Resetting the Discourse after Another NLD Defeat

A handful of simple truths worth grasping.

This piece is less an analysis than a public service effort. Last Sunday’s loss to Arsenal was bad, though few expected anything different. It doesn’t follow, therefore, that Spurs are doomed. Consider the following:

1. Arsenal are probably one of the top 3 teams on the planet right now. They’re in the final form of a very expensive, multi-year project that has them in the position to bring on the likes Martinelli, Madueke, and Odegaard of the bench.

2. Spurs had a total of 14 (15 if you count the backup goalkeeper who’s played 0 minutes this season) fit senior players. You could build an 11 out of our injured senior players that, if fit, would probably defeat the 11 we had available to play.

3. The new manager, Igor Tudor, had a little more than a week to work with the team, so expecting any kind of substantial changes in how we play would have been expecting a lot. Expecting any changes at all to have actually been inculcated to the point of effectiveness would be expecting the impossible. Spurs did play with intent in the first half—even if they were outplayed in so doing—and that’s a baseline expectation. In short, it doesn’t make much sense to sulk over the fact that the performance didn’t match the good vibes in the stadium before kickoff, because it was never likely that Tudor’s presence could move the dial much in the first game. At the same time, the fact that we went into halftime even is a good sign of intent and something to take away, even if we were outplayed. Getting outplayed is a function of finer tuning than Tudor and the players had any time to execute in a week of training, though it’s possible to do a lot of that fine tuning with more than a quarter of the season left.

4. Had Kolo Muani’s would-be equalizer stood, it would’ve altered the game state significantly in Spurs’ favor. Arsenal were coming off a last-minute Wolves comeback in which the former dropped points, with ‘it happened again’ ringing in their ears. Gabriel’s school-play level acting job was an unalloyed embarrassment to the game, but it worked. Scenarios with the kind of hand positioning that Kolo Muani applied do get called sometimes, but scenarios with the degree of force that Kolo Muani applied almost never do. Particularly in light of Ekitike’s much more forceful push on Romero earlier in the season, which stood against us, you have to say it was a bad call that erased our second goal. Materially it means nothing to say this, but in terms of morale it’s worth bearing in mind. The game might have been more competitive than it was in the end had the game state that Spurs earned have been allowed to come into effect.

5. This is all to say: If you take the emotion out of losing to Arsenal, and the amplification of giving up a 4th goal in garbage time, this match was never the yardstick for what the team can accomplish in the final quarter of the season. It was never a ‘free hit,’ for obvious reasons, but that doesn’t mean it was representative of our task in the games that remain. It was not.

6. The fact is we still don’t know what Tudor will or won’t accomplish with this squad. Pundits are always going to say everyone else ‘shows more fight’ than Spurs, because that’s the stick they beat you with when you’re a big team underperforming. But I promise you none of these players want to be the ones who took Spurs down to the Championship, and no magic coaching is going to organize them (or anyone) in just a week’s time.

7. 11 games is a lot of games. 6 of those remaining 11 are against teams who are also in the bottom half of the table right now. 2 more of them (Fulham, Everton) are against teams just barely in the top half. Spurs are on a down-streak while some others (West Ham, Wolves) are on an up-streak, but rarely does anyone hold a steady trajectory either way for 11 games straight.

8. Pessimism is not inherently rational. Neither is optimism. It’s easy to feel pessimistic about recent events, but pessimism is not inherently better than optimism at predicting future events. I think we’ll have a better basis for predicting future events over the next few games than we do after an extremely unsatisfying defeat in the North London Derby, so again it makes little sense to assume that if we can’t beat Arsenal then we can’t beat Fulham or Palace or Wolves either.