Bang on the money...............
Mo Salah is back, baby. And this could be a proper title race. Jose Mourinho's Tottenham though? Oh my, that was ugly.
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Jose Mourinho
A defeat so damning on Tottenham’s manager because it was so bloody predictable. We winced at the sight of this team lethargically
trying to unpick Liverpool in midweek with Harry Kane absent and winced at the thought of their prospects without their best player. If this was not the worst team performance of Mourinho’s tenure, the first half was surely the worst 45 minutes.
Suspicions that Tottenham were ripe for dismantling on Sunday night only grew when Mourinho picked three central defenders against the worst home side in the country. That formation typically relies upon the wing-backs to provide the creativity, but Mourinho selected two unnatural wing-backs in Ben Davies (left-back) and Moussa Sissoko (central midfielder). They created one chance each.
The lack of Kane obviously provides a part-explanation. The downside of his greater responsibility to knit together the strands of Tottenham’s attack rather than merely leading it is that his absence would leave a deeper hole than it previously had. Gareth Bale looks half-broken, Steven Bergwijn is a runner but not a finisher and I’m not even sure why Tottenham bought Carlos Vinicius to then never play him and leave him rusty for precisely the time he was needed.
But that isn’t a good enough excuse. Mourinho must have worked on a plan in the build-up to Sunday’s game and yet Tottenham played like a team without any semblance of attacking strategy. Tanguy Ndombele could have played as a No. 10 to increase his creative influence or more attacking wing-back options. But more important than that was that Tottenham moved the ball at speed through midfield to drag Brighton’s defenders (who lack pace) out of position. Instead we saw the same miserable half-speed football that only ever seems to lead to half-chances. Tottenham’s expected goals total at half-time? 0.03.
Mourinho insisted after the match that his team did apply pressure in the final 20 minutes, but forgive me for holding back the prizes for that. Spurs were 1-0 down against a team with one home league win since 2019 – I’d bloody hope that they would try and equalise. That doesn’t even meet the bare minimum standard required.
And there’s a slightly broader issue here too. Mourinho explained the lack of energy in the first half – particularly in attacking areas – because several Tottenham players are “sad”. You can interpret that in all manner of ways (Mourinho’s vagueness was surely deliberate), but the manager must accept his own culpability in that process.
Imagine the following scenario: At work, you have been given a task and told to do it how you see fit. Rather than play it safe, you choose to try something a little different that has a higher ceiling of success if it comes off. When it doesn’t come off, your manager lambasts you not just in front of your peers but on national television. The next time your teammates are given an identical task, how are you likely to approach it? Will you also try something experimental that your competitor may not expect? Or are you far more likely to play it safe for fear of being given the same treatment? Welcome to Tottenham’s Dele Alli problem.
Mourinho now has a serious problem on his hands. Tottenham are enjoying a worse ‘start’ (and we are now past halfway) to a season than in any of the five full campaigns under Mauricio Pochettino. If that nugget handily omits Pochettino’s fall from grace season, the emotional fatigue following the Champions League final heartache made a change necessary.
But then a change is supposed to bring a new mood and is supposed to allow talented footballers to express themselves in a new light. Fourteen months after Mourinho was appointed, Tottenham look roughly the same as they did in Pochettino’s final weeks. They are gaining more points per game than Pochettino did until November that season (1.2 vs 1.7), but then Tottenham have signed nine new first-team players under Mourinho.
Plenty of Tottenham supporters must be wondering whether this is all worth it. They emotionally invested so much in Pochettino’s Tottenham partly because he took them to previously unthinkable places but also because he created a culture within the squad that really did bleed into the mood of the fanbase. They were proud of their boys and there was an intangible sense of community between the elements of the club.
What’s really to emotionally invest in now? A League Cup win ends the silverware drought but hardly sets pulses racing. The team is attacking as if it is operating inside a joy vacuum. The relationship between manager and players looks to be wavering, death via a thousand angry Mourinho post-match press conferences. And they’re not even winning games to vindicate his autocracy.