How losing centre backs has hurt Tottenham’s attack
Crisitan Romero and Micky van de Ven are critical to build-up play for Ange Postecoglou’s side and their absence has led to issues further up the pitch
Hamzah Khalique-LoonatJanuary 26 2025, 7.00pm GMT
Dragusin, centre, has had to step in for Romero, right, and Van de Ven, but cannot match their progressive passes, causing problems for Postecoglou, left
Last season Ange Postecoglou’s Tottenham Hotspur were probably the neutral’s favourite team. This season they may still be, although for very different reasons.
The refreshing, fearless and attacking football that had Tottenham soaring to the top of the league after ten matches last season has gone, as the team have descended into what appears, at times, an incomprehensible mess.
For those who aren’t quite up to date with the Tottenham’s topsy-turvy season: Spurs have the fourth-most losses in the league; the third-most goals; the tenth-best expected goal difference; the seventh-best actual goal difference; have lost four consecutive league matches; are 15th; have one foot in the Carabao Cup final, having beaten Liverpool in the first leg, yet have the third-worst odds of winning the competition; and they remain the favourites for the Europa League.
In short: something very strange is going on at Tottenham.
Postecoglou has assigned much of this bizarre form to injuries — and he’s got a point. Of the team
which lost 2-1 to Leicester City, six starting players — Guglielmo Vicario, Cristian Romero, Micky van de Ven, Destiny Udogie, Brennan Johnson and Dominic Solanke — were unavailable for selection due to injury.
In addition, the squad players Timo Werner, Wilson Odobert and Djed Spence were unavailable.
Also returning to fitness was Yves Bissouma (named on the bench) and Pape Matar Sarr, who was selected to start, but Postecoglou admitted afterwards that he was not fully fit.
Across the defence this season, Spurs have had just one starting player available for all 23 matches: Pedro Porro. Whereas his team-mates Udogie (1,430 minutes, 15.9 matches), Vicario (1,080mins, 12 matches), Romero (974mins, 10.8 matches) and Van de Ven (788mins, 8.8 matches) have missed considerable action.
The centre backs have played a combined 1,762 minutes of a possible 4,140 — less than half of their potential league minutes.
The problem with that (beyond the obvious difficulties of playing without your best defenders and goalkeeper) is that they are critical components of Tottenham’s build-up play. In a seminar with Hudl in 2020, when Postecoglou was still manager of the Yokohama Mariners, he laid out his principles.
“For me it starts with the ball,” he said. “Everything we coach and preach starts with the ball. There are certain things that are non-negotiable, and the first is that I want my teams to have the ball. So our attacking and defensive philosophy is measured around that.
“Possession is important, but it’s not just possession, because if we kept the ball with no real purpose, a) we wouldn’t be successful, and b) it wouldn’t be exciting.
“Are we playing forward, are we getting close to the goal so we can have shots? Ultimately it’s about goalscoring. We need to play out from the back all the time. And that means putting players in difficult situations, goalkeepers, defenders, who in many respects at times would prefer probably not to receive the ball in certain areas, but we’re saying we need to.”
Spurs tend to play in a 2-3-5 shape, which is designed to have lots of passing options infield, and one-on-one opportunities for the wingers on the touchline.
That shape necessitates the goalkeeper and centre backs having responsibility for moving the ball forward.
Van de Ven averages 4.89 progressive passes per 90 this season, and Romero 4.44. Both are well ahead of Radu Dragusin (2.66) and Archie Gray (2.16).
But it’s not just a matter of passing, it’s also about carrying the ball forward, either into space, or to draw an opponent out and create space for a team-mate.
In this respect, Romero is the more important of the centre backs. This season he averages 197.8 yards of “progressive distance” per match.
While the Romania defender Dragusin’s “progressive distance” is not too dissimilar from Van de Ven’s, the Netherlands international often pulls wide, to create angles for his team-mates.
But what does this mean for Tottenham in a practical sense?
The result of this stymied build-up is that their most attacking (and best players) such as Son Heung-min and Dejan Kulusevski have less involvement inside the opposition penalty area, as their defensive team-mates struggle to find them further upfield. They have been starved of possession.
This is a classic domino effect. Because Tottenham struggle to move the ball upfield, they find it difficult to control the pitch, and force opponents deeper.
That has two immediate consequences: it’s more challenging to keep possession, as the opposition are not being forced into defending their own area; and it’s harder to press, as instead of cooping a team in their defensive third, Tottenham are chasing opponents all over the field. Which is reflected in Tottenham’s falling share of possession, compared with the highs of last season.
Likewise, the intensity of Tottenham’s press — measured by their PPDA, the average number of passes their opponents take before they make a defensive action — has declined too.
Last season Tottenham’s PPDA was 8.8, this season it is 9.3.
“The defending side again is about the ball,” Postecoglou explained. “As a coach when I’m watching the game I’m just not comfortable when I’m watching the opponent with the ball. I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m watching the opposition working us around the pitch looking for space.
“A lot of that is immediate pressure after we’ve lost the ball; pressure high up the pitch away from our goal, where if we win it, there’s a massive reward. Our whole defensive strategy is about ‘Can we get the ball off the opposition as quickly as possible, as far away from our goal as possible?’ ”
Tottenham still press high. To stay compact, they position their defenders on halfway. But without Van de Ven’s pace, Romero’s heading and Vicario’s sweeping, long passes in behind are effective at exploiting Tottenham’s press.
Consequently,
Tottenham have become easy to play through. They have faced 28 “fast-break” shots this season, the third most in the league.
And the nature of these shots tend to be high quality. The average shot faced by Tottenham this season has an xG of 0.14, the joint highest in the league.
Postecoglou has been cast as an ideologue for his unrelenting commitment to his principles. In that same interview in 2020, he said: “When my team is playing, I pretend my father is in the grandstand and thinking, would he be enjoying watching this team?”
“That’s always been the root of everything I’ve done. So when people say have you had challenges of changing your playing style, or questions, I can’t shift, because for me where it all started from is more powerful than any sort of challenges I’ll get externally, whether it’s criticism from owners, or media or supporters or even players question my beliefs… It’s so deep rooted it will never change.”
It’s a powerful message, often misunderstood and misinterpreted. The manager has never said he would not make tactical tweaks, just that his objective of always seeking possession and using it offensively is paramount.
So when he makes tweaks they are designed to achieve those principles, such as a recent alteration to his full backs’ positions. In his time at Celtic and especially last season, Postecoglou caught the eye with how he inverted both of his full backs into midfield.
According to Opta, Spurs typically have the narrowest full backs in the top flight, and the second highest too. They often sit alongside the deep midfielder, but frequently join the attacking line.
The central positioning of those players was supposed to provide passing options to control the middle of the pitch, outnumber their opponents and build forward with greater ease. However, with Dragusin, Gray and Antonin Kinsky struggling to move the ball to the midfield line, Postecoglou instructed his inverted full backs to drop deeper, to assist the team’s build-up.
In the image below, Gray (nearest to the touchline) is in a conventional full-back position.
The problem is, it hasn’t worked. Spurs had situations such as this, where Dragusin couldn’t find a team-mate further forward, so he moved the ball across to Ben Davies, who encountered a similar problem.
Without a defender confident enough to stride forward, attract a man and play a combination to break Leicester’s first line, Spurs were reduced to playing around Leicester’s block.
“Even under pressure our goalkeepers and defenders are constantly looking for short options. It’s not about going forward for no reason, it’s looking for where the space is and creating space to eventually be able to attack with some purpose,” Postecoglou said.
However, his defenders are struggling to find those short options.
So, is there anything that can be done? Well there are a couple areas for improvement, notwithstanding the injury situation.
Tighten up in midfield
At the weekend some of Tottenham’s midfielders had a rotten start to the game, where they coughed up possession needlessly.
Here’s an example of how the press is supposed to work, when Tottenham are in a mid-block.
They man-mark their opponents, cover the centre and guide Leicester out wide. Rodrigo Bentancur steps across and intercepts the pass.
It’s a clean ball recovery, exactly the sort of thing Postecoglou would love to see. But looseness from Sarr gifted possession to Leicester.
A similar situation plays out here, with Bentancur losing possession three times in a sequence.
Cutting mistakes like these out would go a long way.
Adjust the press
Opponents find it easier to play through Tottenham’s press than that of other teams such as Woolwich, Bournemouth and Liverpool, for example. The reasons for this are two-fold: there are triggers that are easy for an opponent to identify and exploit. Such as this:
And Tottenham, who use a man-to-man press, don’t give themselves much cover (in the form of a spare man), so when a pass like this is made out wide, and Tottenham lose a duel, suddenly it becomes very easy to run through the team.
Asking one of the wingers or full backs on the opposite side of the ball to leave their opponent and act as a spare man infield may give the team the cover to deal with these breaks.
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