The only good thing about Tottenham’s loss to Wolves is that it will force everyone to confront something that had been left unsaid for too long: this team is not playing well and has not been for some time.
Spurs have managed fairly successfully to cover up this inconvenient truth over the past few weeks. When Brentford and Brighton came to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium recently, the home side plodded through the first half and went into the break 1-0 down. Both times they relied on a second-half comeback to win the game and in the thrill of victory, the poor start was largely forgotten. The fans went home happy and Tottenham continued to climb the table.
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The first hour against Wolves felt like a carbon copy of those two games. The same miserable first half, Tottenham failing to find their way around a clever well-organised opposition, trying to play in spaces that simply did not exist. The same concession of an opening goal that was only a fair reflection of the first period. The same quick improvement straight after the break and a speedy equaliser. When Dejan Kulusevski made it 1-1 in the first minute of the second half, it did feel as if yet another comeback was on.
But after an hour, this game sharply diverged from Spurs’ last two here. Instead of scoring the goal to put them 2-1 up, Tottenham conceded after losing the ball from their own corner. Spurs never recovered their composure and Wolves were worthy of the win.
‘We’ve got to be better. It’s up to me to get us up to that level.’
Ange’s reaction to #TOTWOL 🗣️ pic.twitter.com/gSBNG4sQvd
— Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) February 17, 2024
This was a fair result, not only in the sense that Wolves were the better team over the 90 minutes but also because Spurs could not rely forever on second-half turnarounds. Those last three home first halves were not entirely the same: this game was more about Wolves’ compact organisation, Brighton was about their man-to-man marking, and Brentford about their ability to drag Spurs into the disjointed stop-start game they did not want to play. But in all three cases, it was the visitors who dictated the terms.
Manager Ange Postecoglou did not have an explanation for this trend afterwards but admitted it makes it difficult for Spurs to impose their own expansive game. “For us to kind of dominate games like we want to, it does mean we need to start aggressively, and try and put the opposition on the back foot,” he said. “And we haven’t really done that (in the) last two or three games. Sometimes it’s the mindset going into games, sometimes it’s the opposition, sometimes it’s just the context of the football game.”
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If you look at the bigger picture, rather than just this game or even the last three home games, it becomes more worrying for Spurs. There is a trend that has lasted for longer than the past few weeks.
For months, Spurs have looked like a team not performing as well as they could. A team unable to dominate opponents over the whole game, conceding too many chances, often relying on individual quality at both ends of the pitch to get them over the line.
When was the last truly convincing 90-minute performance from Spurs? When was the last time they played as well as they routinely did in those thrilling first weeks of the season? Not the Burnley win in the FA Cup, a dismal game rescued by one brilliant goal from Porro. Not the Bournemouth victory, when they were outplayed for long spells but snatched it at the end. Not edging past Everton, when they were desperately hanging on for much of the second half. Probably not even beating Nottingham Forest at the City Ground, a professional display in a poor-quality game.
You would have to go back more than three months to the 4-1 win over an injury-hit Newcastle United, on 10 December, to find an occasion when Spurs played to their full capabilities, dominated and controlled the whole game.
Now there is plenty of mitigation for why Spurs are not playing as well as they did at the start of the season. Half of the first team have missed long spells with injuries or international duty over the past four months. The squad is not deep enough to survive those absences, but that explanation cannot last forever. Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven have been back for a month now. This was James Maddison’s fourth start in a row. Son Heung-min, Yves Bissouma and Pape Matar Sarr are all back from their tournaments and all started against Wolves. Yes, they were missing Pedro Porro and Destiny Udogie, but Postecoglou did not want to take it as an excuse.
Maybe Tottenham are victims of the high standards and expectations they set in those first weeks of the season when they won eight and drew two of their first 10 league games. That was an unsustainably good start, an unrealistic level for a team trying to learn a new style of play with half a new team.
Maybe it was inevitable there would be a correction. Tottenham were not going to maintain those results all season. It is to their credit that results stayed consistent over recent months, even when it was clear the team were not playing anywhere near their best football; two points behind fourth is a good position and probably ahead of schedule for this team. For a while, some could even argue that winning while not playing well was a sign of a good team.
But the true mark of a good team is playing well more often than not, dictating the terms of the contest, taking control from the first minute and never allowing your opponent a foothold in the game. That is the football Spurs aspire to, the football they have slowly slipped away from over the past few months. Maybe this overdue defeat will remind the players where they need to get back to.
(Top photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images)