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The whole point of getting Michael Carrick in as interim head coach until the end of the season was so Manchester United could carefully identify a stellar name, preferably with Premier League experience, to become their next manager.

Four wins from five and two contract renewals later, and the dial has shifted.

The i Paper has been told that Carrick now stands as good a chance as any candidate of getting the job on a permanent basis.

Why Carrick has impressed

First and foremost, Carrick is really impressing in his temporary role. Not just on the pitch. His relaxed aura, a man of “few, but meaningful words”, has helped calm the waters after a turbulent end to Ruben Amorim’s time in charge.

Sources have insisted the dynamic among Carrick’s backroom staff is the “perfect balance”. Jonathan Woodgate has surprised many with his tactical insights and has taken time to work individually with young defenders Ayden Heaven and Leny Yoro to help them assimilate to life in the United fast lane. His ability to speak Spanish has also proved vital.

Steve Holland’s experience has provided Woodgate and younger faces around him in the coaching setup to operate cohesively. One source admitted being surprised a man of Holland’s knowhow and ability had not been snapped up by another Premier League rival.

Taking United’s beloved academy seriously also reflects well. Faith in youth borders on obsession at Old Trafford, something which Amorim never quite grasped.

While the Portuguese rarely attended youth games, Carrick is a regular, whether at Carrington or elsewhere. His son is part of the youth setup, but he even travelled down to Oxford this week to watch the Under-18s. Something that has not gone unnoticed.

The other major boost to Carrick’s hopes of getting the job full time is that other options are, one by one, dropping out of the race.

Carrick’s rivals out of the race

Thomas Tuchel was one of the United hierarchy’s top picks. The German is more combative than some senior figures would ideally choose, but his track record, especially in the short term, was more than appealing. His new England contract takes him out of the running.

Rumours have been circulating for some time that Luis Enrique wants a new challenge having achieved all he can at Paris Saint-Germain. The Spaniard’s English is perfect and is seen by a large portion of United’s fanbase as the ideal candidate.

Sources in Paris have been adamant all along, however, that Enrique will instead sign a new deal in the French capital. It is understood that new deal is now close to being agreed.

PSG’s capture of wonderkid Dro Fernandez from Barcelona, beating Manchester City, Chelsea and other top European clubs to his signature, was partly completed as a sweetener to persuade Enrique the project in Paris is only just beginning.

Sources in South America have also said Carlo Ancelotti is about to commit his future to the Brazil national team, too, taking another marquee name off United’s list. That deal is expected to be finalised in the coming weeks.

Other elite coaches who could be approached remain. Roberto De Zerbi is another top pick, but he is understood to be under serious consideration for the permanent Tottenham job, a role he is keen on, sources close to the fiery Italian said.

Some in the United hierarchy have doubts over Oliver Glasner, fearing he is of the same level as Amorim when he was appointed. The feeling within the club’s boardroom is that they got it wrong with the former Sporting boss – he was not ready for a role of United’s magnitude.

They will not make the same mistake again. No approaches will be made yet. Not while it is going this well with the current set-up.

While the club is in good hands for now, there is no need to rock the boat and start conversations with other options. The approach, like it has been in terms of player recruitment, will be carefully planned and take time. There will be no more knee-jerk reactions. Conversations will start towards the end of the season.

The next appointment is one senior figures are determined to get right. Carrick gives them plenty of food for thought.

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There he is, sandwiched between Kylian Mbappe and Harry Kane as Erling Haaland trails in a distant fourth.

Anthony Gordon has always been adamant that he belongs in the pantheon of elite modern day forwards and, statistically speaking at least, his football appears to be doing the talking for him in the Champions League this season.

Mbappe (an impressive 13 goals) may have a healthy lead in the competition’s golden boot leaderboard but Gordon (now sitting on 10) isn’t doing too badly for a player who has only played through the middle eight times this season.

Returned to the centre-forward role that he was thrust into in desperation at the start of the season, Gordon suddenly looks like a player transformed by the responsibility. Four goals against Qarabag to effectively seal Newcastle’s place in the last 16 of the Champions League was impressive but it was also part of a trend for the England man.

He has six goal involvements since Eddie Howe shook his forward line up at Anfield three weeks ago and the experiment to push him into the middle appears to be working.

Anthony Gordon rifles in Newcastle's third from the penalty spot @tntsports & @discoveryplusUK pic.twitter.com/Aq4Hd00Vw0

— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) February 18, 2026

Credit has to go to Gordon, who can be a lightning rod for criticism in this Newcastle side. His look, swagger and tendency to talk himself up can jar when the goals aren’t flowing.

But when he plays like this – even brushing off a demand from captain Kieran Trippier to hand over penalty responsibilities to Nick Woltemade late in the first half – you really do see what all the fuss is about.

For Thomas Tuchel, who has always liked the Newcastle forward, it is food for thought. It would be no surprise if he started against Croatia in Dallas in four months’ time.

Gordon was electric in Azerbaijan, destroying opposition that had sprung a few surprises in making it into the Champions League play-offs. Qarabag had taken points off Copenhagen, Benfica and Chelsea in the league phase but looked utterly out of their depth against a Newcastle side who seem to be relishing the more open, up-and-at-them style of sides in Europe.

It is admirable that Qarabag boss Gurban Gurbanov felt his side could go toe-to-toe with Newcastle but he had perhaps not factored in that Howe, looking for answers to save the Magpies’ season, has reconfigured his forward line completely in the last week or so.

Out has gone the out-of-sorts Yoane Wissa and Woltemade and in has come Gordon, whose energy and incision has refreshed Newcastle’s attack and allowed them to press from the front again. All of a sudden they look much more like the team that etched their name in club history in the second half of last season.

It helps that Gordon has stopped overthinking things in front of goal. Just two minutes were on the clock in Baku when he was fed a through ball from the marauding Dan Burn and his finish was instinctive, dispatching past Mateusz Kochalski without missing a beat.

It set the tone for an embarrassingly one-sided first half. Malick Thiaw nodded a second from Trippier’s excellent cross before Gordon tucked him the first of two penalties Newcastle were awarded.

For the second Gordon was encouragingly selfish, ignoring Trippier’s overtures for him to allow Woltemade to take the spot kick. But why should he? Gordon is the penalty taker, he’s fantastic from the spot and he’s a live contender to win the Champions League golden boot. You’d be disappointed in any forward who felt charitable in that position.

For Howe it couldn’t have gone better. A five goal cushion means he can rest players for the home leg next week as Newcastle build momentum. Don’t be surprised if Gordon, with Mbappe in his sights, petitions to play, though.

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So far in 2026, I’ve heard boos from away supporters towards their own team and manager. I’ve heard home fans chanting for their own manager to be sacked, booing at full time and jeering one of their own players for poor set-piece delivery.

I’ve heard the fanbase of the team top of their division drowning in angst, one bloke screaming repeatedly at a winger for not doing something right from a distance that made his individual words audible to their target. I’ve heard a team get booed off at half time. I’ve heard angry chants against broadcasters, owners and referees… always referees. I’ve heard furious claims that multiple governing bodies are corrupt.

I quite like booing. There’s something comical about using a pantomime gesture to translate rampant frustration and despair. But the rise in anger across all four divisions of English football is undeniable. It raises a question: why does it feel like vast swathes of people don’t like the game or the club that they love?

The wider context is inescapable. Football is the most significant cornerstone of British culture. Nowhere else in everyday life do more people congregate in larger groups than at football matches.

Anger is a rising epidemic across the general population. A recent study recorded that almost a quarter of people surveyed say they felt anger on a daily basis, up significantly in a decade. Research into the treatment of customer service workers revealed that 60 per cent had experienced serious verbal hostility over the past 12 months.

Negative news cycles, perceived social injustice, a feeling of being ignored by those in power, social media as a highly addictive tool of amplification and reinforcement of things specifically curated to annoy you; these are the causes. And at football, we gather together like nowhere else.

On that last point, football is probably the best example after politics. You surround yourself with those who agree and you all get angry together towards those who don’t. Tribalism has fragmented over the last decade, from “us vs you” to “us vs you, but also us vs each other”. Factions exist over debate and extremism runs wild.

Football matters more now to those who go to watch it, a sweeping statement but a correct one. The notion of simply going along to watch the game and seeing what happens, football as soap opera, is now archaic.

There is always another week and another season but the second football epidemic, desperation culture, provokes a heightened sense of need for success to happen immediately. I think we used to see football as one entire mass. Now it is more of a food chain fight with its economics reinforcing that hierarchy in concrete.

If we have become more emotionally entwined with on-pitch performance then, crucially we also have more insight into club life and access to more performance data and analysis than ever before. It’s one thing to watch a team play badly, but if you have read four theories of how they could be better and articles about how injuries could be better avoided or how the sporting director is failing, you’re more likely to express frustration in person.

But the angry football fan is a creation of the sport itself. The rise in ticket prices, merchandising and concessions, far above inflation (and decency) irrevocably increased expectations of the product being sold, which in football’s case is either success, entertainment or both. Previously, supporter loyalty would extend to the “thick and thin” principle. Increasingly that loyalty is exhausted simply through the financial effort of being at the game. They made us like this.

If you believe that the club cares about you less (and that is the overwhelming sentiment of matchgoing supporters in 2026), the club loses its own leeway. This is a two-way street. Treat supporters as customers for long enough and they begin to believe it. If your washing powder stains your clothes, you complain or switch brands. If your team loses badly at home, you can’t switch so you complain doubly loud.

To which we then add the myriad other (entirely valid) complaints by the same people, from kick-off times at the behest of broadcasters and the sanitisation of the match experience to the limitations of Profitability and Sustainability Rules and the emotional blackmail of clubs who pretend matchgoing supporters matter when it suits.

That presents rising anger not only as a product of football’s market economy, but a marker of its success. You see everybody is still here. Despite everything, crowds continue to rise. Fourth-tier crowds averaged over 6,000 in 2024 and 2025 for the first time in 60 years. Rank all second-tier crowds in England over the last 70 years and the last two sit first and second.

The more they gouge, the less it seems to make a difference to football’s in-person popularity. If everybody who was angry left, they would probably be replaced by happier, clappier attendees. But we don’t. We simply stay, getting less for more, changed and warped but still stuck in the cycle of hope and despair and thoroughly addicted to the whole thing. Booooo!

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The difficulty we face in the fight against racism, former Liverpool icon John Barnes holds, is not tackling the racists themselves. They are effectively lost to us. The problem is persuading those who believe themselves not to be racists that they also inflict hurt and damage in their responses to it, effectively giving the prejudiced licence to abuse.

I give you Jose Mourinho. I give you Mark Clattenburg. I give you the Benfica comms department, all of whom would vehemently deny being racist but in their own ways demonstrated the damage they do when addressing what appears to be a clear racist incident as Benfica’s Gianluca Prestianni insulted Real Madrid’s Vinicius Jr. 

Mourinho insisted that Vinicius should have celebrated “in a respectful way”. Asked if he believed the forward had incited the crowd, he said: “Yes, I believe so.” Clattenburg for his part suggested the player had made it “very difficult” for the referee.

Vinicius had just scored the worldie that would decide the outcome of the match and celebrated in true samba style at the corner flag. This wilful joy fried the brains of the opposition, triggering playground rage that turned nasty. This is a blight he has confronted throughout his career in the Iberian peninsula, where his flamboyance in the cause of Real Madrid meets the base impulses of racists who use it as an excuse to let rip.

The difficulty in legal terms is establishing the fact of what Prestianni said, because his mouth was concealed. We can infer from the shirt pulled over his mouth that Prestianni was not saying well done.

Vinicius complained to the referee, making clear the word he had heard was “monkey”. According to Vinicius’ teammate, Aurelien Tchouameni, Prestianni denied racism, claiming the insult he used was in fact homophobic. Great. That’s okay then.

Either way the game was stopped for 10 minutes as per Uefa statutes before playing to its conclusion. The matter was never going to rest there, and shouldn’t. The response of others like Mourinho and Clattenburg show how far we are from understanding the problem, never mind dealing with it. 

Real Madrid’s tie with Benfica was halted for 10 minutes after Vinicius Júnior reported alleged racist abuse pic.twitter.com/yHJfwved0e

— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) February 17, 2026

The Barnes thesis at least provides a framework for helping white people understand what white privilege means, that it is a thing, and the damage it can do when good people fail to recognise how their behaviours make progress impossible.

Mourinho wanted this to be about the goal celebration, essentially blaming the victim for the abuse he received, rather than the abuser for giving it. Clattenburg positioned himself at Mourinho’s shoulder with the same interpretation of events. The fact that the match referee raised crossed arms to indicate suspension on racist grounds was not uppermost in their considerations.

Mourinho would later double down on his harmful intransigence by offering the Benfica career of legendary black player, Eusebio, as evidence that the club could not be racist. This is the kind of devastating primary school reasoning that doubles down on denial and blocks mainstream recognition of the issue.

Benfica went even further in producing a clip of match footage as evidence that the Real Madrid players were too distant from the alleged abuse to have heard anything. This was contradicted by a number of Vinicius’ teammates, including Trent Alexander-Arnold, who spoke out against the abuse after the game.

What Benfica’s position does show is intention and bias. Their interest is not in understanding how the incident impacted Vinicius, but on defending their own player and thus themselves. They are not prepared to take a black man at his word. They are of course not saying that his claims are untrue, only that they cannot be corroborated by evidence. Thus is Vinicius gaslit in his moment of need by Mourinho and Benfica.

The institutions of the game, coach, club, ex-referee are choosing not only to look away but to shift the pretext. This is not an isolated incident but is playing out in context of black people’s experiences the world over.

It is an insult to history’s tortured victims of racism to ask the question, but what would be gained by a black man charging about the pitch opportunistically accusing a white opponent of racism? I mean it never happens, right? And besides, who needs that kind of attention?

By reacting as they have, Mourinho, Benfica et al perpetuate racism by not confronting it head on. Blinded by white privilege they have made this Vinicius’ problem not theirs, not the game’s, not ours, when in truth it is on all of us to make a stand. Shame on them.

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Brighton & Hove Albion began this season in a better position than most. They were the highest-ranked Premier League team in 2024-25 to not qualify for Europe. Without that workload, so the supposition went, they could properly kick on and finally challenge the elite consistently in the manner that had always been the end goal.

The same manager was in place, Fabian Hurzeler, likely better off for his debut campaign in English football. Joao Pedro was the only first-team departure who left an obvious hole, but Brighton spent £30m on Charalampos Kostoulas as a replacement. Between June 2024 and August 2025, they invested around £310m on transfer fees.

Brighton have won one league game since the end of November, at home to Burnley. Ten days ago they were booed at the end of a home defeat to rivals Crystal Palace and, since then, they have lost further matches in two competitions without scoring. A team that was flawed but eminently watchable has become lethargic and easier to defend than at any point over the last four years.

Brighton supporters are quickly losing – or have already lost – faith in Hurzeler. He stands accused not just of underperformance but a particular brand of frustrating overthinking whereby players are picked in seemingly unfamiliar roles that has knocked confidence and prolonged this funk.

You see the point. In 26 Premier League games, Hurzeler has started six different players as a defensive midfielder, four at right-back, six on the right wing and five on the left. Ferdi Kadioglu has started in four different positions, Diego Gomez in four too. Mats Wieffer has played most of his games at right-back and Georginio Rutter most of his as a No 10. Not enough of it makes sense and the results prove as much. Were this the first season, fine. But…

Brighton clearly don’t want to sack Hurzeler. He was given a show of faith by chief executive Paul Barber in the Palace programme notes, Barber referring to “growing fan impatience across large parts of the football landscape”. Brighton haven’t sacked a manager mid-season since Sami Hyypia in 2014 and they crave certainty.

The German, if he is to blame for this messy, unformed season, is also a useful distraction from a recruitment methodology that has achieved mini-miracles over the last half decade but has made its first significant missteps.

That £310m spend includes six players signed for £25m or more, but only two have started more than half of Brighton’s league matches in 2025-26. Brajan Gruda has already been loaned back out to RB Leipzig, while Matt O’Riley and Kostoulas have started four matches between them. Danny Welbeck’s Benjamin Button football career remains a blessing; his goals have been worth eight league points.

This is no calamity, of course. Brighton have proven themselves capable of overcoming hurdles inflicted upon them by others (read: Chelsea) and their managerial recruitment is typically excellent. That is a product of the environment. This is a fine place to work and every employee I have ever spoken to has been at pains to mention as much.

Brighton also are not going to go down, even if this home straight arrives with an unpleasant limp and a stitch. Take a step back; that is extraordinary. If this is a step backwards, it is only because the consolidation years (2017-2021) made way for the potential ceiling being lifted while Brighton supporters rarely worried about the floor.

We are about to find out whether this is a Brighton problem or a Hurzeler problem; supporters certainly have far more faith in the leadership than the head coach. He has done well to last until now, given the last three months. His club has reached a phase in which moving forwards is the only option. This season, there were fewer excuses than ever.

Because Brighton must also know that they are selling a vision and a commitment that they will not go the same way as other smart upstarts who eventually lost their way. If supporting this club over the last 15 years has been a dream, it is not easy when you suspect that the peak is always one more climb away.

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Newport County had a dream to be different. When Huw Jenkins bought a majority stake in January 2024, he arrived with a vision to replicate his own successful past in this part of Wales: passing football, developing players, rising up through the EFL to who knows where. At Swansea City, with Jenkins, the ceiling never seemed to exist.

It was a brave plan with one slight problem: forget the ceiling; it was the floor that scared everybody in Newport. Having lost two League Two play-off finals, a long funk had set in. In the last four seasons, Newport have finished lower each time: fifth to 11th to 15th to 18th to 22nd. It goes without saying that they cannot afford to finish lower this time.

And yet: Newport County are bottom of the Football League. They have won four league games since 9 August and have two home wins in all competitions over the last 11 months (although both were since Christmas).

In the short term, Newport have not scored in four games. Christian Fuchs, appointed as manager in November, has 10 points from 15 league games and that is not going to be enough.

There are historical reasons for the threat of relegation to cause deep fear here. The last time Newport left the Football League, in 1988, they were expelled from the Conference and the club faced liquidation.

It took until 1994 for Newport to get back to Wales, exiled through financial necessity. It took until 1999 for the club to even get their original name back and 14 further seasons for Football League promotion. Nobody can face going through all that again.

At a fan’s forum event in December, Jenkins stressed that he has been seeking outside investment to help the club’s financial situation. Jenkins said that his own arrival in 2024 came 48 hours before an inability to pay the players and that he has invested £3m of his own money to keep the club on a stable footing.

The problem is that Jenkins said that an external cash injection has been complicated by Newport’s league position. That is the crux of this issue, an unpleasant catch-22: Newport need more money to be better, but they need to be better to attract more money.

And so the question inevitably grows in significance and volume: is the plan itself so flawed that it will not work?

Jenkins’ hope was to mimic the best bits of that Swansea model: young players signed on the cheap from less glamorous clubs and sculpted into a specific way of playing before being sold on as the team improved.

Newport have the youngest squad in League Two. They try to play passing football (they rank eighth for accurate passes but low for possession, aka they get the ball and pass it around the back a lot). They are 20th in the division for touches in the box and the lack of attacking penetration has reached a nadir over the last four games.

The recruitment plan has been emphatic and largely split into two areas over the last 18 months: clubs in Wales (Haverfordwest, Merthyr Town, Penybont, Barry Town) and U21 loans and free transfers (Swansea, Queens Park Rangers, Newcastle United, Cardiff City, Sunderland, Leicester City, Manchester United).

There was a slight shift in January, when Newport signed loanees aged 29, 29 and 30. But is that too late?

“The model is obviously to buy young players and try to sell them on but it feels like we’ve not got the blend of experienced and inexperienced players right,” season ticket holder Dan Grace tells The i Paper.

“The hope is that some of these young players will settle in and improve, but clubs in League Two rarely manage to then sell for decent money anyway, because players normally just leave when their contracts expire.”

The added complication is the managerial recruitment.

Fuchs is a big name with a Premier League title as a player, but this is his first full-time head coach job. Newport have appointed their last three managers from Maritimo B, Barry Town and Charlotte SC (where Fuchs was an assistant).

If you are going to develop young players in this environment in this league, surely you need some experience around them?

“This really plays into the narrative that we’re trying to do this on the cheap,” Grace says.

“With our coaches over the last couple of seasons it feels like even they’re learning on the job, which can’t help the players. The comment from Fuchs a few weeks ago about us not being in a relegation battle after we had won one game just speaks to that naivety.”

The last time I came here, I was minded to enthuse about any small club in a provincial city trying to do something different. It is undoubtedly brave to embark upon a project that you believe can work if it rides out the first two seasons.

But there is an obvious counterpoint and it is gaining significant support amongst supporters: this just is not going to work here. At their best, Newport County was a team that fought for its relevance and bruised the noses of clubs who would always have bigger budgets. There is a substantial risk that Newport have lost sight of what they are good at in favour of something that is failing to land.

This can only get harder if the worst happens between now and May and that is increasing in probability with each winless or scoreless match. Forget the ambition for a moment; Newport are in firefighting mode and the worry is whether the last decade is being quickly fragmented into pieces.

“Our EFL status is the main selling point for anyone who might want to invest,” Grace says.

“We don’t own our own ground, training ground – we’ve got no assets.

“Once our EFL status goes we become a really unattractive club and attracting outside investment becomes even harder. Then what happens?”

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“Oh Tottenham, can’t you go five seconds without humiliating yourself?” To say it has been a season for Tottenham Hotspur would be an understatement and then some.

Like Abe Simpson’s slacks dropping to reveal a fetching pair of pants, Tottenham have, despairingly, become accustomed to having theirs pulled down. John the Pragmatist – more commonly referred to as Thomas Frank – set the lowest of bars from the outset. “One thing is for sure, we will 100 per cent lose football matches,” Frank enthused at his unveiling. Way to hype up the Europa League champions, Thomas. To Meh is To Do.

Unsurprisingly, the Dane didn’t see out the season, this despite the best efforts of the Gruesome Twosome, Vinai Venkatesham and Johan Lange. Two wins from the 17 league matches, five points above the relegation zone, and early exits in the Carabao and FA Cup; supporters are more shocked than anything that the reign of terror lasted this long.

Ultimately a 2-1 defeat to Newcastle was the straw that broke the camel’s back. An injury-hit Spurs side losing in front of a half-empty stadium on a wet and windy Tuesday night. The football gods had this season’s metaphor spot on.

And so, Spurs have turned their attention to Igor Tudor. The Croatian returns to management following his Juventus exit in October with the sole aim of keeping Spurs in the Premier League. Forget the Champions League, survival is the priority. Tudor is To Do. To Dare is Tudor. Take your pick.

But just who is the 47-year-old, and how can we expect Spurs to look under Tudor?

A master firefighter

Well, first things first, Tudor is one of the game’s best interim coaches. He has signed a five-month deal at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in a bid to clean up this mess.

Think Troy in Community walking into a burning room. That will be Tudor on day one at Hotspur Way, because, to be frank – pun intended – Spurs are a state.

These situations are where Tudor thrives, however. He walked into Juventus in March 2025 with nine games to play as Thiago Motta failed to tame the Old Lady.

The Italian giants won five, drew three and finished in the Champions League spots. He signed a two-year deal in Turin as a result, though that ended after a matter of months.

Rewind 12 months, and it was similar with Lazio. Again, Tudor won five and drew three of nine games before riding off into the Rome sunset.

The former defender twice kept Udinese up, so he is as well versed in European qualification as he is consolidation. He is a master firefighter, albeit one now armed with a water pistol running head first into a raging inferno.

‘Threegor’

In terms of setup, expect the three-man backline to take up temporary residence in the capital. Frank experimented with the system, and it worked well in Spurs’ 2-0 win at Eintracht Frankfurt last month, before reverting to a four-man defence for the second half of the eventual 2-2 draw with Manchester City.

Tudor, though, is wedded to a three-at-the-back system, so much so he should be renamed “Threegor”.

This does suit the players at his disposal. Destiny Udogie and Pedro Porro – two attack-minded defenders with ample experience at wing-back – will thrive… when fit, of course.

Pape Matar Sarr, Joao Palhinha and Archie Gary, Spurs’ three available central midfielders at present, provide energy and tenacity in the middle of the park.

That said one of the latter two are likely to deputise in defence, at least until captain Cristian Romero has served out his four-match ban.

Kolo Muani

Further forward, and in all likelihood Xavi Simons and Conor Gallagher will operate in the No 10 roles, and potentially in support of Randal Kolo Muani in a 3-4-2-1 setup. The latter in particular may enjoy a new lease of life with Tudor at the helm.

This season, Kolo Muani has proven anything but too hot to handle. Some wanted him sent back to Paris Saint-Germain in the January transfer window.

Yet the on-loan forward excelled under Tudor during their respective time together at Juventus, scoring five times and providing one assist in 11 competitive appearances.

Aggressive pressing

Off the ball, Tudor sides are aggressive. They press, and they press hard.

“If you don’t run, you don’t play,” Tudor once said during his time at Marseille. Dimitri Payet didn’t run, so Payet didn’t play.

This is not alien to Tottenham. They rank second for ball recoveries (1322) in England’s top tier this term, even if they reportedly endured lax training sessions under Frank.

The issue has not necessarily been winning the ball back, but rather what Spurs do when in possession. They have been too pedestrian this season, evident in that they rank 12th for forward passes (3,632), 13th for big chances created (35), 18th for shots following a counter-attack (13) and dead last for through balls (15) in the Premier League this season.

All four metrics should increase under Tudor, who relies heavily on quick transitions. Expect a more forward-thinking, vertical-passing Spurs team with Tudor at the helm.

On paper, he is arguably the best interim coach the club could have hoped for. No wonder Fabio Paratici wanted to hire the 47-year-old as a Frank replacement.

Injury risk

Conversely, the appointment does not come without risk. Tudor has largely worked in Serie A. The Premier League is a different beast entirely.

Already in the midst of an injury crisis, the running Tudor demands increases the probability of muscle issues. A threadbare squad could drop like flies over the coming weeks.

What is clear is that Spurs have taken a huge gamble even if Tudor’s track record is sound. Keep them in the top flight, though, and it could be his greatest managerial accomplishment yet.

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