We find ourselves pondering a familiar question: What, precisely, is the point of Tottenham Hotspur?
The reason it feels a particularly pertinent thing to ask at this moment is not because, as ever, we’re unable to answer it. But because we really don’t think anyone connected with the club could give a coherent answer at this point.
What does a Good Season for Spurs look like this year? We’ve honestly absolutely no idea. A few events have collided to leave this looking like a club uniquely lost, in desperate need of direction and completely at a loss of where to look for it.
The flux at Spurs over the last six months has been quite extraordinary. The ownership hasn’t changed, but the boardroom structure and occupants are now almost entirely different. The manager has changed. The captain and most conspicuous ‘face of the franchise’ has left.
And perhaps in a curious way above all else, Spurs accidentally actually won something. We perhaps hadn’t realised the extent to which the trophy drought had become Spurs’ entire personality until just one fine day it simply wasn’t there anymore.
Spurs are now a club so lost and confused that even the anger and frustration is directionless. There is widespread frustration with Thomas Frank’s methods, particularly at home where his safety-first approach has become in its own way a massive risk. His well-documented opposition to taking low-percentage attempts on goal falls down entirely when the alternative, as has become the case across an increasingly wretched collection of drab home performances, is no attempts at all.
But there’s nothing coherent or visceral about it. Previously when faced with uncertainty about who to blame, Spurs fans could at least rest easy knowing Daniel Levy was there as the all-purpose default target. Everything could be and was pinned on him. At least you knew where you were.
There’s none of that now. And you can’t hate Thomas Frank, can you? Not really. Not the way you can hate more obvious pricks like Antonio Conte or Jose Mourinho when things are going wrong. Even Ange Postecoglou had a more compelling villainous streak in the tough times than the affable Dane.
We do wonder, though, whether Frank is a bigger part of the problem than might be apparent from a set of league games that, in the round, have delivered a passable 17 points from 10 games for a team that ended last season tumbling giddily and uncaringly towards a relegation zone from which it knew it was always safely insulated by the graver incompetence of others.
Frank’s brand of cautious, reactive football feels like it’s incredibly reliant on what the other team does. Away from home, where the opposition feel obliged to create some sort of running, it has been wildly effective, with four wins and a draw from five games. At home, it’s been atrocious.
And the reactive nature of those tactics mean it feels far, far more likely that the away form will eventually move towards the home record than the opposite. Because it is a style of football dictated by what the opposition are doing more than by what Spurs are doing. And quite quickly teams outside the elite few who will simply back themselves to just beat Spurs anyway are going to realise that the more they play like an away team at home to Spurs, the greater their chances.
Which again just feels like something we’ve seen time and time again when the manager who has overachieved with smaller clubs steps up to the big time. Seriously, how often does it actually work?
Eddie Howe at Newcastle, maybe, at a push. Mauricio Pochettino at Spurs themselves, but there was always a sense of bottled lightning about that, and his post-Spurs career has been remarkably unremarkable. But for every Howe or Poch there’s a David Moyes at Man United or a Graham Potter at Chelsea or about eight managers in a row at Newcastle themselves as well as Nuno Espirito Santo at Spurs.
It’s beguiling to watch managers like Frank or Marco Silva or Oliver Glasner overachieve under the radar, and for fans of struggling big clubs to start coveting those managers, but it’s just a very different game and a very different world once you’re at the big clubs.
You won’t get away with the same tactics and most significantly you won’t have any hope of staying under the radar.
You don’t get away with the dodgy little runs of form that nobody notices elsewhere. Nicking the occasional result against the big teams is no longer enough to sustain a narrative for six weeks.
Silva, for instance, has just come off a four-match losing run at Fulham. Fulham fans will have noticed. Silva will have noticed. The wider football consciousness didn’t; but they will if he now wins four games in a row.
There has been huge and deserved praise for Glasner’s transformative work with Crystal Palace, and we’re really not having a go here at perhaps the most conspicuous mid-table overachiever who might have the best chance of success at a bigger beast, but they’ve also only just come out of a run of four games without a win and featuring three defeats.
One of those was Arsenal, which is fair enough, but the others were against Everton and AEK Larnaca. You lose those games as manager of Spurs or Man United or Liverpool or Newcastle and you’re in major talking point territory and at the very least tentative suggestions of a mini-crisis and a cracked badge.
For valid and understandable reasons, these managers and clubs are noticed far more for their good works than the inevitable blips. But that is flipped entirely on its head the moment they step out of that comfort zone.
It’s still too early to say Frank is doomed at Spurs, but he will have to realise soon that he’s now at a club where shooting blanks at home to Chelsea sticks in the memory far longer than set-piecing your way to victory at Everton.