There are few bleaker things in football than the point where absolutely everyone has realised a manager is doomed, apart from the suits who actually have to make the decision.
Spurs fans know Thomas Frank is done. The Spurs players definitely know Thomas Frank is done. Most clearly of all, Thomas Frank knows Thomas Frank is done.
In the cruellest of twists, the only person among the 60000 at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for Spurs’ latest barrel-scraping nadir against West Ham who doesn’t yet realise Thomas Frank is done is Vinai Venkatesham, the new post-Levy CEO who actually has to make the decision.
His mule-like refusal to accept the evidence of his own eyes and ears appears to tell us two things.
One, that we must surely all have been wrong in framing the appointment of Frank as Daniel Levy’s last act at Spurs. The timing of announcements may suggest it was his call, but it can’t have been, can it?
The refusal to admit a clear and obvious mistake makes even less sense if we continue to act as if the clear and obvious mistake Spurs’ ‘new’ rebadged Lewis Family regime are denying isn’t even their own.
And two, Vinai really did let pulling a Homer with the Mikel Arteta decision at Arsenal convince him he is some kind of manager-whisperer.
He isn’t. Frank is a dud, entirely out of his depth and wholly unsuited to a job that would right now be astonishingly hard for the right man, never mind such a conspicuously wrong man.
And at some point in the very near future even Venkatesham and the other new-broom suits in the Spurs boardroom are going to have to accept reality. Having already waited long enough to allow a disappointing season to descend into an undignified relegation fight, further delay will soon reach a point where it becomes existential.
There is a match against Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday night. It is, of course, a vaguely inconvenient irrelevance and it does seem like Frank will be in charge of that.
Win or lose (SPOILER: they will almost certainly lose) it makes no real difference. We don’t think we’re speaking out of turn in suggesting Spurs will not win the Champions League this season either way and, thanks to the dreary design of your modern Champions League, they will still likely end up in the play-offs at worst even if they lose both their remaining league-stage games.
But after Dortmund comes a third successive Premier League six-pointer, against Burnley. Having lost against a team with no wins in 11 games and then a team with no wins in 10 games, they really cannot afford to lose another one of these.
After Burnley, Spurs play Man City, Man United, Newcastle and Arsenal. They have already lost the chance to get a new-manager bounce in games against Sunderland, Bournemouth and West Ham; even if they act today they are now looking at hoping for a bounce against some teams that are actually good.
They’ll probably beat City, obviously, but outside that it’s hard to see where points currently come from in any of these games – Burnley included – if Frank remains at the wheel. If they are still below 30 points when that run of games is done, it is no longer an outside chance of being sucked into relegation trouble.
The clear desire from the Spurs board to at least muddle through until summer and see where they’re at might be about to collide hard with a far more uncomfortable reality. At some point during that run, pennies will drop and Frank will be sacked.
But then what? Part of the desire to muddle through the season could be about the potential for a bigger pool of suitable managerial candidates to exist in the summer. Especially after the World Cup.
Yet if, as looks increasingly certain, that luxury is not one that will remain open to Spurs, what should they do?
Do they go the Man United interim route? Appointing a former Ajax head coach as Frank’s new assistant manager was certainly an interesting move last week, one that could just as easily be seen as readying a knife for the manager’s back as showing him support.
But it doesn’t really change things. Say it is John Heitinga as interim for the rest of the season; on what grounds could you possibly expect that to prompt meaningful improvement at the speed Spurs will require it?
It’s easy when watching Spurs to think it can’t get any worse than it already is. But they’ve just spent the last few games reminding us that, in the immortal words of Mick McCarthy: it can.
But it also is genuinely now quite hard for it to get much worse. After the last two league defeats, and with the recent improvement and greater resilience being shown by your Wolveses and Burnleys, it is neither difficult nor mischievous to suggest Spurs are as of right now the single worst team in the division.
It does feel like almost anything must by definition be better than… whatever this spectacle of collective misery now is. But if Spurs are going to try, as they really probably should, to appoint a proper new manager now then it’s very far from easy.
One lesson Spurs must learn from Frank, despite their proud record of never learning any lessons from anything ever, is that appointing an impressive and overachieving manager from a well-run club is a bigger gamble than you might think.
We’ve seen it with Graham Potter and we’re seeing it now with Frank. It’s not just how exposed they’ve looked outside the sensible and functional environments in which they flourished; it’s how effortlessly the clubs they’ve left have carried on without them.
Neither Brighton nor now Brentford have missed those once-venerated managers at all. What was hailed at the time as a fine manager doing great work has turned out to just be a well-run club being a well-run club.
That means this morning’s links with Fabian Hurzeler should raise concern. But makes someone like Oliver Glasner potentially much more interesting.
On the face of it, it’s an appointment that has all the same issues as Frank or Hurzeler or another stepping-stone appointment. The football isn’t a perfect fit for Spurs, and there is no record of success at a club of comparable size. But at least he isn’t a manager who has flourished only in high-functioning environments. Crystal Palace are not Brighton or Brentford, and that means something.
Of course, there is also something delicious about the idea of Glasner flouncing out of Palace in righteous indignation at the suits’ lack of support for the football side of operations and then turning up immediately at Spurs.
What Glasner’s vague if unconvincing suitability really highlights, though, is just how large Spurs’ problems now are. They have an obviously doomed manager who should have been sacked weeks ago, but no obvious route out of trouble under anyone else. The gettable managers aren’t quite right, and the right managers aren’t quite gettable.
The right profile of manager for what Spurs have become is something of a unicorn. The clearest indicator of that is that a manager of the perfect profile is out there, right now. Xabi Alonso is precisely the right fit.
There are no guarantees of success anywhere in football, and that’s more true of Spurs than just about anyone else. But if you were looking for just the right level of manager to have the best possible chance, then a man who Knows The League and has achieved astonishing things with a club like Bayer Leverkusen before coming unstuck at a club like Real Madrid is the ideal kind of thing.
And there is absolutely no chance of that happening, because Xabi Alonso isn’t an idiot.
So while certainty exists on what Spurs must do first of all, there is no clarity whatsoever about what happens next. And that’s really even more important.
They can go interim, they can have another go at finding an overachieving manager further down the food chain who can manage to replicate that success at the world’s stupidest football club, they can make a doomed play for the actual perfect manager for them who is certain to have better offers.
None of it looks that appealing. But what they absolutely must do now is something. It should already have been clear that ‘do nothing’ was already the worst option even before the West Ham unpleasantness.
