There have been many moments over the last four wasted years when it felt as if Tottenham Hotspur were finally, miserably bottoming out.
The defeats to Bayern Munich and Brighton & Hove Albion that showed the Mauricio Pochettino era had come to an end. The 3-0 loss to Dinamo Zagreb, whose manager had just been sent to prison, a month before Jose Mourinho was sacked. Any of Nuno Espirito Santo’s five league defeats, especially 3-1 at Arsenal, or the 3-0 to Manchester United that ended his reign. Burnley away under Antonio Conte, or Leicester City away, or Sheffield United away, when Spurs gave up on this season’s FA Cup. Even Bournemouth last week felt like a new low.
But none of them have anything on this.
Looking back, all of those bad moments, as painful as they were at the time, were just minor hiccups and inconveniences along the road compared to St James’ Park today. If you want to know what a real nadir looks like, just watch back the first 21 minutes of this game.
This first half of the first half, when Newcastle United scored five of their six goals, was arguably the worst extended sequence of football you will ever see from a Premier League side. Not just in relative terms, given that Spurs are nominally chasing a top-four finish, finished fourth last season and have players as good as Harry Kane and Son Heung-min. But in absolute terms too: nobody at this level shows up anywhere and plays this badly. Interim manager Cristian Stellini admitted it was the worst performance he had ever seen and no one who was here would disagree.
This was a non-performance from a non-team, perfectly representing a manager-less, direction-less club.
It has been clear for weeks that there is very little holding Tottenham together any more: no spirit, no confidence, no unity, no organisation, no discipline, no character, no passion and no plan. But we have only seen it in ominous glimpses which hinted at a terrifying truth: the last 15 minutes at Southampton just over a month ago, the last 20 minutes at Everton in the following game, longer spells in the next two against Brighton and Bournemouth.
Now here were Stellini’s Spurs, naked in front of the world, looking lonely, lost strangers not only to one another but to the fact they are a football team.
Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg feels the pain as Newcastle run rampant (Photo: Alex Livesey – Danehouse/Getty Images)
Many fans will point fingers at the players and it is impossible to disagree with them. They could not have made it any easier for Newcastle. They were second to every tackle or loose ball. They ducked out of challenges as if they were trying to avoid injury. (Cristian Romero is still playing as if he is trying to save himself for a forthcoming World Cup, letting Joelinton past him for the first two goals — although he is not the only one.)
Tottenham were tactically brainless, playing a dangerously high line while never putting any pressure on the ball. It was insultingly easy for Newcastle to play through them or to just stick the ball in behind them, run straight onto it and score. Their second and fourth goals were painfully similar and painfully obvious, and yet it never even occurred to Spurs to make it difficult for them. When Jacob Murphy scored Newcastle’s third from 30 yards, after nine minutes, nobody tried to put up any resistance.
Newcastle would have had a harder time playing against training-pitch mannequins.
We could go on all day about what a failure of character this is from a set of players who have grievously let down the football club yet again. Some of the team’s more normally reserved members lost their tempers at half-time in the dressing room but, by that point, the game was already lost.
But there is a bigger picture here too. We could blame Stellini for sending them out in this 4-3-3, with a back four made up of at least three, and possibly four, defenders who are not cut out to play in such a system. Ivan Perisic and Pedro Porro are wingers who have learned to play wing-back, but they are not full-backs. Eric Dier is far more at home in a back three. Romero has played in a four for Argentina but in the Premier League looks like he needs the extra protection.
Stellini insisted afterwards that he did train the players in the back four last week. But it certainly did not look that way as Spurs were cut open time after time. It makes you wonder what sort of commitment to improvement there is on that training ground. It was telling that it took a return to 3-4-3, and the introduction of last weekend’s fall-guy Davinson Sanchez, for them to stop conceding every time Newcastle came forward.
But Stellini is a fall guy himself, so pouring too much of the blame onto him feels like missing the point.
Clearly, the Stellini mini-era is a bust. He looks uncomfortable and out of his depth, unable to deliver either continuity with the Conte era or meaningful change from it. But today he picked a system many fans would have wanted him to. He said afterwards he would take responsibility if the system was to blame but he hinted that there were other issues at work here.
We all know that Stellini has inherited problems that he cannot fix. He took over a group of players whose confidence has been utterly destroyed by the Conte era. Here, he tried to get them to play a different way, to push them into a gear they were unused to, and the engine blew up in his face. These players have forgotten how to play on the front foot, forgotten how to defend high up the pitch, forgotten how to think for themselves. All that is not just on Stellini.
So you could take another step back and say that this disaster lies at the door of Conte. He instituted this rigid style of play, the psychological dependence on 3-4-3 and sitting deep. He made these players so obedient regarding his tactics that they lost the capacity to take responsibility themselves. He then spitefully destroyed their confidence in the end — in a way which will take months to recover. None of that is incorrect and yet even that analysis is only about half of the story.
Because Conte was a man brought in to deliver instant success and then not given all of the tools he is used to. He completed half of the job, with Tottenham finishing fourth last season, but then when performances and confidence started to collapse in this one, he did not look willing or able to fix it. Yes, he deserves blame, but by no means all of it.
Dejan Kulusevski looking in disgust as Spurs fall to bits at St James’ Park (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
