A Few Better Ways to Talk About Spurs

With vibes this bad, here are a few ways to refresh our conversations.

There’s no getting around the fact that it’s been one of Spurs’ worst seasons in a long time. Fans are frustrated. Pundits have been piling it on. We don’t know if Ange Postecoglou is on thin ice with the board, but a fan and pundit consensus is forming around the idea that he should be.

Through all of this, our conversations about what’s happening—from social media to podcasts to pub chats—are falling into stale territory. Many of us have had enough, even if we don’t all agree on what it is we’ve had enough of!

For those who’ve had enough of Ange Postecoglou and this iteration of Tottenham Hotspur, the conversations and debates are readily predictable:

P1: The performances have been poor!

P2: Yes, but, the injuries!

P1: Well, we weren’t good even before the injuries. Remember Ipswich?

P2: Yes we were. Underlying data! And we were in 6th place just a few points off 3rd.

P1: But Ange caused the injuries!

P2: I thought we were talking about whether we were good before the injuries? Now we’re talking about assigning blame.

And so on.

This is boring and we don’t have to keep doing it.

But perhaps more importantly, the reason P1 and P2 are never going to see eye to eye is because they want different things out of the conversation and believe those things are incompatible. P1 wants acknowledgement that the results have been terrible, no matter how you slice it, and the manager is to blame. P2 wants to explain why the results have been terrible and therefore why we don’t have the right conditions to place all the blame on the manager. P1 frequently thinks explaining why the results have been terrible is an attempt to deny the reality or terribleness of the results. P2 frequently thinks there’s no point in commiserating over bad results if you can’t explain why they’re bad.

It’s no surprise that I’m closest to P2 in this kind of exchange, but I’m going to lay out some heuristics for moving both of us—P1 and P2—beyond the impasse, hopefully in such a way that I’ve honored what P1 wants from the discussion.

Principles for Changing the Conversation

1. Explanations are not excuses for results.

I’ve discussed this before, but it bears repeating: results, explanations, and excuses are three different things. Results are what happened. Explanations are answers to the question ‘Why did that happen?’ And excuses (at least in this context) are rhetorical gestures to mitigate results. Excuses can be good or bad, legit or not. Explanations are oriented toward the truth of the matter: What best explains why the results are what they are (regardless of whether they mitigate poor results)?

Sometimes an explanation might mitigate poor results; sometimes it won’t. To venture an explanation for a result is not necessarily to excuse or mitigate one, nor to deny the reality of the result. But if it happens that good explanations actually mitigate poor results, then it can seem as if the explainer is just trying to make excuses, or to deny the poorness of the results.

Too often, fans, pundits, podcast discussants, etc. jumble all these things together in a way that leads to talking past one another. Sometimes someone’s purpose in the conversation (like P1 above) is to vent or commiserate over poor results. If that’s the case, they’re not really looking for explanations (which they’ll mistake for excuses or apologia). And that’s reasonable, because their motives aren’t to know more about what’s happening, but to process the shitty feeling we all have about our team struggling in the bottom half of the table amid a highly disappointing season.

Other times, people engaging in discussions about the club and the performances are doing so because they want to better understand why and how things could go so poorly this season. In that case (closer to P2 above, and—to put my cards on the table—closer to my own typical motives for engaging), hearing people keep circling back to the results being poor can get boring and frustrating, because we already know the results are poor. We’re not here to dwell on or commiserate over that fact, we’re here to explain it.

So, one step toward better conversations in which we’re less likely to work at cross purposes is to be more transparent and attuned to why we’re here in the first place and what we want out the exchange. If you want to commiserate with an explainer, or explain with a commiserator, it’s not likely to go well. That’s a lesson for me—as an explainer—as much as for anyone else who might be reading this.

2. Distinguish between what it is and what you want it to be.

The way this problem has been playing out lately is with the assertion that Spurs now have all of our players back, we’re on the other side of the injury crisis, so there are no more excuses for performances like the first leg away at AZ Alkmaar or the chaos of the Bournemouth draw.

This is a good example of conflating what’s really the case with what you want to be the case. The reality is that while Spurs had some key players back on the bench against AZ, and even got some minutes in Dom Solanke, none of these players were ‘back’ yet in any meaningful sense. Romero and van de Ven were not ready to play and so did not feature in the match. Solanke came on for less than 20 minutes before taking a knee to the back and coming off again. Our consensus best player of the season, Dejan Kulusevski, was out injured (and still is).

So, just because it felt like the momentum was swinging in our favor with glimmers of hope of players returning doesn’t mean we actually have these players back yet in any meaningful sense. ‘Romero and van de Ven are back’ is a lot different than ‘Romero and van de Ven are back but they didn’t play in the match,’ and a lot of people are trying to pass off the latter as the former to claim there are ‘no more excuses.’

Romero and van de Ven both got minutes against Bournemouth (though not at the same time as a CB pairing, which was among the 3-5 stingiest CB pairings in the Premier League before they both got hurt), Solanke came back fully (thankfully), and Kulusevski is still out injured.

Again, these are not excuses (or even explanations). They are facts. I think a lot of our fans have been itching to pass final judgment on Ange and be done with it, and have taken the re-appearance of Romero and van de Ven on the bench as a sign that we can now jump right into that suspended judgment.

But think about it. It makes no sense if in practice these players have either spent a full game on the bench or come in for minutes selectively as they get back up to speed after not playing for months. Being back for the vibes is not the same thing as being back and settled in the squad and up to match speed. Romero, for example, was atrocious in the opening minutes of the Bournemouth match, probably because he hadn’t played a competitive professional football match since December.

The key here is to distinguish, in conversation and debate, between the commiserator’s impulse to take even a whiff of key players being back as permission to level the judgment you’ve been patiently denying yourself all this time, and the reality of the situation, which is that we’re still figuring out, with a heavily chopped and changed squad after the injury period, whether this team can get back to their best, or whether this project under Ange has truly run its course.

3. You can still critique the present without denying the past.

For much of this season, Tottenham Hotspur have been poor. Right now, Tottenham Hotspur are poor. We haven’t seen ‘Angeball’ in months. The press is as disjoined as ever. The intensity is attenuated. The decision-making is perplexing. This is all true.

And it can be true without erasing the fact that earlier in the season, before the injuries, Spurs had demonstrated massive improvement upon last season in virtually every key area of their game. The evidence for this is overwhelming. You don’t have to deny it to be critical of what the performances have since become or of how poor the results have been. Especially when a manager comes in, as Ange did, for a total overhaul of squad personnel, after losing the club’s all-time leading goalscorer still in his prime, and with a style of football that’s 180º different from what Spurs had been playing for years prior, improvement isn’t always going to show up most starkly in results. It may show up in other ways before the results start to click.

If you want to commiserate about how bad things are right now, let’s do it. If you want to explain why things are as bad as they are right now, we can do that too. None of this requires lying, misrepresenting, or memory-holing the first ~ 50% of the games we’ve played so far this season before losing so many key players at once—and for prolonged periods of time—to injury.

4. Focus on the knowable.

Especially when vibes and results are bad—and especially when we have this relatively expensive squad of players who, at least on paper, really ought to perform better than they have been lately—it becomes really tempting to reach for intangibles to explain what’s going on.

By intangibles I mean things like assumptions about players’ and managers’ psychological states, how much they care or don’t care, whether they’re backing the manager, whether they’re committed to the cause, whether they believe in the project, and so on.

But I find it’s usually better to stay away from that kind of stuff, not only because it’s straightforwardly unknowable from our perspectives as fans, but also because psychologizing players and managers in general can lead to some really toxic places.

I’ll give two concrete examples of the kind of thing I think we should basically just cut out of our discourse altogether.

One is the speculation about Christian Romero and Argentina, or the talking point that Romero doesn’t really care about Spurs, only wants to play for his nation, and then the conspiracy theory that he ‘suddenly gets fit’ for international breaks or is sandbagging for Spurs as training for country.

For one, Romero has won a World Cup and a Copa America with Argentina, so criticizing him for caring about playing for his country is pretty despicable, I think. It’s also hypocritical when the English game at large tends to use the England call-up as a barometer for how good an English player is and how much he’s worth. Speculating over whether Maddison will get back into the England team or Solanke will get the call-up for England only shows that it’s legitimate for players (and others) to be proud of a national call-up. But then, when it comes to Romero, being proud of being a key player in his World Cup-winning national team is used as a cudgel to beat him with, or to question his commitment to Spurs. In my view, this is not only unfair to Romero and poor form from pundits and fans, but it probably also leads to misinformation and jumping to conclusions, i.e. the completely unfounded speculation that Romero is definitely leaving Spurs for Real Madrid this summer.

Similarly, I’ve heard a number of fans (and podcasters) make a talking point of Ange’s sideline demeanor, criticizing him for not flapping his arms about or moving around frenetically and shouting things. This is in the same vein of criticisms earlier in the season of his demeanor in press conferences, whether he makes eye contact with reporters or is looking down too much (part of which is that reporters are sometimes actually interviewing him from a level down from where he’s standing or sitting).

These are not legitimate talking points about whether a manager is fit to manage a football club, what his level of commitment is, what his relationships with his players are like, and so on. These are personal—I would even say prejudicial—judgments that have no place in honest discussion of our players and coaches.

So if we want to have better conversations about what we’re seeing, what’s going on, etc., my recommendation would be to leave out such personal things, because they really don’t tell us anything about Romero or Postecoglou. If anything they tell us about the ill motives and (as the case may be) lack of professionalism among the observers.