After another few days of widespread nonsense throughout the Spurs Universe (the only universe that matters) we find ourselves wondering if there isn’t a broader fable, a more general cautionary tale to be found among their slapstick shenanigans.
To be very, very clear from the outset here; we’re not saying winning trophies is bad. Winning trophies is a very good thing to do. It is nice and fun and good and teams should definitely be trying to do it.
But you can’t make it your whole identity. We’re all guilty here, of course. We all fed into the pot-dodging narrative around Spurs. We all said, lads, look, you’re just going to have to go and win something now, it’s absurd.
Yet for normal, healthy, sane football clubs winning trophies is a product of doing all the other stuff right that gets you into position to win trophies. Spurs did none of that to finally end their trophy drought, preferring instead to burn everything else to the ground in the single-minded pursuit of a particularly winnable Europa League campaign that came during a Premier League season with a particularly woeful bottom three.
Ange Postecoglou wasn’t wrong to prioritise as he did once it was clear how the season was panning out. By mid-February it was clear that Spurs a) could definitely win the Europa League, b) had f*cked their league season into the sun but crucially c) were in absolutely no danger of relegation thanks to the sheer incompetence of the bottom three.
From a football and business sense, the only rational option to take at that point was to pour everything into that Europa League campaign with its twin prizes of Actual Trophy and Champions League football.
But let’s not pretend that this is how normal big clubs go about things. Thomas Frank has acknowledged this when talking about competing on multiple fronts. He’s not been right about everything or even perhaps very much at all in recent weeks, but he was right about this despite the Daily Mail pretending not to understand his very obvious meaning for comic effect.
Spurs haven’t competed on multiple fronts since the days of Mauricio Pochettino. It’s worth remembering that even as his downward-curve team bantered their way to the 2019 Champions League final, they also still finished fourth in the league.
Winning the Europa League got a monkey off Spurs’ back. It gave Spurs fans a magnificent night and a huge celebration, as well as rattling all manner of rival fans. That’s tremendous. That’s a huge part of what football is about.
But what was it all for? What was it meant to achieve? There is no sense whatsoever that they will kick on from that success. They couldn’t even enjoy it for more than a fortnight before the manager who had orchestrated their best night for a generation was sacked. By the end of the summer the man who sacked him had also been sacked.
Six months on from That Night In Bilbao and the wildly cathartic open-bus celebration that followed, the fans and players hate each other, supporters are booing their own goalkeeper six minutes into matches and senior players are bollocking teenagers just for having the temerity to applaud the fans they now despise.
We cannot think of a starker representation of ‘trophies are great but they aren’t everything’ than the idea supporting Tottenham 2020-2025 has been better than supporting Tottenham 2015-2019 was.
That might be the most important lesson of all from winning the Europa League. That, yes, it was a great night. But it was only one night. For several years under Pochettino, Spurs fans were actually able to enjoy most of their matches. To look forward to them, even. To actually enjoy the whole idea of being a Spurs fan for an extended period of time rather than just for one (brilliant) night.
And while the way Spurs and Postecoglou went about achieving their Europa League success was perfectly correct in the unusual circumstances in which they found themselves, something was broken in the process. This is now a group of players used to losing, and more than that used to losing without consequence.
Standards have been allowed to fall to ludicrously low levels, where even such a catastrophically self-inflicted home defeat to a Fulham side who had lost five straight away games is no longer deemed unacceptable.
Where the response of players and manager to the boiling anger and frustrations of fans, many of them with season tickets currently working out at over £700 per Premier League win over the last 12 months, is to conclude it must be the fans that are wrong.
No, it isn’t ideal for your own fans to be booing their own goalkeeper after six minutes of a game. But you know what else is sub-optimal? Being 2-0 down against a team with no away win all season six minutes into a game after managing to win three home games out of your last 20.
Another thought that occurs here is that one of Daniel Levy’s most vital yet under-appreciated tasks over the last 20 years or more has been to act as lightning rod for all that fan anger that bubbles up from time to time.
It was quite literally a thankless task, but we do find ourselves wondering whether the Fulham scenes would have panned out differently with Levy in the house in his oft-performed role of pantomime villain.
For nearly a quarter of a century, when Spurs fans have been pissed off, they have known instinctively where to aim their ire and displeasure. Without that swiftly identifiable cartoon baddie, it’s all far less certain, far less focused, and before you know where you are you’re six minutes into a game and you’re booing the absolute f*ck out of your own goalkeeper.
We’ve seen it argued that Spurs players channelled their frustration into an improved performance to grab a rare point at Newcastle from a 2-2 draw. It’s an appealing argument, especially given the way the away fans – who have, it should be noted, seen most of Spurs’ better work over recent months – rallied round Vicario and the sheer main character energy of Cristian Romero’s refusal to accept either objective reality or his own limitations.
But while it was without doubt an improved result, was the performance any better? Not really. There was still a desperate lack of creativity and cohesion to their attacking play, and they still relied on a centre-back scoring twice to get them something from a game in which they were conspicuously second best pretty much throughout.
Newcastle will wonder quite how they didn’t emerge from three points in a game they dominated and were even handed the added bonus of being given the first – and probably last – penalty from the big Clampdown On Holding, in which we discovered that getting your much smaller opponent in a headlock so they physically can’t look at the ball is in fact a very clever way of winning a spot-kick.
Because Spurs are Spurs, they salvaged a point from this game with goals either side of the penalty nonsense via a diving header and overhead kick – although contact any higher up Romero’s leg and we’d have to call it an overhead dick – from their centre-back.
That only widened the existing gulf between the quality of Spurs’ general play (arse-achingly, teeth-grindingly dull and ineffective) and the quality of the goals they somehow end up scoring despite themselves (Richarlison’s two Premier League goal-of-the-season contenders, Micky van de Ven’s Son Heung-min Puskas recreation, even the intricately worked opening goal against PSG).
It’s all just such powerfully Spurs content, but the nagging question remains as to what, precisely, winning a trophy has actually done for them in the grand scheme. There is arguably even less purpose and direction to them now that one, overriding obsession of the last few years has been achieved.
The only real subsequent positive impact has been its utility as a shield against the barbs and jibes about all the other Spursy sh*t they’ve got up to since. Can you imagine just how wretched Spurs fans would feel now if they had all the rest of this and no actual trophy? Unbelievably grim.
Which isn’t nothing, but is it an all-conquering something? We’re really not sure it is.
We’re more convinced than ever that Spurs were happier, healthier and better in their Worra Trophy Era than their Actual Trophy Era.
