There were points during the last six weeks or so of last season when it might not have felt like it, but one of the key achievements of Ange Postecoglou’s first season as the manager of Tottenham Hotspur was that he made them fun to watch again. This is a club now far removed from the existential angst of the late stage Conte era.
By Ian King
No small part of this enthusiasm that is carrying into Postecoglou’s second season is stemming from the younger players that are now fleshing out the first team squad. Arguably the biggest signing of their summer could have been to secure a three-year contract–the maximum allowed–with Mikey Moore, the sensational winger who reached the broader consciousness thanks to his spectacular meandering runs for England at the Under-17 Euros.
Moore alone is a good reason to be enthused, but he’s just the start of a list of four or five young Spurs players who’ve shown the potential to go to the very top. Midfielder Tyrese Hall signed a five-year contract with the club in May and made his debut against Manchester City in the same month, marking a positive end to what had otherwise been an injury-interrupted season.
Elsewhere in attack, 18-year old striker Will Lankshear scored 25 goals in 26 games for the Under-21s last season, while attacking midfielder Jamie Donley made four appearances in the first team last season and ran up 17 assists in 23. There’s also Alfie Devine and Ashley Phillips, who are expected to join Donley out on loan this season. The Spurs academy has been producing strong results, of that there’s little question.
But there has also been something of a lean into younger players in the transfer market, too. Lucas Bergvall’s options included Barcelona when he was shopping around while playing for Djurgården in Sweden, but he was eventually persuaded that he had a better pathway in the Premier League at The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. They paid £8.5m for him.
And their second biggest summer signing after Dominic Solanke is a substantial investment in youth. Archie Gray cost £30m from Leeds United. That’s a lot of money for an 18-year old, which in itself speaks volumes for the esteem in which he’s held as a player.
At the risk of making him sound like livestock, Gray has got a very strong pedigree. Both grandad Frank and great uncle Eddie played under Don Revie in the great Leeds United team of the 1970s. He can play at right-back or in midfield.
There are others whose relatively youthful years are half-forgotten because they’re already well established in the first team squad. Destiny Udogie and Pape Matar Sarr are both 21 while Brennan Johnson, Dejan Kulusevski and Mickey van de Ven are 23.
Over the last couple of years, there’s been a steady transformation of the makeup of the team. Older, more established players such as Harry Kane, Hugo Lloris and Eric Dier have left, as well as Emerson Royal, Ryan Sessegnon, Bryan Gil and Pierre-Emile Højbjerg, either permanently or on loan.
If youth is always a gamble, such a policy would fit right in with a Spurs team that was set up in tactical formations that bordered upon reckless at times last season. In the latter stages, when they were conceding thirteen goals in four matches against Newcastle United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool, it felt as though that gamble was failing. These clubs, it can be more than reasonably argued, are expected to be Spurs’ contemporaries.
The defensive cracks exposed last season don’t seem to have even papered over, either, if dislocated performances such as that seen in their last friendly against Bayern Munich are anything to go by. Where cracks were papered over at the end of last season was in scrambling to fifth place and a spot in this year’s Europa League.
That was enough to keep Daniel Levy happy, but it overlooks the fact that Spurs had ended the season needing a win to cling onto fifth place when for much of the winter they’d been chasing a Champions League place. Spurs are another of those clubs, like Wolves, who need their form from the end of last season to not carry over into the next.
As so often seems to be the case with Spurs, there’s a brittleness to the current squad which raises questions over whether significant improvement upon last season is possible. Youth development is a good thing. Any club will always be healthier for having smart young recruits and academy products coming through and into the first team.
But there are few indications that much has been done to address the defensive problems they had, so while the future may be bright, the present may continue to perpetuate familiar problems for Spurs this season.
(Cover image from IMAGO)
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