We are just a few days into 2025 and already Tottenham Hotspur are coming to terms with losing another key player to a long-term injury. Happy New Year, Ange.
Destiny Udogie is the newest member of the walking wounded club, joining six teammates in an increasingly crowded Hotspur Way treatment room after pulling up against Wolves last Sunday.
It is rotten luck for the 22-year-old, who has now suffered five injuries (four to his hamstrings) in a season and a half at Tottenham. The Italian missed the Euros last summer after undergoing surgery to repair a torn quadriceps.
Early reports indicate that he could be unavailable for between six and 10 weeks.
His absence also exacerbates Ange Postecoglou’s defensive crisis at the worst possible time with fixtures against the Premier League’s two most in-form teams coming up in the next six days.
Spurs face Newcastle on Sunday and Liverpool in a Carabao Cup semi-final next Wednesday. A makeshift back five of whom Pedro Porro is the only regular, will be tasked with keeping Alexander Isak and Mo Salah quiet. Not ideal.
Unfortunately, Udogie’s misfortune was entirely predictable and not just because of his historic fitness record.
Tottenham’s game against Newcastle will be their 29th of the campaign and they have roughly played a fixture every four days since August.
Fifa’s response to long-held concerns over an overcrowded calendar was to invent a Club World Cup in the off-season, an idea that nobody from players to coaches, fans and broadcasters seems to care about.
Uefa are no angels either, after needlessly bolting additional games into their competitions for no reason other than revenue.
Football’s governing bodies warrant some blame for Udogie’s latest setback but it can be carved up and shared around.
Tottenham’s failure to buy a specialist left-back in the summer transfer window seemed risky at the time; it looks nothing short of negligent now.
Udogie is the only left-back that Postecoglou trusts. Ben Davies, who is also nursing a hamstring injury of his own, lacks the dynamism and attacking edge that Postecoglou requires and has instead been repurposed as centre-back cover.
Sergio Reguilon is still knocking about but only because there were no takers for him last summer. The 28-year-old, who will leave for free in June, has spent the last two seasons on loan at Atletico Madrid, Manchester United and Brentford.
He marked his first competitive Spurs appearance in over two-and-a-half years against United last month with an Instagram post captioned: “Look mum, I played a football game yesterday.” Top bantz from one of Tottenham’s many transfer flops.
This situation could hardly have been unforeseen. Udogie missed 10 Premier League games last season due to muscle injuries and that was without having to play European football on top.
His susceptibility to pulls and strains allied to Spurs qualifying for the Europa League meant that the club should have prioritised buying a new left-back.
For some reason, they didn’t and Postecoglou has a right to feel like he wasn’t properly backed. Dominic Solanke aside, Spurs bought young players with future seasons in mind more so than the current one. That policy may help the club in the long-term but it hasn’t helped the manager in the short-term.
Postecoglou himself could have done things differently. Tottenham’s inability to integrate academy prospects into the first-team and haphazard squad building in recent years forced the Australian to name a reduced 23-man squad for the Europa League to comply with Uefa’s stringent “homegrown” rules.
However, he decided to pick Djed Spence as the fall guy, depriving him of full-back cover on both sides for Spurs’ first six games in Europe. Spence would have been infinitely more useful in those matches than Timo Werner has been.
That call resulted in Udogie playing more European minutes – 258 in total – than he might have done while also limiting Spence’s game time, ensuring he was less ready to step in for Premier League matches.
Postecoglou’s reluctance to use Spence prior to the last few weeks has looked like a misstep given the 24-year-old has acquitted himself well, a foolish red card at the City Ground on Boxing Day aside.
Udogie and Porro have both suffered from dips in form and naturally looked fatigued having started 18 and 16 Premier League games respectively. Spence has only started three, his first against Southampton on 15 December. Why has his chance been so long coming?
Postecoglou’s questionable squad management has placed a further strain on players already operating at the upper limits of their physical capacity.
Being a Spurs defender is arguably one of the toughest jobs in the Premier League given how many high-intensity sprints they make, whether underlapping or overlapping runs forward or high-speed chases back.
While it is unfortunate that Spurs have lost four defenders – Udogie, Micky van de Ven, Cristian Romero and Davies – to hamstring injuries at the same time, it’s not purely incidental either.
Can such a relentless approach work for a team competing in what is widely regarded to be the most intense domestic league on the planet and on four different fronts? Increasingly, it seems like the answer is no.
Last January, Postecoglou acknowledged that the hamstring injuries Spurs were suffering then were “a consequence of the way we play and the way we train”.
He added: “When we get a more robust and deeper squad, we’ll be able to overcome it.”
Twelve months on and Spurs don’t have a significantly deeper squad and don’t seem to be any more robust either. Unless reinforcements arrive quickly in this window or Postecgolou tweaks things, they will remain hamstrung by pinging hamstrings.
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/SD7i18F
Post a Comment