ROT SP URS
Kane misfiring, no new signings, Pochettino feeling the heat — what has gone wrong with Tottenham?
YOU can blame Harry Kane if you like. You can obsess over the summer transfer window. And you can fret about the World Cup. Add it all together though and the team that beat Manchester United 3-0 last month, apparently with some swagger, suddenly isn’t firing.
Mauricio Pochettino says he always saw this coming. Even when they had three wins from three at the start of the season, he says he had predicted this bump in the road. ‘I was never really happy,’ he said. ‘I was always thinking about providing the team with better tools because we knew this situation was going to happen. The performance wasn’t great. The reality is we need to improve a lot. And this type of game shows you that we need improving if we want to be contenders for some type of titles.’
That much is clear. And title races are not won in September. But in a league in which 100 points is the new benchmark (an average of 2.6 per game), two defeats in your first five games gives you little leeway.way. Spurs can only afford to lose one, maybe two more, if they expect to get close to the points total we might expect Manchester City to accumulate. Or Liverpool on this showing.
There are s ome obvious explanations. The lack of summer signings is an itch that will scratch right through until January. It’s the go-to reason for any pundit. Liverpool added £191million of players and look like they might challenge City. At Wembley, they had Alisson, Virgil van Dijk and Naby Keita playing, all of whom have been added since the 4-1 humiliation here last October.
It’s hard to argue with the subsequent improvement Liverpool have shown. How might Spurs have fared if they were blooding Jack Grealish in games such as this? It seems unlikely that he would have made the difference. The option of Wilfried Zaha’s pace would have added more danger.
However, the problem is perhaps as much that each setback now can only be viewed through the prism of the transfer window. That doesn’t mean it is the reason, but constant discussion is a millstone around the season. ‘I trust completely in my squad,’ repeated Pochettino. ‘Not one hundred per cent. Two hundred per cent. That was my feeling two months ago and that is my feeling now.’ Of course, it is the only answer he can give until January.
It dovetails with the other explanation to which Pochettino has alluded, the World Cup, which featured ten Spurs players in the semifinals. Add in the Asian Cup, which confined Heung Min- Son to the bench at Wembley, and that’s a team full of players some way off their best. ‘I don’t want now to complain about the World Cup,’ said Pochettino. ‘But from the beginning I told you, it’s a massive challenge to work with a team that arrives a few days before the start of the competition. But I am not worried, I promise you. We are going to win a lot of games.’
The principal worry must be over Harry Kane. An ankle injury last March seems to have curtailed his game. He is getting nowhere near the amount of shots per game as he was before them. His energy levels seem depleted.
How much is it down to Spurs’ new system, playing up front with Lucas Moura and, yesterday, with a diamond midfield behind him? Moura fizzed all around and was the source of Spurs’ energy. That was once Kane’s role. He was the sole talisman, the leader. It is almost as if playing in a front two has stolen his spotlight and put him in the shade. ‘For me, it’s a collective problem,’ said Pochettino. ‘I am not going to put the finger at some player.’ Common sense says Kane won’t play like this forever and that Pochettino will tweak the system to get him closer to goal and improve his shot ratio.
But aside from grander issues, it is often the seemingly small details which often undermine Spurs. ‘We must go and kill with every single action,’ said Pochettino before this game. But Spurs didn’t do that. Th They can be good for a spell; maybe for a run of games; even over months; but eventually a lack of ruthlessness lets them down. They settle for something a little less than excellent. Spurs have hit excellence plenty of times. Now the challenge is to ensure they do all the time if they want to progress.
Against Liverpool, they failed that test. Sometimes they were just plain sloppy. It is the accumulation of minor errors which construct a defeat. Like Eric Dier’s under-hit pass which played in Mohamed Salah on 24 minutes. Michel Vorm saved the day then. But on 38 minutes, they had cleared an initial danger when the ball came to Christian Eriksen whose back-pass put his defence back under pressure and let Sadio Mane force a corner.
Of course, Vorm should have dealt with it better, though Pochettino exonerated him. Maybe he had Dier’s weak clearing header in mind as the principal reason for the goal? But Spurs consistently put themselves in vulnerable situations. A pattern is emerging, which only these players can resolve. There is a reason why you fail in crucial games, in the season-defining moments.
If the top four is the ultimate goal, current standards may be satisfactory. And in a season when your captain is arrested for drink-driving, when the location of your home stadium is a source of uncertainly and after a summer in which you haven’t added to the squad, that may be all that can be expected.
Except that you know from the relentlessness with which Pochettino approaches the job, it won’t be enough for him. You sense he believes his players can do much better. Certainly they can do much better than this.