Thomas Frank is learning a lesson that many managers have to learn when they step up in class: that focusing on eliminating risk can in its own way be the biggest risk of all.
And the worry now must be that it’s a lesson he simply isn’t learning fast enough.
We’ve written before about the biggest early danger to Frank’s Tottenham reign lies in small-timing the job. That came in the wake of a truly pitiful 1-0 home defeat to Chelsea in which Spurs barely even attempted to land a punch of their own against a distinctly fallible opponent whose defence had been thoroughly discombobulated a week earlier by a newly promoted Sunderland with 10 times the ambition of Spurs.
Frank went about the North London Derby in a slightly different way, but the outcome was the same: a near-total absence of attacking threat until the game was lost, and even then it relied on Richarlison, a man who has an absurdly cursed career, choosing the most futile moment imaginable to do something utterly extraordinary.
If we’re being extremely generous, we could just about defend the decision to start with a back three against the lethal threat posed by…Mikel Merino. If it were truly a back three designed to provide wing-backs with ample opportunity and scope to stretch the game and try to push back Arsenal’s wide threats while still occupying Eberechi Eze in the centre, you could understand it. A bit. Just about.
One could also just about defend the decision to start with a front three, even if the personnel choice was questionable.
What is almost impossible to defend in any way is the decision to do both and leave Spurs’ already desperately fragile gameplan for such a huge game pretty much over before it had begun by entrusting a midfield two with a near-impossible task against the champions-elect.
It is not defeat here or even against Chelsea that will scupper Frank’s Tottenham revolution before it has even begun, it is the manner of them. Spurs could have lost at Arsenal without his position being weakened at all. Arsenal are an excellent football team and better teams than Spurs have lost and will continue to lose against them.
But to go to Arsenal and play for a 0-0 draw they were almost certain not to get is never going to fly. This is where refusing to gamble anything at all becomes the biggest gamble of all. Pedro Porro has never played in a Premier League goalless draw for Spurs; that is the level of unlikelihood Frank was striving for to pinch a result here. Spurs, no matter how sensible you try to make them, will still be Spurs.
Ange Postecoglou, for his many faults, understood that. The only managers who have managed to survive beyond a year or two in this job have understood it. Mauricio Pochettino absolutely did. So did Harry Redknapp.
The clear worry now is that Frank does not understand that. If you’re going to go ahead and lose 4-1 anyway, do it the way Ange did with his nine daft men against Chelsea in his first season. Not like this. Not with surrender.
Frank has now approached two huge Big Six London derbies like a League One manager hoping to avoid a battering in the early rounds of the cup. Maybe, if the stars align, burgle something extraordinary.
He has approached both with a gameplan that required nothing short of absolute perfection in every action, as well as a healthy dollop of luck along the way – a dollop he actually got against Chelsea, really, given their failure to decisively put the game to bed with further goals – just to have a chance of maybe nicking a point.
It clearly, in its own way, represents a bigger gamble than trying to at least meet these teams as something approaching equals. You don’t have to fully Angeball it; you just don’t have to go Full Mourinho either.
In fact, that’s not fair. If you look at the stats, Mourinho never approached a game as Spurs manager so negatively as Frank has the Chelsea and Arsenal games.
Even picking a front three at the Emirates had the whiff of desperation. An attempt to at least look like there was some attacking intent despite Spurs apparently not even having even the most abstract theoretical idea of how they might go about funnelling the ball towards that front three in the hope of forging an actual opportunity.
Frank and his supporters will point to the Super Cup against PSG and the 2-0 win at the Etihad in defence of his strategy, but these games only damn him further. In neither of those performances were Spurs so pitifully limited in their scope or ambition; while both were performances built primarily on minimising the extreme threat level of elite opponents, never was it at so absolute a cost to their own ambitions as in recent weeks.
Tottenham had 13 attempts on PSG’s goal in the Super Cup and an xG of 1.38; at City it was 1.68.
In those early examples of Frankball against top-tier opposition it really did look like here was a manager to split the difference between the miserabilism of your late-era Contes and Mourinhos and the self-sabotaging chaos that engulfed Angeball.
But he has retreated further and further into what is now no longer safety-first football but safety-only football. And the paradox is that this obsession with being safe leaves him anything but.