The Thursday Spurs: The Foreboding
Tottenham's performance in Alkmaar last week has left a familiar feeling of gloom in the build-up to the second leg.
Alright, everybody? How are we feeling? All good, ahead of tonight’s big match?
There’s an extent to which I have to chuckle at the weight of importance that has been placed upon tonight’s Europa League game against AZ. Firstly, there’s the absolute Tottenhamness of allowing it to percolate into the public domain that the club is entirely focused on the cups this season, only to get knocked out of two of them in the space of four days.
And then there’s the fact that this ‘all or nothing’ attitude is manifesting itself as early as the Round of Sixteen of this tournament. It’s a grimly ironic state of affairs. All the eggs are in the basket marked ‘Just win the goddam Europa League’, but so tepid was the performance in Alkmaar last week that everyone has had the fear of God put into them by it all.
Should Spurs get through this evening, we’ll have to go through all this again in the quarter-finals. Should they get through that, we’d all have to go through it again in the semi-finals. Then should they get through that, we’d have to go through the final itself. And in a way, it’s only when it’s laid out in front of us that it starts to look foolish to even attempt to focus on winning a piece of silverware to the extent that it could even feel as though you’re neglecting your own domestic League season.
A lot of this comes down to perception, and it’s the point at which I start to consider the club’s own behaviour as being effectively self-sabotage. This pressure surely doesn’t help. Say what you like about the club’s rivals, but both Arsenal and Chelsea have thus far moved through the Champions League and the Europa Conference League in a pretty serene manner rather than finding a way of turning practically every game into some form of psychodrama.
There are reasons to be optimistic about playing AZ. Spurs already beat them in the group stage of this competition this season by a goal to nil. They’re only sixth in the Eredivisie, which is not an exceptional level of performance. They’ve played English clubs away from home in European competition on six previous occasions and have lost every one of them, and on each of the last three of these visits they conceded four times.
Yet they’ll arrive in North London tonight full of confidence because it’s Spurs. This is what happens when you allow your football club to turn into a meme. On paper this should be a fairly routine match. The financial disparity between these two clubs is enormous, after all. But that extra air of jeopardy is thrown in by Spurs doing Spurs things so routinely. It doesn’t just get us all down; it also hands a little self-belief to opponents just by existing in the first place.
There was little to feel optimistic about as a result of the Bournemouth match on Sunday afternoon. Bournemouth were the better team in just about every department, and salvaging a point required what was very clearly a mis-hit cross and penalty which came about because Kepa is just the sort of guy who lets that sort of thing happen to him.
There’s a silver lining that they kept going, and that perhaps they can take something positive from having shown a bit of character to come back from two goals down to rescue a point, but it’s gossamer-thin in comparison with the nuts and bolts of the extent to which Bournemouth have been a better team this season by such a distance.
But what has been most dispiriting about the last three Spurs performances has been how supine they’ve been. Against both Manchester City and Bournemouth as well as against AZ in the first leg of this Europa League tie, Spurs have been almost completely tepid, creating little and depending on fluke or the shortcomings of others for the only goals they’ve scored.
And this doesn’t work. The consolation of Angeball was supposed to have this element of death or glory about it, that they might end up going down but that at least they’d do so in an entertaining manner. But instead they’ve just looked skittish and afraid over much of the last few games, allowing themselves to get penned in by anything remotely resembling a competent press and still looking at very high risk of making catastrophic mistakes.
So is tonight the be-all and end-all for this season? Probably. They’re currently eight points from the midway point in the table, so qualification for European football almost certainly now depends on them winning the Europa League. The moment they’re eliminated from this competition–and there does remain a frustration that this competition is winnable, just not by this team–perhaps they should try to focus on finishing above Manchester United instead. That, at least, will give everybody something to play for.
I like Ange. We all like Ange. But as time passes it increasingly feels as though his essential football philosophy is ill at ease with this club, in this division. I want it to work. We all want it to work. But we also have to be realistic about what’s possible, and this is starting to feel like something that will not work out to the benefit of either the manager or the club themselves. Even a comfortable win tonight will only be postponing any agony to the next round, and then the round after that. If the club could just focus on eliminating that feeling of foreboding that we all feel, that would be nice.
Ange knows he's cooked, it's in his body language. It's a shame 'cos he's a cracking manager and I hope his next job's in the south of France where he can flex his hot moobs at the beach and get rich(er). Who's the next manager to be made to look stupid for a year or two? Iraola?