Should Frank bow to The Spurs Way?
The suffix ‘Football Club’ on the end of Manchester United has felt so appropriate in recent seasons, given that merely declaring the accepted shortened version of the club’s name hasn’t carried enough heft to portray the shambolic results and performances the team has produced.
It feels like we’re now going that way with Tottenham Hotspur. It can’t just be Tottenham, as they told us last season, and what’s happened there in the past few years feels like it goes way beyond the ‘Spursy’ tag. So, seriously, what on earth is going on at Tottenham Hotspur Football Club?
Even for them, the paradox of finishing 17th in the Premier League a few months ago while also enjoying their most memorable moment in decades after winning the Europa League, street parade and all, to now being fifth in the table while booing the team off, is just too, well, we said not Spursy, so let’s just call it absolutely nuts.
You don’t need xG to know which way the wind blows but the numbers do paint a grey, bleak picture of nothingness.
They mustered a pathetic total of three shots against Chelsea (one on target) yielding an xG of 0.05, their lowest since records began in 2012 (504 games since then).
It wasn’t a one-off, given their xG against Bournemouth a couple of months ago was 0.19, or 0.8 in their previous home match against Aston Villa.
The boos were booming and vicious. And, through the prism of that Chelsea performance and recent home form, fully merited. Yet on the road Spurs are the best team in the land, earning 13 points from 15, scoring 12 goals and conceding only three.
So how can the team currently on track to qualify for the Champions League again (if fifth place is good enough, like last season) be earning so much disapproval from their own supporters?
Well, Spurs are a special case. The Spurs Way™ is a thing; they don’t just want to win, they want to do so with style, panache and, above all, entertainment. You know, the kind Ange Postecoglou attempted to instil last season. The kind he completely abandoned when they came within sight of the winning post in the Europa League. And duly won it.
Thomas Frank has brought in the pragmatism Postecoglou pigheadedly failed to lean on during the majority of his Spurs tenure, but the Dane is probably using a bit too much of it.
The much-discussed double defensive midfield pivot of Joao Palhinha and Rodrigo Bentancur lends itself well to away matches; they can protect the defence while faster, more attacking players like Mohammed Kudus launch brisk counter attacks. Set pieces, trying to control matches without the ball, it’s nice enough away from home.
At home, though, with that same double pivot, and with only two attacking players in the XI against Chelsea (Kudus and the unfit Randal Kolo Muani), Frank didn’t just have the handbrake on, he had an anti-theft lock on the steering wheel and four heavy-duty wheel clamps on the tyres.
And yet, you wouldn’t exactly call Frank a defensive manager at Brentford. In fact, a year ago they were the league’s great entertainers, especially at home with scorelines like 5-3, 4-3, 4-2 and 3-2 between October and December.
Only Liverpool and Manchester City scored more than Brentford’s 40 home goals last season, and only Ipswich Town and Southampton conceded more than their 35 at the Gtech Community Stadium.
What’s the difference? Frank’s Brentford squad was perfected and honed over years of excellent recruitment. At Spurs, not only are his new signings like Kolo Muani and Xavi Simons still in the infancy of their Premier League careers (with Simons struggling to adapt), but injuries have deprived Frank of Dejan Kulusevski, James Maddison and Dominic Solanke, while Wilson Odobert and Mathys Tel are young and inconsistent.
Perhaps, even allowing for the alarming Steve McClaren-esque moment of being ignored by his players on the pitch at full time, we should wait for Frank to have more options at his disposal given that, rather than an overhaul of the playing style, is what Spurs need right now. Sorry, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Never a dull moment.