overturned it, the corner Spurs should have had in the first place went the same way as the penalty that should have never been.
A small thing, sure, but the small things feel so much bigger when you’re this bad and need every tiny bit of help you can get. Which is the key to it all: the misfortune is real, but let’s not pretend it is anywhere close to being as important as the sh*tness.
And the good news does just keep coming for Spurs fans: when you’re in the Championship next season, you can also look forward to a great many more co-commentaries from Don ‘Duty of Care’ Goodman.