Our Spidey-sense is a-tingling and we think things are going to go really, massively and cartoonishly wrong for Spurs and Thomas Frank.
The sheer scale of the Premier League’s mid-table mediocrity this season and more high-profile crises elsewhere has shielded them a bit up to now, but things feel like they’re just starting to come to a head.
PSG away isn’t the ideal fixture to try and bounce back from the unacceptable NLD surrender, but it’s also kind of a free hit. Really it’s the upcoming Premier League home game against Fulham that will offer the true bellwether test of just how bad things are getting.
If the miserable Tottenham Hotspur Stadium form continues in that one, Frank suddenly finds himself in Daniel Farke levels of trouble, we reckon.
So what’s gone wrong? Lots, and most of it appears to only be getting worse. Here are 10.
Small-timery
There are worrying signs that Thomas Frank simply hasn’t fully understood the change in his circumstances. Spurs are a daft football club in many ways but they are a big one and they come with big-club attention. You just can’t get away with small-timing the job and hoping to fly under the radar. It won’t work.
The safety-first paradox
Thomas Frank isn’t the first manager to stumble into this head-scratcher and won’t be the last, but the moment you allow safety-first football to become an overriding obsession you are in fact playing the most high-risk, high-wire football of all due to the need for absolutely everything to go right.
In the last few weeks Spurs have played high-profile London derbies against Chelsea and Arsenal in which their approach gave them almost no chance of getting anything from either.
Home discomforts
Spurs’ dire home form goes back long before Frank’s time. But his methods have done nothing to improve a record that now stands at just three Premier League wins in 20 games over more than a year.
And it does make grim sense that a manager who has made defensive solidity his sole focus would deliver better results on the road than at home. And harrowing as that NLD defeat was, it is still Spurs’ first on the road this season after four wins and a draw.
But he has to find a better way of managing home games, starting with a Fulham clash this weekend when he and the players and the fans could all do with seeing something compelling to lift the mood.
Because right now it feels uncomfortably certain that it’s those high-flying away numbers that are going to move towards the relegation-bothering home numbers rather than the other way round.
The unique impossibility of the Spurs job
We’ve been very critical of Frank’s recent mis-steps. The small-timery of the Chelsea defeat, the entrenchment of a safety-first philosophy to the extent that ‘let’s sort out the defence first’ has become ‘only the defence matters’.
But we do have sympathy, because we do think the Tottenham job might be fundamentally impossible given the unique nature of it. You can argue among yourselves about whether Spurs are the smallest of the Premier League’s giants or the biggest of the Premier League’s strivers, but whichever answer you land on you end up with Spurs in a league of one among Premier League teams.
And it means that the pool of managers actually suited to this neither one thing nor t’other job is desperately limited.
There are lots of managers too small for the job and plenty of managers too big for it. And Spurs have now appointed a great deal of them, lurching from one extreme to the other, with no real lasting success either way.
There are managers like Nuno Espirito Santo and, with increasing certainty, Frank, who just can’t quite handle the glare of their new reality where every defeat, every sub-par performance is a talking point. A world where, unlike their previous jobs, one good result puts less credit in the bank than one bad one withdraws.
And then you have your Antonio Contes and Jose Mourinhos, managers far too big for the job who quickly find themselves appalled by the small-timery of the club itself and act like they are doing a vast and unreturnable favour just by being here.
The only exceptions in the last 20-odd years have been the lightning-bottling efforts of Ange Postecoglou, a one-off maverick who managed to deliver one great moment even as the whole thing was collapsing around him, a seasoned Premier League campaigner in Harry Redknapp whose self-fulfilling caricature status belied a sharp footballing mind and keener understanding than most of what Tottenham were, and the best of the lot in Mauricio Pochettino who was the ultimate right place, right time coach-on-the-way-up who arrived to find a squad of just the right profile to mould to his methods.
Pochettino’s subsequent struggles at bigger clubs suggest he may in fact be the most Spurs manager ever, the one true believer who actually fits with Spurs right in the tiny sliver they occupy in the footballing Venn Diagram.
Can Spurs ever find another one of those? We start to wonder. Could it be Oliver Glasner?
The injury crisis
We’ve done the vague ‘is Spurs just f*cking impossible for anyone?’ pondering; the more tangible mitigation for Frank lies in an injury list whose length and breadth is such that only Arsenal among Premier League teams would be able to ride it out.
We know Arsenal could do it, because they are at this exact moment doing it. Spurs cannot cope with the loss of their two most incisive creative players in James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski to long-term absences, while Dominic Solanke is surely closing on a world record for most time spent ‘a couple of weeks away’ from a return to action.
Chuck in the number of frustrating setbacks suffered by Randal Kolo Muani, who arrived on loan from PSG well short of match sharpness having been part of the Parisiens’ bomb squad, and you do have some explanation beyond the manager’s own shortcomings or proclivities for why Spurs have so thoroughly lost or forgotten the fundamentals of attacking football.
Bergvall reluctance
But still the manager doesn’t help himself. In the absence of Maddison and Kulusevski, the Spurs squad contains one player who possesses the crucial ability to knit defence and attack. One player who has the vision and passing range to break lines and try and move Spurs up the pitch with precision and conviction rather than hopes and prayers.
And Thomas Frank is reluctant to use him. That player is Lucas Bergvall. He is still 19, still very much a raw talent and it makes sense to have some care about how he’s used. He is not Maddison, he is not Kulusevski.
But he is preternaturally gifted and he is the closest thing Spurs now have to anything like the attributes those two players provide in the unlocking of opposition defences. Frank’s reluctance to use Bergvall does now, with increasing frequency, leave us with Spurs not even trying to pick those locks.
The Chelsea game in which Bergvall was forced off with a head injury a few minutes in is the only game he has started that Spurs have lost in the Premier or Champions League this season. His other seven starts have yielded three wins and four draws.
As he returns from concussion after that head injury, he simply has to be more involved if Frank intends to show any ambition at all.
The Palhinha-Bentancur double pivot
Which brings us on to this one. The awkwardness here is that neither Palhinha nor Bentancur is playing badly. Both have been among Spurs’ better performers this season, with Palhinha in particular adding a much-needed heft to what had been for so long a featherweight midfield.
He is, essentially, the player Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg thought he was. Palhinha showcases his enforcer status by tackling everybody all the time, and on balance that is probably better than Hojbjerg’s preferred method of pointing at things a lot.
The encouragement, albeit potentially quite misleading encouragement, is that both actually have reasonable numbers for progressive actions. Palhinha in particular has managed to pop up in more goalscoring positions than might have been expected. We can also all surely enjoy the playmaker’s assists he has already contributed to the cause this season, putting goals on an absolute plate for Micky van de Ven against Copenhagen and Richarlison against Arsenal.
He has perfected the tackle-assist and it could be game-changing. Bentancur remains a classy midfield operator.
But Frank’s repeated insistence on deploying both of them together at the expense of a Bergvall or Sarr just sees the Spurs midfield descend too quickly too often into stodge, capable of destruction but not creation. Tackle-assists notwithstanding.
The No. 10 vacuum
It was always asking an awful lot for Xavi Simons to come in and just instantly adapt to English football at one of its most consistently awkward clubs and make the No. 10 position his own.
But Tottenham, shorn as they are of alternatives, did also really quite urgently need him to do that. Moribund/non-existent as their attacking football so often appears to be, they are still actually scoring a reasonable number of goals. Potentially unsustainably, sure, looking at an xG over-performance that can no longer be explained away as easily as it once was by the presence of elite finishers in Harry Kane and Son Heung-min, but reasonable nonetheless.
And that’s because at least there is at least something coming from the wide areas, notably Mohammed Kudus in the early days of the season but also bits from Brennan Johnson or Wilson Odobert.
The problem is more central, behind or alongside the striker. Richarlison, bless him, has contributed five goals which is perfectly adequate, but there remains a creative vacuum directly behind him. No real link between the midfield and attack.
The attempted solution Frank hit upon at Arsenal? Do away with the No. 10 altogether. Clever, but didn’t really work. Something needs to, and soon.
The goalkeeper
We like Guglielmo Vicario a lot. He is an enormously entertaining keeper to watch. The problem, though, with enormously entertaining keepers is that only very rarely does that equate to being very good or reliable keepers.
Vicario feels like much more of an Angeball keeper than a Frankball one. In a team built on risk and adventure, why not have a similarly minded keeper? One confident sweeping up behind a high line and capable of the absurd just feels right.
But in a team built on more prosaic foundations, he looks a man out of place.
Vicario’s two main attributes as a keeper are saving shots that look unsaveable and failing to save shots that he has made appear unsaveable. We think he might be the best goalkeeper in the world at dealing with shots from five yards out, and the worst at dealing with shots from 20 yards out.
We really aren’t sure if he’s actually good or not. It all feels deliciously Spurs, but just not very Frank. Compounding the problem is that everything we’ve seen of Vicario’s understudy Antonin Kinsky suggests he’s a keeper cut from similar cloth.
Udogie’s fragility
We’d be reluctant to suggest Spurs have flowed at any point this season. Even in the games where goals have come – and there have been a few of them despite it always feeling somehow incongruous – it’s all looked like a lot of hard work.
The closest Spurs have come to looking natural going forward has been through Pedro Porro and Mohammed Kudus linking up on the right and Destiny Udogie doing likewise with Wilson Odobert on the left.
The problem is the sheer infrequency with which Spurs have been able to see the latter, because unfortunately Udogie appears to be fashioned almost entirely from glass.
Djed Spence has, to his enormous credit, turned himself into enormously effective defensive cover on both flanks but he can have a stultifying effect on the attack, which in a team already struggling to knit things together going forward is a double problem.
The fact Spence is the only real alternative option within the Spurs squad for both full-back positions is something we fully expect to bite Spurs even harder on the arse at some point than it is now with its less dramatic but still tangible impact on their attacking play.
