St Catherine of Genoa, a Catholic saint who is said to have suffered the pain of purgatory on earth, claimed that “there is in purgatory as much pain as in hell”. It’s a feeling that Tottenham Hotspur supporters will be more than familiar with following the North London Derby last weekend, a game that continued the sense that their season hasn’t quite got going yet.
By Ian King
The current Spurs team are committing what may be considered a cardinal sin when it comes to this particular football club. They’re ordinary. The team seemed completely bereft of attacking ideas against Arsenal on Sunday as soon as they reached the edge of the opposing penalty area. And this is nothing new. The last third of last season was largely the same.
You can have all the possession under the sun if the sum result of it all comes to nothing. Spurs enjoyed two-thirds of it at home against Arsenal, but only managed five shots on target and nothing that felt like a potentially game-altering moment. Arsenal sat back, let them run themselves ragged and then sprang the most obvious trap by scoring from a set-piece, secure in the knowledge that those wearing lillywhite could have passed the ball around the edge of their penalty area for the rest of time without scoring an actual goal.
It was the sheer to the point of bloody-minded obviousness of this that will have been the most infuriating thing to supporters. In each of the four Premier League games they’ve played so far this season they’ve had at least 60% possession, yet they have only won one of them, and that was against an Everton team which has been spending the first few weeks of their season seemingly looking for inventive new ways to infuriate their own supporters beyond reason. Beating them at the moment is pretty much the same as saying “Well done, he’s 13”.
Otherwise, it’s been business as usual when it’s come to the Spursiness-o-meter. They took the lead at Leicester on the opening weekend but couldn’t hold onto it or kill the game. The annual trip to St James’ Park ended in the annual defeat at St James’ Park. And then came the North London Derby and an insipid performance in which it felt as though they had neither the talent nor the heart of their most bitter rivals.
All of this has turned the heat up under Ange Postecoglou somewhat, but the problems seem to run deeper than him and him alone. There seems to be a fundamental unhappiness surrounding the club. Of late, this has found a voice in the form of protests against a huge increase in the cost of concessionary prices for over-65s season tickets, the cost of which is to increase by 25% between the end of this season and 2030. That the club should have introduced this at a time when the team is coughing and spluttering its way to mid-table anonymity is striking.
And furthermore, if there is to be radical change, where on earth is it going to come from? The transfer window of opportunity to make significant changes passed two and a half weeks ago. The January transfer window is two and a half months away, but the sort of players that Spurs evidently need if they’re to come anywhere close to challenging for a top six place don’t seem to be going there, and even if there were to be plenty available come the end of the year, few among the Spurs support would trust the current set-up to pick the right ones.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, of course. The construction of the new stadium was supposed to act as a springboard for the club to consolidate their position as regular contenders for a place in the Champions League, but this simply hasn’t happened. In the five years prior to moving into their new home, they finished 5th, 3rd, 2nd, 3rd and 4th. In the five years since, they finished 6th, 7th, 4th, 8th and 5th.
This may seem like only the subtlest of downturns, but in a division in which the difference between finishing 4th and 5th is tens of millions of pounds, it matters. And this relative inertia has only been amplified by Arsenal remembering how to be any good for the first time since the middle of the last decade.
Upon his departure from the club in the summer of 1984, former manager Keith Burkinshaw gestured dismissively in the direction of the stadium and told the assembled journalists that “there used to be a football club over there.” Four decades on, it doesn’t feel like much has changed. Tottenham Hotspur FC are more the off-shoot of a multi-event stadium operator than a football club these days. Plus ça change.
(Cover image from IMAGO)
You can follow every Premier League game on FotMob – with in-depth stat coverage including xG, shot maps, and player ratings. Download the free app here.