The good news for Ange Postecoglou is that it seems relatively straightforward to recover from being Tottenham manager: his two immediate predecessors, Antonio Conte and Nuno Espírito Santo, are top of Serie A with Napoli and third in the Premier League with Nottingham Forest respectively. As the banner unveiled on Sunday by Spurs fans during the defeat by Leicester read: “24 years, 16 managers, one trophy”. Nobody really looks at Tottenham any more and thinks the problem is the manager.
But it is usually the manager who pays the price. Their past 10 league games have yielded four points. They have just lost against Everton, who had not won in six, and Leicester, who had lost their previous seven. They’ve reached a stage at which it feels possible that they could lose any given fixture. The only saving grace is that they are 1-0 up against Liverpool after the home leg of their Carabao Cup semi-final and that they are sixth in the Europa League table, assured of automatic passage to the last 16 if they beat the Swedish side Elfsborg on Thursday.
Yet the cups are almost part of the problem, placing further strain on a squad already hammered by injury and fatigue. What may be their salvation, what may bring Postecoglou the trophy he famously always wins in his second season at a club, is also what is undermining their league form. Spurs were without 10 frontline players on Sunday and Postecoglou admitted Pape Matar Sarr, who managed 54 minutes after missing the win in Hoffenheim on Thursday with a knock, probably should not have started.
So much is going wrong at Tottenham that it’s difficult to know where to start but, even taking all the issues with personnel into account, even acknowledging that the hand Postecoglou is trying to play is not a strong one, the performance on Sunday was poor and one in a string of disappointing displays. Postecoglou’s time at Spurs can be divided into two chunks: there were the first 10 games when he was the gruff Australian, the normal bloke cutting through the Premier League’s nonsense to take 26 points; and there are the 51 games since, beginning with the notorious nine-man high‑line defeat against Chelsea, which have yielded just 64 points: 10 games at 2.60 points per game followed by 51 games at 1.25 points per game.
The midfield against Leicester was shambolic. The two more advanced players in the central triangle, usually Sarr and Lucas Bergvall, would go off pressing but because the back four is sitting a little deeper these days – as Spurs try to be less exposed – the deepest‑lying midfielder, usually Rodrigo Bentancur, was left with space in front of him. Leicester, with Jordan Ayew and Bobby De Cordova-Reid taking turns out of possession to drift from the flanks, seemed deliberately to be trying to provoke that space.
The two Leicester goals stemmed from issues with Spurs’ cover. For the first, Pedro Porro had advanced and nobody had dropped in to fill the space so that when Bentancur was dispossessed De Cordova‑Reid was in swathes of empty grass and able to measure his cross for Jamie Vardy. For the second, Porro’s pass to Bentancur was underhit and possession lost and nobody had filled the gap left by the Uruguayan, giving Bilal El Khannous space in the centre of the pitch through which to advance, before measuring a shot inside the post. Not for the first time this season there was an unforgivable openness about Tottenham that is less to do with the individual players than with the basic structure. Perhaps fatigue, the youth of the side and frequent changes of personnel play their part but those issues ultimately come back to the manager.
Yet given the way the squad’s slenderness has been exposed, it is also fair to wonder whether the club might not have been rather more supportive of Postecoglou in this transfer window. The Czech goalkeeper Antoníin Kinskýy has arrived for £12.5m to cover an obvious problem, although it’s not ideal for a 21-year-old to arrive and be thrust immediately into action. But it is baffling other support hasn’t been offered, even if only on loan; if a couple of players don’t arrive before the transfer deadline next Monday, the implication will be that Daniel Levy has already written off Postecoglou.
Even if players are added – and given Spurs’ wages-to-turnover ratio is a Premier League low 47%, there must be plenty of PSR wriggle room – it will be hard to avoid the conclusion that they should have been signed in the summer. Whatever the shortcomings of Postecoglou – at least some of which can be explained by the way the relentlessness of the Premier League addles minds as form goes awry – the ongoing pattern is the result of a club trying to do things on the cheap. It feels absurd now that they were one of the six English clubs involved in the Super League project: they lie 15th, undone by a chronic failure of ambition.
This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.
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