On 5 January, the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust (THST) announced that it had sent a letter to the club over “genuine concerns about the current situation”.
On the one hand, it felt like an act of great entitlement. Tottenham made the ambitious appointment; Antonio Conte was a coup. Tottenham spent £90m on new players last season and another £150m in the summer just gone. Tottenham have the fifth highest wage bill in the Premier League and are fifth in it. Next month brings a Champions League knockout tie against Milan. Are you not entertained?
Well, no, as it happens – have you watched Tottenham lately?
Spurs have managed to land upon an unhappy middle ground whereby they are a chaotic mess and yet somehow boring at the same time. If THST are guilty of anything, it was jumping the gun and failing to include the gory details of Spurs’ first home league defeat to Arsenal since 2014.
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Richarlison’s performance against Arsenal embodied Tottenham’s current malaise. Richarlison, the club-record signing for £60m. Richarlison, who has yet to score a league goal for Spurs. Richarlison, who completed two passes and had nine touches in 20-odd minutes but did at least get involved in at least three scuffles. Richarlison, who has mastered the art since his move of tricking you into thinking that he’s busy but who doesn’t actually achieve much of note. That could be the epitaph on Tottenham’s season.
Arsenal’s swaggering rise to the Premier League’s summit clearly makes a difference here. As football supporters, we know that avoiding living through the prism of a rival club’s majesty or misery is a fool’s errand, but this is not a choice.
Tottenham were the third favourites for the Premier League title in July; Arsenal were sixth. As Arsenal rose to their own challenge, Tottenham have limped away from theirs, hamstrung by their own staccato rhythm. It stings, and they will freely admit it.
On Sunday, those chasmic differences laid bare in unappetising high definition. Tottenham knew what Arsenal would try and do and were wholly unprepared to stop it.
Arsenal knew Tottenham’s flaws and exposed them with humiliating ease. Watching your team be outplayed by their fiercest rival is bad enough, but when it plays out exactly as you envisaged, frustration inevitably warps into anger.
At this point, it’s worth reflecting upon the reasons for Tottenham’s appointment of Conte. First was the big-game record: Spurs had typically suffered from an inferiority complex and Conte had the strength of personality to pick players up by the collar and tell them that they were men.
His team have taken one point from a possible 18 this season against the Big Six plus Newcastle. They have either looked lethargic, disorganised or both during long periods of each match.
OK, but what about the defensive organisation? Conte, that wizened and wily operator, was the answer for a club that had conceded 47 and 45 league goals in their previous two seasons. He would certainly demand that Tottenham invest in central midfielders and defenders – they bought five defenders, a goalkeeper and a holding midfielder last summer alone.
And for what? So that Spurs could concede more goals than two of the bottom three over the first half of the season? If you appoint a perceived defensive coach, the least you might expect is that the defence looks organised. As for the masterful use of wing-backs, we’re 14 months into this project and Matt Doherty and Ryan Sessegnon are starting – and looking out of place in – a north London derby.
If your defence doesn’t look organised, the team better be expansive in attack. No, don’t laugh, Conte’s team are the Premier League’s third highest scorers. But almost half of those goals came in four matches against bottom-half teams and, more pertinently this is less the result of successfully executed attacking strategies and more driven by the emergency situations they have inflicted upon themselves. First-half goal difference: -5. Second-half goal difference: +15. Tottenham attack when they have to and seem happy not to when they don’t.
The attacking numbness matters most, for that is where Conte has lost most trust. The principal reason for his appointment was because he was a “now” manager rather than a project builder.
With Harry Kane and Son Heung-min entering the likely twilight of their peak years, Tottenham effectively decided to build around their brilliance rather than cashing on it. Kane and Son had nine combined touches of the ball in the penalty area against Arsenal. Against Aston Villa on New Year’s Day, they had four in 202 combined minutes.
Kane is just about managing: the goals are still flowing and he enjoys dropping deep to play passes on the turn because he’s so damn good at it.
Dejan Kulusevski is industrious, but it’s telling that he, Rodrigo Bentancur and Cristian Romero, the three newest key players, are the ones that have occasionally risen above the fun; Tottenham-itis will surely get them soon.
Son looks browbeaten and half-broken, a watertight control experiment for Tottenham’s general health. As a neutral, one phrase flashes repeatedly across your brain when watching Tottenham: how on earth do they make it look so hard?
Every supporter at every club subconsciously calculates their satisfaction across three different categories: results, entertainment, connection. On the first, Conte is just about keeping his head above water. For entertainment, he is pitifully lacking. But it’s in that third category that Conte has failed most. At Chelsea, he engineered a siege mentality, an umbrella under which players and supporters shared shelter.
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At Tottenham, Conte appears in a siege of one. The more he says he would love to stay if the club could only meet several conditions, the more supporters might accuse him of deflecting criticism or preserving his own reputation. Neither are easy to stomach.
Tottenham supporters loved Mauricio Pochettino because he brought unexpected highs to a club that had previously found its natural habitat in mediocrity; pretending that the success wasn’t the dominant factor would be misguided romanticism. But Pochettino engineered that success through that romance: he maintained the sense that he was genuinely honoured to be in his job and that he cared deeply about the connection between club, supporters and community.
That is what Conte appears to have missed. He is the short-term hit without the short-term improvement. He is the disciplinarian who seems unable to control Tottenham’s players on the pitch. He was the problem-solver who isn’t solving problems. Without that, you spend 15 minutes trying to put your finger on what is working and then give up trying.
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