defying season takes another huge turn as unlikely hero emerges
There are lots of ways to try and understand the sheer absurdity of this Tottenham season.
We tried it with numbers earlier in the week, and entirely fittingly, that has now been largely overtaken by events. We’re not saying that us pointing out Nottingham Forest had an underwhelming goal difference is the entire reason they went out and put seven past Brighton, but we are comfortable claiming, what, 10 or 15 or 35 per cent of the credit.
Another way to look at it now is by deciding who the best player is. At the start of the season, most would probably have agreed Son Heung-min was Tottenham’s best player. Within a couple of months of the season it was clear that it was in fact Dejan Kulusevski.
We were not entirely sure how to feel about that. We like him an awful lot, but he still kind of feels to us like a very good Big Six player but not quite a ‘best player at the club’ kind of character.
Now we must all try and come to terms with the even more alarming but now surely undeniably true fact that Tottenham’s best player is Djed Spence.
Spurs’ season has been a largely horrifying crisitunity of one sort or another, and it’s one that’s been taken by several players.
Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall have been significant positives for Spurs during the darkest moments, while the opportunities for the academy kids Ange Postecoglou has now been forced to turn to reached a zenith in the Europa League on Thursday night when three players – the oldest of them a 20-year-old Dane Scarlett, who was at the time only the fifth-youngest Spurs player on the pitch – scored their first senior goals for the club.
But no player’s rise during this season of such bleak unpleasantness has been less expected than Spence’s. Gray and Mikey Moore and Bergvall and the like were players expected to have significant Spurs careers, just maybe not quite so significant quite so soon. Spence, at 24, was a player whose Spurs career – such as it was – already felt like it could be discussed in the past tense.
So far from first-team thoughts was he that he wasn’t even registered in the Europa League squad at the start of the season and – crucially – not one person at the time thought this a surprising or noteworthy call.
To watch him here, though, was to wonder at just how that could ever have been the case. Playing out of position at left-back, as he has pretty much since returning to the side through necessity towards the end of last year, he produced surely his best performance yet in a Spurs shirt in the toughest of circumstances.
There was a collective wince when the teamsheet revealed no sign of Micky van de Ven even on the bench after his return to the starting XI on Thursday night. The idea of Spurs taking all three points here at that time seemed absurd; the idea of them doing so via just a fifth Premier League clean sheet of the season palpably absurd.
Yet that is precisely what they did, with Spence pocketing Bryan Mbeumo in startlingly impressive fashion.
The entire Spurs defence – and team – deserve huge credit for this wildly out-of-character backs-to-the-wall performance. Brentford sent 40-odd crosses into the Spurs penalty area and created almost nothing clear-cut from any of it. Antonin Kinsky was strong and decisive when he needed to be – another narrative-busting effort – while Gray and Ben Davies put not one foot wrong.
This is still just one game and one result, albeit a crucial one that lifts Spurs back to 10 points above the relegation zone ahead of a run of huge games across multiple competitions in one of the oddest seasons ever. And there’s a sense of even this kind of belligerent, heroic defensive effort at the home of a team that has scored more home goals than anyone else just being more Spursy banter. Of course they keep a clean sheet here after shipping five goals to Everton and Leicester.
The opening goal was even the sort of goal Spurs more generally concede than score, a corner swung into the six-yard box causing a keeper to panic and a confused defender to knock the ball into the goal off his back with no Spurs player within three yards of it. Bonus points for the fact Spurs hadn’t in fact registered a shot on target at the time they scored, or indeed for several minutes after.
The second goal was a much more Good Spurs kind of affair, a patient counter-attack involving the entire team and ending with a clever Pape Sarr finish.
To return to numbers, it does mean that Spurs still haven’t completed a one-goal win in the Premier League this season. But what they have done now is prove at last that they can win in adversity, that they can tough it out rather than only being able to win games in which they saunter three or four goals clear.
It is something you might ideally do before February, but better late than never; a cliche that might yet still apply to the winning of trophies. This is a Spurs season that defies logic and in which nothing should be ruled out.
