When Tottenham managerial reigns end – which they do a lot – you usually get something pretty spectacular on the way out.
Trust Ange Postecoglou to produce the most spectacularly entertainingly stupid one yet. He’s been on the brink for a while now. His injury-addled squad has flirted with humiliation already this month at Tamworth and have been sinking towards the fringes of a relegation scrap for some time now.
They are no longer on the fringes of that scrap; they are right in it and on all available evidence powerfully unready and ill-prepared for what lies ahead in the months to come. They could absolutely go.
There’s little doubt that Postecoglou isn’t the only problem at Spurs, a club that is undeniably rotting from the head. It’s very possible he isn’t the biggest one. But he’s reached the point where he isn’t just not the solution but a genuine aggravating factor.
Spurs’ currently available squad is quite bad, but it really shouldn’t be this bad. It would be a major surprise now were he to survive Monday, never mind the season, after Spurs contrived not only to lose chaotically 3-2 at relegation rivals Everton but do so in a way where it really should have been far, far worse than it already was.
There is still some fading sympathy, for the transfer business, for the injuries, and above all for the very simple fact that almost everyone who has to manage Spurs appears to have their brain entirely melted by the experience within 18 months.
But he’s done. And he can’t really have any complaints. He has been given a longer leash than any other manager would have been or has been granted here. Every Spurs manager who has departed from Pochettino to Conte via Mourinho, Nuno and even the occasional interim, was binned off for less than this. It is no snap judgement to say Postecoglou’s race is run; this is a team that has won nine Premier League games in the last nine months and lost twice that number.
It probably still needed something this catastrophically, abysmally bad for Postecoglou not to at least survive the month and be granted the chance to at least see the cup runs through to their inevitably Spursy conclusions.
But he cannot survive this. This is Everton. Everton. They may for sure be enjoying a bit of new-manager bounce under David Moyes, but this really did feel far more like an old-manager crash.
We had been expecting to see a Sarr-Bergvall-Gray midfield for Spurs. It at least promised to offer a glimpse of a potentially exciting future amid the swirling shod of their current campaign. What we got instead was the worst attempt at a back three we think we’ve ever seen. Just to be the worst Spurs back three we’ve ever seen is already quite the effort.
During that particular 45-minute experiment, one which simply has to be the last of Postecoglou’s very interesting yet ultimately just far too stupid attempt to make something of a club that cannot be managed, Everton scored one-sixth of their total Premier League goals for the season.
The Dr Tottenham phenomenon is well known – and, in the interests of fairness it should be noted is one that significantly pre-dates Ange – but rarely have its effects looked as rejuvenating and potent as this.
An Everton team that had failed to score in nine of its previous 11 league games was suddenly knocking the ball around like prime Barcelona, carving Spurs open at will and seemingly without much effort.
Both Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Iliman Diaye scored beautiful goals. We really, really don’t want to downgrade or denigrate their efforts, but they were the sort of beautiful goals where very good play is undoubtedly made to look even better than it was by the near total lack of involvement or even apparent interest from defenders.
In spirit if not necessarily aesthetics, both came from the same school as Son Heung-min’s Puskas winner for Spurs against Burnley back in the days when he could run 90 yards without a defender getting to him; now he can’t make it five.
If watching the Postecoglou era end in real time was one thing, watching the Son era also come to a close will bring true lasting pain for Spurs fans. Rarely have we seen a player so good lose it all so fast.
For all that Spurs were dreadful in that first 45 minutes, and they really, really were, a Son at anything like his base level of performance over the last decade would have scored at least one of the two clear chances he was provided.
The first, where he was reeled in by James Tarkowski without even getting a shot away was a particularly vexing sight given Son’s near peerless record in one-on-ones across multiple Premier League seasons. The sad scuffed finish straight at Jordan Pickford spoke not so much of the loss of the physical attributes that once made him great as his mind struggling to cope with his painful new reality.
Postecoglou tried to remedy things in the second half, and in fairness it was a change that certainly remained true to his ethos as Richarlison replaced Radu Dragusin, a player who appears to exist primarily as Spurs fans’ punishment for all the mean things they said about Davinson Sanchez.
A back four was restored, Son shifted left and Richarlison sent through the middle. It made no real difference to the flow of the game in the early parts of the second half. Everton continued to create chances at will and really should have extended their lead.
Antonin Kinsky had a horrible game at Arsenal. It damns the rest of Spurs’ efforts at Goodison to note he was excellent here.
But this is Spurs and this is Everton, so of course there was still some late nonsense. Spurs scored twice because of course they scored twice, the perfect number to make you question your judgement without actually impacting the hugely damaging result.
The first from Dejan Kulusevski was a brilliantly clever finish after Pickford had gone walkabout, the second poked home by Richarlison – of course Richarlison, given his fondness for goals both at Everton and in devastating defeats – from a superb Mikey Moore cross.
Thoroughly typical all round from two teams who set out at all times to make their fans’ lives thoroughly miserable at worst but never anything other than unbearably and unnecessarily stressful even at their best.
And it was also increasingly typical of late-era Postecoglou. This twelfth – twelfth! – Premier League defeat of the season for Spurs somehow ended up as the eleventh to have come by only a single goal. It sort of looks like it’s a bit unlucky and it could change, but also it absolutely isn’t and won’t. So, so many of those defeats have flattered Spurs as thoroughly as this one did. Even the one defeat by a wider margin – the genuinely insane 6-3 against Liverpool – could and should have been much much worse.
But more relevant than the specifics of the scoreline is the false hope. And it is false. Spurs nearly found an unlikely way back into this game. Spurs nearly do a lot of things. But the amount of credit for nearly digging yourself out of a ridiculously deep hole of your own making should be so small as to be barely measurable.
The second-half fightback, such as it was, cannot be used as any kind of cover for what was, for 75 minutes, a long and mortifying resignation letter.
Enough is surely enough, mate. Spurs are where they are; even those who cling to the belief, aided perhaps by those two late goals, that Postecoglou might somehow still be the manager for some possible bright future really should accept that he is absolutely not the manager for their darkly-comic present.
Give it Dychey until end of the season.
