THE TURKEY 'WICH WAS STALE
Things I wish we hadn’t learned at this point in the season…and why I’m still #AngeIn.
(Image by @gsportsauburn.bsky.social.)
In these heady tech days as Spurs supporters have led the exodus of users from Twitter to Bluesky (with a bit of help from Swifties) and the club has just announced a digital brand remastering (no extra tracks?) I feel obligated to start with some notes of positivity. So here goes:
I love my family.
I have a nice little house in a picturesque part of the state.
Tottenham Hotspur lead the Premier League in goals.
Now onto the business at hand, namely, the situation at Spurs after a car crash of a match in Istanbul and a dismal domestic showing against Ipswich Town that saw us tumble to tenth when we would have climbed to third in the table with a win.
Although we are through to the Quarterfinals of the League Cup and sit in the top 8 of the Europa League, we’ve won just 5 of 11 matches in the Premier League. A third of the way into Ange Postecoglou’s second season with the club, I feel a number of troubling issues have come to the fore:
vdV is our most important player (a.k.a. We’re not allowed to have nice things).
I’ve been saying since last year the Dutch defender is our most important player. Not our best player, mind you—that used to be Son; now it’s Romero—but the one player we can least afford to lose under Ange. His freakish speed provides a safety net for our high line, his size is invaluable on defense, and although he’s not the ping master that Romero is, Mickey has the ability to play out from the back and to lead charge ahead on counters.
Unfortunately, as was the case with Gareth Bale, whose jaw-dropping Champions League performances against Inter in 2010 were recalled by vdV’s heroic charge at Old Trafford, an Assist of the Year candidate, the same musculature that makes van de Ven special apparently leaves him vulnerable to chronic injuries. Without him, we lose a big part of what makes Angeball work. And most unfortunately, we have no functional cover for him (see below).
Also on the subject of not being allowed to have nice things…ugh, Wilson Odobert posted this on IG: https://bsky.app/profile/rjk3phd.bsky.social/post/3lb44eki6322t
Levy left us lacking again.
I’m a Dom Solanke fan. He fits well into our system and is starting to establish his form. Bergvall and Gray seem to be good bits of business. Odobert offers much-needed 1v1 skills when he’s on the pitch, which hasn’t been much of the time (see above).
But we still lack cover for Udogie and vdV. Mickey himself serves as cover for Udogie, which is how he injured himself. So not only do we not have cover for our most important player; we also expect him to man two positions. Anyone else see the problem?
We also have a glut of left-sided attackers—Son, Timo, Odobert, and the exciting Mikey Moore—but no one who can serve as an alternative to Brennan Johnson on the right, save for Dejan Kulusevski, who’s needed more in the middle. I hate the term and find it’s misused more often than not, but if anything is Spursy, this is—we have too many of some parts, not enough of others.
Dragusin is a decent player in the wrong system.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but what seemed at the time to be a smart addition in January has been exposed as misguided. Dragusin could play for many a team. He could’ve been an effective CB in a back 3 under Pochettino. But in a center half pairing in a system that relies on playing out from the back, he makes me miss Emerson Royal. Both Galatasaray and Ipswich Town built a match plan out of targeting him in possession, much as Jose Mourinho’s Man U team did to Davison Sanchez in the Europa League final. (Speaking of which, well done to Davinson, who recognized the away fans after our match in Turkey…he certainly didn’t have to after the way we treated him at Spurs.) Sadly, I think we need to move Dragusin on next summer, if not this winter, and begin at the begin again in our search for CB cover.
Udogie, Vicario, and Pedro Porro are living up to their early billing…not all for the good.
Think back to advance scouting reports that came with those transfers. While all three rightly generated excitement, they also came with caveats. We heard Porro was a strong attacker with some defensive weaknesses. Udogie was raw. Vicario was a rising star with rough edges. (I can mix metaphors with the best of them.)
At first, it’d seemed all three players were much better than we’d anticipated. Porro established himself as a consistent performer and sometimes-star while more than capably defending his position. Udogie displayed a preternatural poise that had me wondering how long it would be before he would be linked with Man City. And Vicario dazzled us not just with his shot stopping but with ball distribution while launching our Angeball counters.
But with time, we’ve seen issues in the play of all three.
Perhaps most notably, the narrative of Venom’s weakness in the air took off during some notable moments last season. Some of that was unfair, as it became clear to anyone paying attention that (1) opponents were building the corner routines on blocking/fouling Vicario and (2) officials weren’t doing a damn thing about it. But this season in particular, I believe we’re seeing more moments for which Vic has only himself to blame. The corners thing is baffling, and I’m not sure it can be coached out of him. He doesn’t offer the strongest of presences in his box, and some of his decisions in recent matches might be filed under Lost His Mind.
While I’d suggested last summer that we’d just bought Heurelho Gomes 2.0, I’d begun to think I’d been too hard on him. He began winning matches for us right away and looked to be one of the best keepers in the League. I still enjoy watching him play, and I take pure delight in seeing him bait would-be pressers. But I now doubt we can ever mount a true title challenge with him as our #1 given the tiny margin for error in the Premier League campaigns.
For Udogie and Porro, my observations may be unfair as both have been played into the ground due to lack of cover. Udogie’s drop in form may simply be from the rather serious injury he suffered near the end of our last campaign. And lest we forget, Ange’s system asks a hell of a lot out of our fullbacks by consistently asking them to set up outside their traditional territories. And Porro has been one of the more consistent players under Ange.
Nevertheless, Udogie now looks leggy, offers little in the final third, and has looked vulnerable on the defensive end while failing to close down players in sequences leading to goals. And Porro has found himself flat-flooted or out of position on some high-leverage balls sent into our box
Which brings me to my next point…
We lack an on-field leader.
This has been true ever since the Pochettino era, and I contend it’s a systemic one that results from a business model that relies almost exclusively on developing young talent and finding bargains during the transfer window. We lack that voice of experience from a player who has won in England.
Look at our captains. Sonny is a talisman but not a trench warrior. James Maddison has some swash in his buckles and brings a certain something to our side, but not consistently.
And I’ll go ahead and say it: Although Romero is a world-class player, he’s not captain material. Case in point: How many times have we seen opponents come down our left side and cross into our box as Romero, Porro, and Johnson blow their coverage? Rather than being the calming, inspiring presence I’d expect from a World Cup winner, we see him all too often looking at his teammates in confusion during an opponent’s goal celebrations. And, yes, I’ll admit to wondering now and then if he’s saving his best efforts for Argentina.
Let me be clear: Cuti is our best player. He’s one of the best and most complete center halves in the world. I dread the day we sell him. But even he does not give us that pitch presence to help us see out matches…to grab teammates by the front of the shirt and tell them, Nah, lads, we’re not going to throw away three points in Brighton, not today.
O…Captain?
When Spurs supporters speak of Sonny these days, they begin with an almost apologetic preface: Don’t get me wrong, I love him, he’s a club legend, etc. And he is. Watching Son rise to the heights of the game was not simply joyful; it was redemptive. When he won the Golden Boot, it felt like a trophy for Spurs…I wrote about it here.
But Son Heung-min is 32. He may well notch another season of 15+ goals, and he can still curl in an assist here and there. But he’s not the xG-slaying assassin he used to be. I fear the last of the special players from the Pochettino era has begun his descent down the other side of the mountain. Surely, we miss him when he’s out of the lineup…yet when he’s in it, there are questions whether he should be or for how long.
This is what we in the narrative business call “irony.”
Remember all the talk about how we needed to move on from players like Brennan Johnson and Timo Werner? Don’t look now, but Johnson’s our leading scorer—all credit to him in the face of social media trolls—and as preposterous as it may sound, we can’t afford to terminate Werner’s loan with Sonny’s soft slide and Odobert’s fitness struggles.
The ironic thing about Timo is we wouldn’t know how bad he is at finishing and, sometimes, decision making, if he weren’t so pacey and hard-working. The guy puts in a shift, spreads defenses, and puts himself in good positions. He does parts of his job very well. He just struggles with the rest of his job. And unless we’re ready to trust the very, very promising 17-year-old Mikey Moore in huge leverage situations, Werner is the first person off the bench to spell Sonny right now.
Which brings me to my next point…
We are not—and never are—equipped to compete in multiple leagues.
Three days after beating Ferencvarosi in Budapest, we collapsed away to Brighton. Three days after beating Alkmaar, we lost away to Palace in their first win of the season. Three days after a match of madness in Turkey, we returned home to give Ipswich their first win of the season. Ipswich. The fitness hits that come with fixture congestion always get us.
Look at our best showings in the Premier League and Champions League (2017 and 2019, respectively, both under Mauricio Pochettino). Our strong league finish in the final season at White Hart Lane was fueled in part by an exit from the Europa League at the hands of Gent. Meanwhile, our miracle run to the European final came with the side-effect of relegation-level form in the PL, from which we never recovered under the same coach who gave us those memorable runs in England and Europe. (Good luck to my national team’s new coach!)
It’s an old story. Under ENIC, we don’t pay enough for sufficient squad rotation. Until we do, it becomes a question of which competitions to prioritize, no matter what Ange or anyone else says.
We’ve got a 2014/15 team in a 2015/16 season.
We famously missed a chance to go third by losing to Ipswich, which dropped us to 10th. The league is a jumble this year and is beginning to feel like that crazy season when Leicester won. Meanwhile, in this second season of Angeball, we’re playing a lot like the team from Pochettino’s first season with the club. There are encouraging signs—we are leading the league in scoring—but fundamental squad deficiencies that need to be addressed ASAP.
Still, I’m thoroughly Ange In.
Ange remains a breath of fresh air after the stagnation of Jose, Nuno, and Conte, though our skipper has indeed left himself open to questions with some odd lineup choices of late—Sarr instead of Madders and Dragusin instead of Davied v. Ipswich stand out—as well as with some of his answers to those questions, which often amount to saying, These players just need to grow up, and that’s on me, but it’s really their fault. Sometimes, rather than hearing how we need a team of Iron Johns, maybe what we need is a more strategically sound lineup or a substitution before the 85th minute.
And you know what? If I could press a button to ensure Levy would give Ange another three seasons, I’d have done it yesterday. We have an amazing crop of young players coming through the ranks. Moore. Gray. Bergvall. Will Lankshear, just scored his first senior goal for the club in Turkey, even though his ill-advised sending off probably doomed our comeback attempt. Alfie Divine. Jamie Donley Tyrese Hall. Alfie Dorrington. Luka Vušković. And check out Luca Williams-Barnett.
Bottom line: I want to see Ange get more time—and additional windows—to construct Angeball at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. I think we can win something under him.
I want to believe.
Next up: City away on Saturday. History tells us it should be a doozy of a match. Up the Spurs!