The problem with appointing your third manager of the season with seven Premier League games left, when you have not won for more than three months, and all your creative players are injured, is that you desperately need your luck to be in.
Over the course of a 38-game season, you can hope that some of the impact of fortune, of randomness, of contingent little football events, bounces, decisions, injuries, and human error, might be levelled out by the sample size. But if you judge over just seven games, and those games are played under pressure like this, then luck will inevitably play the decisive role.
This is the situation that Roberto De Zerbi has walked into at Spurs. He has just signed a five-year contract. He should be able to build an exciting Tottenham this summer, one that can make his ideas real on the pitch. But to get to that point, to be able to start planning for the future, first he needs to survive this seven-game gauntlet. During which his team are exposed like never before to the random bounces of a relegation scrap.
We always like to think of managers as all-powerful, sitting in front of a dashboard of buttons and levers, able to adjust the variables until they get the desired result. That is never really the case, but it has never been less true than in the case of De Zerbi.
He has arrived at Spurs with almost no buttons to press or levers to pull. No transfer window, a squad struck by another injury crisis, with confidence on the floor and precious little time with the players. He has had to radically simplify his football, just keeping it to a few digestible principles, and hope that his force of personality can unlock something in the players.
And above all, given the stakes, given the limited time, hope that the ball bounces their way. It is not De Zerbi’s fault that he is rolling dice in the dark.
So when Tottenham showed up here at the Stadium of Light on Sunday afternoon, it was never going to be a radically different performance. There was never any prospect of Spurs mastering the complexities of De Zerbi’s ideal game, with all of its bright originality, its intricate patterns. Instead, they just came here trying to work hard and be direct.
There is no point trying to sugarcoat it. This was, in large parts, an ugly, scrappy game. Some football was played in the first half, but very little in the second. So much of it hinged on the physical battle between Brian Brobbey and the Tottenham centre-backs. Sunderland were the better team over the course of the game, especially in the second half when they took control and Spurs ran out of steam, ran out of belief. You would struggle to argue that Tottenham were unlucky to lose this game.
But despite all of that, there were moments when Spurs were not exactly lucky either. Or where, in a marginal situation, things did not go their way. Like when Richarlison played in Dominic Solanke, who whipped in a cross which Lucas Bergvall could not quite reach at the near post. Or when Conor Gallagher played in Randal Kolo Muani, who laid it off to Richarlison, who could not connect in a good position. Or when Kolo Muani was awarded an admittedly questionable penalty after colliding with Omar Alderete and Luke O’Nien, only for VAR to overturn it. Or, best of all, when Destiny Udogie crossed from the left, just before the break, the ball fell to Solanke but Robin Roefs saved.
None of these were great chances or necessarily great football, but they were the kind of promising little moments which on a good day fall for you. And there was time for one more when Pedro Porro released Richarlison, who again failed to finish with conviction.
And the problem when things like this keep bouncing against you is that there is always a chance they will bounce against you at the opposite end, too. Tottenham’s defending to let Nordi Mukiele run at them was poor, but when his shot hit Micky van de Ven, it deflected in a way that left Antonin Kinsky no chance.
The biggest single problem Spurs have right now, even bigger than the injury crisis, is the total collapse of the players’ confidence. This is a team who have not won a league game since December, two managers and almost four months ago.
And anyone who has watched them this season knows that as soon as anything goes against them in a game, the players do not know how to cope. This was the story against Nottingham Forest, Atletico Madrid, Crystal Palace, Fulham and far too many other recent defeats to mention. And this is precisely the type of ingrained issue which is very difficult for De Zerbi to just click his fingers and change.
So it was little surprise that Spurs offered very little after Mukiele’s goal. But there was still another slice of bad luck to come, when Cristian Romero was nudged into Kinsky by Brobbey, colliding with his ‘keeper in such a way that he left the field in tears with a suspected knee injury.
At the end, when Van de Ven was sitting exhausted on the floor, Udogie down on his haunches, it was a far too familiar sight: Spurs looking beaten, almost broken, adrift with nothing to cling to. Tottenham are now two points behind West Ham United, and three behind Nottingham Forest and Leeds United. Every red light is flashing.
Of course, there are still six games left. When Spurs host Brighton on Saturday, they will have a partisan crowd behind them, as well as another week of De Zerbi’s coaching in the bank. But if they are to stay up, they need to win — not just one game but two or maybe three. Right now, they look like they have totally forgotten how to do that, their last league win fading further from memory by the week.
To win those games without playing well, they will need to be lucky. Far luckier than they have been for months. De Zerbi somehow needs to convince them, as remote as it seems, that things might yet turn their way.