Those magnificent Spurs in their flying machines

The vertiginous ups and downs continue for Spurs, and now they're performing them within the confines of ninety minutes alone.

It can feel at times as though trying to make sense of Tottenham Hotspur is pretty much a futile exercise, like walking into the infinite room containing the infinite number of monkeys all trying to write the complete works of Shakespeare with the intention of finding their take on Hamlet. Spurs have become a club who defy rational analysis. They up-diddly-up-up, they go down-diddly-down-down, and they have a long and proud history of even somehow managing to do this within the 90-minute duration of a match.

Not for no reason did I describe them at 4.36 on Sunday afternoon as “Falsehopingham Hotspur” as Dominic Solanke wheeled away in celebration at his goal against Chelsea. By 4.42 they were 2-0 up, but we all know what happened next, and yet again it was self-inflicted. It turned out that the only tactical tweak their opponents needed was for Marc Cucurella to change his boots from a pair that made him resemble Sideshow Bob attempting ice-skating for the first time; Spurs would take care of the rest, gifting them two penalty kicks towards a 4-2 lead which was trimmed back slightly with a late consolation. Ho hum. We go, as they say, again.

Over the last three games, they’ve run the full gamut of negative emotions. At home against Fulham, they were stodgy. Away at Bournemouth, they were almost completely supine. And at home against Chelsea, well… There's a reason why the word “Spursy” exists, and there’s a reason why there’s a Spurs podcast called “Doctor Tottenham” does too. At times, it feels as though they really do cure what ails you, so long as you support a team that isn’t Tottenham Hotspur. Regrettably, since I do, like many thousands of others I am afflicted by this death of hope by a thousand cuts.

In a sense, it feels slightly ridiculous. Check your Football Privilege, Ian. I mean hell, I’m not a season-ticket holder. Those poor bastards are paying upwards of a grand for the privilege of seeing their local rivals do this to them on their own turf on a reasonably regular basis. And in terms of performance, what exactly am I critiquing here? If you strip out minor matters like actually winning trophies, the last two decades have been a golden era in the history of the club.

They haven’t finished lower than 8th in the Premier League in the last 16 years, though it should be acknowledged that there is at least a possibility that they could finally break that run this season. They’ve won a couple of trophies over the last quarter of a century (even if the second of these was more than a decade and a half ago) and reached a Champions League final. They’ve knocked down their out-of-date stadium and built a new one on more or less the same site which has been considered to be one of the best in the world. Talk to supporters of, say, Portsmouth, Derby County or Reading about what ‘struggling’ as a football club can mean.

But this isn’t a race to the bottom. The eternal frustration of Tottenham Hotspur is that they do sporadically give the impression of being able to do much better. The infrastructure has been put in place for the club to push towards the top of the Premier League and regular Champions League football, but it hasn’t really happened. They’ve only made the top four twice since this enorm-o-dome was completed in April 2019, and the first of those came when they only played three home League games there. They marked their first match there of the following season in the Champions League by spilling seven goals against Bayern Munich, and have only had one season in it since.

The potential is still there. This season already they’ve beaten Manchester City twice, putting four goals past the champions away from home in the Premier League and knocking them out of the Carabao Cup. They did the same to Aston Villa in the League. This is not a bad group of players. Harry Kane may have gone, but no club has the right to expect a player to stay with them for the entirety of their professional career. And there is undoubted talent among their current batch, although the current squad has become lopsided with injuries.

Of course, when things are going badly, attention will always turn to the manager. Ange Postecoglou has a higher win percentage in this position than Bill Nicholson, but then again Andres Villas-Boas has a higher one than either of them, so what exactly that statistic is even worth is very much open to question. But Postecglou’s record is worth examination, because it reveals that Spurs have become even more Jekyll & Hyde-esque under his tutelage than in the past. They’ve only drawn 10 of the 63 games for which he’s been in charge of them in all competitions, which means that they’ve lost 21 games under him, and that is… a lot.

Perhaps this is a consequence of the relentlessly attacking football that he wants to play, but the upshot of it is also that their own particular form of skittishness has impacted upon results. Last season saw them finish 5th, two points shy of Aston Villa. This season, at the time of writing they’re in 11th; at this particular moment in time the fifth best team in London, behind not only Chelsea and Arsenal, but also Brentford and Fulham.

Things are going to have to improve, or the truth of the matter is that Postecoglou’s tactics will end up being considered a reckless and naive way of trying to play the game in the rough and tumble world of the top—currently bottom—half of the Premier League that the club simply couldn’t afford to sustain. There are also questions over whether these hell for leather tactics are suitable during a time when the fixture schedule is getting more and more compressed with each passing season. They have a lot of injuries, which is probably to be expected when playing such a high-intensity game being under such circumstances.

But the manager is only a small cog in a very large wheel at a club of this size. Getting rid of him now would probably be a mistake. Spurs have a home Carabao Cup quarter-final coming up against Manchester United a week on Thursday, and they’re in ninth place in the Europa League megagroup with three games to play. And even if we do reduce this down to the manager, well, Postecoglou is a very specific type of manager. Unlike under Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, the players still seem happy and together.

Spurs took Ange Postecoglou on knowing exactly what he’s like. Offloading him now would be like sacking a bear for shitting in the woods. And if they did… who’s next? Erik Ten Hag? Graham Potter? Kieran McKenna? Another ageing antagonist with a love of anti-football, like the last two to hold the position prior to the current incumbent? If you’re going to engage in a long-term project to change the way the team plays, offloading the person at the very centre of that change only seems likely to set you on a very circular course indeed.

The fact remains that there is—as there always seems to have been—still an extent to which the senior management of the club seems to want to make themselves as unlikeable as possible. Their handling of the Rodrigo Bentancur matter was shambolic and self-defeating. The club's decision to remove and phase out concessionary prices from over-65s—really, a relatively tiny amount of money in the overall scheme of things—makes them look grasping. There remains a great extent to which it feels as though Spurs are now just part of a broader entertainment empire whose existence primarily justified the building of a huge stadium to host NFL games and concerts in North London in the first place.

Tottenham Hotspur are, if nothing else, a fundamentally contradictory football club; a big club who barely win any trophies and whose owners seem curiously unbothered by the wild oscillations that they perform on the pitch throughout the season. Would it help if Ange Postecoglou was a little more pragmatic in the way he gets his team to play? Well, it might well have done last Sunday. All this would be forgotten come the end of the season were Spurs to win an actual piece of silverware, and they’re still in three competitions. The problem is that these wild ups and downs have become the closest thing there is to The Tottenham Way, and consistency is the one thing you need to win trophies in the modern era. Still, audere est facere, eh? EH?