Igor Tudor ended Tottenham's disastrous Thursday night by speaking about a boat and which players wanted to be on it.
Spurs appear to drive their head coaches to despair and naval analogies, with Thomas Frank having declared before his departure that the north London club is a big super tanker that would take a while to turn. The problem with such analogies is they also conjure images of sinking ships.
The HMS Tottenham Hotspur is taking on water quickly because it's been punched full of holes by the decisions of the club's players, head coaches and hierarchy.
The Spurs fans are disgusted by what they are seeing. At half-time, as they headed to the concourse, a couple of them shouted across at the club analysts in the press area that they are "taking the club down".
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One supporter came back out from the interval and unleashed his feelings up towards those in the director's box, which included CEO Vinai Venkatesham, sporting director Johan Lange, long-serving chief operating and finance officer Matthew Collecott and one of the owners, Vivienne Lewis.
The fan bellowed 'You've killed the club' before proceeding to boo them all for a couple of minutes to make his point fully as stewards attempted to usher him back to his seat.
The supporters are thoroughly fed up with this current abomination of Spurs and some even claimed crowd noise was being pumped in or amplified over speakers inside the stadium.
They are tired of it all. They booed at half-time after they had booed Guglielmo Vicario when he next touched the ball after being slow to come out to Ismaila Sarr's second goal before the break.
In the 94th minute the travelling Palace fans sang 'You're going to boo in a minute' and the remaining Tottenham supporters left among the initial reported crowd of 60,213 duly played their part.
This was a game that turned horribly for the home side in the space of nine minutes in the first half.
First they got a reprieve on 29 minutes when Sarr's face was adjudged to have been offside after his shot had deflected up into the air off Pedro Porro and looped over Vicario and into the net.
Five minutes later and 19-year-old Archie Gray, Spurs' man of the match by a country mile, did well to take down Mathys Tel's cross and jink around two Palace defender before picking out Dominic Solanke to score.
A collective sigh of relief was let out inside the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Nine of Solanke's last 10 Premier League goals have come in that arena and it made it five goals in the striker's previous eight starts in the competition.
Gray has been involved in four league goals this season with two goals and two assists, and only Bournemouth’s Junior Kroupi, with eight, has more goal involvements as a teenager in the Premier League during this campaign.
Yet everything went wrong just four minutes later. A Jorgen Strand Larsen flick hit Micky van de Ven and ricocheted up into the air. Kevin Danso lost the battle with the Norwegian to head the ball and Van de Ven realised too late that it was going to fall for Sarr.
The Spurs captain for the night put his brain into standby mode, grabbing the Senegal international's arm as he ran towards goal and pulling him back and to the floor. Sarr tumbled and referee Andy Madley had no choice but to brandish the red card and award the penalty.
In one moment, Tottenham's hopes for the night were ripped apart. It was another example of a Spurs leader losing their head, Van de Ven learning from Cristian Romero, who was sitting out the final match of his four-game suspension for that wild lunge on Casemiro.
When football.london asked if Van de Ven had spoken to his team-mates at half-time or after the game, Igor Tudor would only say: "That's a private thing in the dressing room."
To be fair to Van de Ven, it was his first sending off for the club, but Spurs have the second most red cards in the Premier League with four and the most yellow cards with 72.
football.london asked Tudor if there was a discipline issue at the club and the Croatian bewilderingly responded without missing a beat: "Discipline? There is no discipline issue at all. Opposite."
Tottenham's press officer ended the press conference in that moment, probably knowing that no good was going to come from the 47-year-old continuing to answer questions.
Tudor's misplaced optimism felt similar to Frank's on the night before he was sacked.
"I will tell you now maybe it will sound strange but I believe more after this game than I believed before," he said. "I saw something. I need to choose the right guys because the boat is going in the direction that I want to go and needs to go and who is in the boat can stay.
"Otherwise they can leave the boat. So when the other players will come back and choosing the right [players] I’m sure we will have a good team and the victories will come back. It’s not easy to accept the moment where we are now but it is how it is."
Tudor, who has begun the match with a back three featuring Porro on its right, had responded to Sarr's converted penalty and the red card by getting the experienced Yves Bissouma and Conor Gallagher on to the pitch.
That ended Souza's first start for Spurs before he had completed a first half for the club while Randal Kolo Muani also came off and marched straight down the tunnel.
Despite the experienced additions, the hosts crumbled in added time in the first half, carved apart by Palace's star man Adam Wharton. First the 22-year-old seized on a ball won back after Tel's dangerous pass and played a perfect pass for Strand Larsen to poke between Vicario's legs.
Then Wharton played a pinpoint ball over the top into Sarr's run and Vicario realised the danger too late and the Palace attacker got to the ball first and prodded it past him, prompting boos and then those targeted at the Spurs keeper.
It meant Tottenham have conceded two or more goals in nine consecutive league matches for the first time in their history and a large number of fans departed into the night, knowing their club had let them down again.
If there's any credit to be awarded on a wretched evening, it's that the 10 men did perform reasonably well in the second half, Danso and Solanke forcing Dean Henderson into saves despite their numerical disadvantage. Ultimately though it always felt like a long shot.
Again a team of senior professionals was led by a teenager in Gray and the odd dribble by 20-year-old Tel and the more experienced Solanke.
The only time the remaining Spurs fans really had something to applaud in the second half was when last season's top scorer Brennan Johnson came off the bench for Palace. He reminded them of better times.
At the final whistle there were only more boos. Spurs have failed to win 11 successive league games for the first time since October 1975 and it is the first time they suffered defeat in five successive Premier League matches since November 2004.
The horrendous stats just keep coming. Not since 1935 have Tottenham gone on a longer winless run in league football to begin a calendar year than their 11 matches in 2026 so far. It was 15 back then but something needs to change otherwise that could easily be repeated.
For rather than repeating his football firefighting act at many previous clubs, Tudor has become only the second Spurs boss in the Premier League era to lose all of his first three games in charge, after Martin Jol did the same back in 2004.
Right now there is too much hope being pinned upon those players who might return around the international break such as Mohammed Kudus, Lucas Bergvall and Destiny Udogie, while only Dejan Kulusevski, sat inside the stadium on Thursday night, will know when he can finally return.
Palace boss Oliver Glasner said after the game: "It’s not my right to talk about Spurs, I talk about my team, about my players and for us it is a great win here because I remember when we started. We came here and lost 3-1. To be honest we had no chance to win this game.
"They were so much better and I see the last two games here we have won. I think this is just the development and progression of Crystal Palace."
As much as Palace have progressed, so Spurs have gone in the other direction - that night in Bilbao aside.
The Tottenham hierarchy must decide whether to give the Tudor reign more time to spark or that they have made yet another managerial mistake and frantically look for anyone who can give these players a sudden lift or kick out of their current trajectory.
A routine email sent to the media on Friday morning confirmed Tottenham's press conference time in Madrid with Tudor and a player on Monday night ahead of the Champions League last 16 first leg tie. That's not a cast iron guarantee that the Croatian will indeed be in the Spanish capital but it's a sign that some expect him to be.
The problem for Spurs is the lack of alternatives to step into the dugout, those available mostly reading like a panel of television pundits.
There's former Tottenham boss Harry Redknapp, who turns 80 next year and last managed in the Premier League 11 years ago when he left QPR second from bottom. He would be the nostalgic choice for a number of fans after seeing what Martin O'Neill has done at Celtic.
Others who have been mentioned are Tim Sherwood, mainly by Tim Sherwood, along with Jermain Defoe, who is understood to be yet to begin his pro licence work, and Ryan Mason, who would complete a caretaker hat-trick.
Along with Redknapp, seeing that quartet coming over the hill is something akin to the four horsemen of the Tottenham apocalypse.
Mason probably makes the most sense of the group if Tudor is unable to turn it around. The 34-year-old knows many of these players well, has been thrown into the job twice before and his teams scored plenty of goals and he will have learned plenty from his stint at struggling West Brom, who have not won in the nine games since his departure.
He could bring in someone like Defoe and include the slight more experienced Stuart Lewis, who is believed to be getting his pro licence at the end of this season. Matt Wells would have been a strong candidate for a caretaker role had he not already headed off across the world for his first managerial role at MLS side Colorado Rapids.
A certain Ange Postecoglou is also currently available, although his return - even on a temporary basis until the end of the season - would mean Venkatesham and Lange admitting a mistake was made in his departure.
Both men's positions will be under scrutiny by the Lewis family following the decisions made in the past 12 months at a club that is lurching from one mess to another.
For now though it is down to Tudor to stake his claim. He has had one arm tied behind his back with the work permit problems preventing him from being joined by his trusted number two Ivan Javorcic, a major part in getting his ideas across to the team.
football.london asked Tudor how difficult it was to be parachuted into a club where chaos lurks behind every door.
"What do you think? How difficult? It's very difficult. What you can do, we need to keep working. Keep working, believe. Working on everything. Try to help these guys, because I understand, you know, I see them every day, they care," he said.
"They care. They want to do, they try to do, but it's moments like that. So, what I said, stay calm, keep working and it will turn off. It will change the situation."
Whatever happens Spurs need to be saved, for relegation would be a disaster. It has been reported that dropping down to the Championship would leave a £250million black hole in the north London outfit's finances.
People all around the club, in various departments, fear for their jobs due to the cutbacks that would need to be made. This is about far more than simply playing in a lower division, it is about people's lives.
Solanke said after the game that the players had just had a frank and open discussion in the dressing room.
"We've just had a big conversation. We know the position we are in is definitely not where we want to be so we need to figure out how we are going to get out of it as soon as possible," said the England striker.
"We know there's been difficulties but we're not in a position to make any excuses anymore. We need to do the job on the pitch. It is easy to say we want to be better but we want to be better on the pitch.
"We need to fight and realise the position we are in. We know the club is not used to being in this position so we need to understand it and understand it's not going to be easy and we need to fight every single game, every single minute, to make sure we improve."
Spurs will fly to Madrid on Monday and it says everything about how bleak this season has become that a Champions League last 16 tie feels like a distraction from the more important matters at hand.
Romero will return and Van de Ven will be available, the injured Djed Spence and Radu Dragusin could return to the squad while Souza and Bissouma are not registered.
The only thing that can be taken from Madrid though really is some confidence to bleed into the nine remaining Premier League games. Spurs could need to win four or five of them if they are to fend off West Ham and Forest, who have momentum, not least in attack.
Something needs to jolt to life at Tottenham because they are currently sleepwalking into the Championship and that would impact far more than just the 11 people on the pitch.
