Last 4 results with Son : DWWW
Last 4 results without Son : LLLL
To be fair though, that Man City win was the biggest, luckiest smash-and-grab you'll see this season. And Southampton fans will probably feel they deserved something from the FA Cup tie (and not without basis). And then wasn't the next game a hard-fought 3-2 last-minute jobbie again?
My point is that there hasn't been the sea change in average performance level that those strings of letters would suggest. Much like how Spurs still weren't
great this season with both Kane
and Son. The results in isolation add a certain simplistic absolutism to the murkier systemic problem of a team that just isn't very good at the moment.
Or, in other words, don't let all the Ws distract anyone from the dire situation outside of Kane and Son. The team was performing badly, then they took away Kane and things got worse, then they took away Son and without Kane or Son, things got tragic. Things will still be bad (better but bad) when Kane and Son return unless the rest of the team changes their tune. And that's what these games right now should be about: trying to get a tune out of everyone else, so that when the main men do come back, they make the team actually
good (rather than just bringing back enough individual brilliance to keep Spurs afloat like they were before).
I'm just trying to temper expectations so that nobody makes the very easy mistake of thinking that things will immediately and sharply improve as soon as either Kane or Son is back. The team has been relying on one of those two to outperform statistical expectations to win games for at least a year now and it isn't going to happen all or even a supermajority of the time[1]. Some of the recent wins are simply evidence of times the hopeful strategy worked.
[1] It will work more than half the time, though, almost by definition. Kane, especially, and Son are world class precisely because they so often outperform expectation (as defined statistically).