Once again we find ourselves divided as a fanbase. It’s no surprise given the way the season has gone to date: seven wins, two draws and eight defeats in the league. Swinging from a low point amongst several other low points in Ipswich at home to a swashbuckling win against the reigning champions, to smashing Southampton and beating Manchester United to conceding six at home.
When we’re good, we’re really good. How often has that been? It depends who you ask. When we’re bad, we’re wide open, and sometimes we are creatively stifled. How often has that been? It depends who you ask.
Below is Nathan A Clark’s 5 Game Rolling xG Trendline for The Extra Inch (Spurs Podcast).
This is the third time under Ange Postecoglou that we’ve seen expected goals against rocket up and expected goals for drop at the same time, the two most notable periods being when our centre-backs have been injured. More on that later.
There is a core group of fans that never took to Ange. They sneered at him — an Australian who was best known for winning in Scotland. Double whammy on the football fan snob-o-meter. They were always going to look for the first signs of all not being well and double down. He’s too naive. He doesn’t have the experience of managing a club at this level. He’s not used to facing credible opposition every week.
I think there’s also the opposite — those that will absolve Ange of any and all responsibility when things don’t go well because 1. they like him (boy is he likeable), 2. it’s a ‘project’ (more on that later too), 3. look what happened when Mikel Arteta was given time. How can Ange possibly have been expected to do more given the squad he has been given, the injuries he’s had to deal with, and the total rebuild required?
And I land somewhere in the middle right now. I expected — I think quite reasonably — more progress in year two.
I think the summer transfer window dealt him a pretty rough hand — not enough players for now, not even close to all squad depth being solved, and especially no 1v1 wide specialist, instead a renewal of Timo Werner’s loan. I said all this at the time, for the record, and you’ve likely seen my articles about addressing squad needs. But this has also been a season of unforced error after unforced error from Ange.
In my opinion that has included a style of rotation that doesn’t really work for anyone (what I refer to as ‘Team A’ and ‘Team B’ style – meaning youngsters play with other youngsters and ‘squad players’ rather than the rest of the ‘first XI’), to repeatedly bringing back players early from injury only for them to re-injure themselves, to a, let’s say, ‘restrained’ use of substitutions and some extremely poor in-game management.
My view on rotation is that the dream scenario is to have a squad where each player can be rotated out in a way that allows them to be suitably rested (particularly when your club is involved in European competition), and that the incoming player(s) won’t create a significant drop-off when part of a greater collective. That means that in every game you can be rotating one, two, maybe even three players. Liverpool have done this for years. City do it. Yes, I appreciate they have deeper squads. Our rotation this season largely sees us make six or more changes for the competitions which seemingly are less important to us, meaning that the incoming players never really get to experience being part of an otherwise full-strength team. It means that they are then not trusted to be a part of that team until the injury crisis means there’s no other choice — hence Djed Spence, Lucas Bergvall, Archie Gray only now getting regular Premier League minutes. It has created a situation where we only have eleven, twelve, maybe thirteen players that are genuinely considered ‘first team’. The players who have played the most minutes (Pedro Porro 1,888, Dejan Kulusevski 1,784, Dominic Solanke 1,747 and Destiny Udogie 1,685) are the players that visibly appear the most tired and whose tiredness also seems to impact us. In the games where Solanke has been less intense, our press has suffered. When Kulusevski is tired, he wins fewer duels. When Udogie and Porro are tired, it’s noticeable how much our ball progression from deep drops off.
We clearly lack depth in some positions (centre-back and passy number ten being the obvious two) but we have some areas of the pitch where I think constant, regular rotation would have worked — Gray and Spence at full-back, plenty of midfield options (albeit not a decent number six rotation, though that appears to be through choice), plenty of wide options. The impact of not readying players to step in is that when the injuries have come, we’ve suffered. And those injuries have really come.
The recent case of both Cristian Romero and Micky Van de Ven returning from injury early and exacerbating their injury issues immediately is in addition to Wilson Odobert and Richarlsion having done the same. The argument goes that Ange ‘cannot be blamed’ for Romero re-injuring himself since it was a different injury. It feels to me too curious a coincidence that he returned extremely quickly — acknowledged by Ange — having not had the additional training sessions (and, therefore, strength and conditioning sessions) to build up his sharpness and resilience, only to go down with a muscular injury, like so many others. I can’t really get my head around how this has been allowed to happen. Players should not simply be able to dictate their returns, nor should injury crises impact on an individual player’s readiness to play after injury. But our injury situation more broadly is just as concerning. Ange has accepted that injuries are just sort of baked into the style of football and intensity of training, saying:
The nature of the way we train and play is always going to be on the edge, it’s kind of by design which means you can have some attrition but the ones we’ve had this year for the most part like Richy and Wilson are just a consequence of the way we train and play and players just not being ready for it.
Ange Postecoglou explains what he told Cristian Romero after Tottenham and Argentina injury problem – Football.London
With the thinness of our squad and number of games, surely we needed to factor this in to training and intensity of play and build up more slowly? If Ange has seen this happen at previous clubs, I wonder why he has not adapted and, instead, just powered through with an insistence that players will either adapt and become mainstays, or saunter off to new clubs, their bodies somewhat broken and inadequate. This, to me, feels at odds with an otherwise modern and progressive style.
This ties in to what I perceive as a prioritisation of physical prowess over technical mastery. Our squad really lacks technical excellence, pretty much all over the pitch. We have a subset of players who I would say display plus-level technical skillsets over and above the competition in their positions across the league: Pedro Porro, Cristian Romero, James Maddison, Micky Van de Ven and Dejan Kulusevski (the final two both in terms of ball mastery and comfort in possession rather than passing). The lack of genuine passing ability elsewhere in the squad means that when we don’t have the likes of Romero and Maddison in the team, we really lack the ability to progress the ball and find creative passes, meaning we rely heavily on chance creation from winning the ball back with our pressing. Which works really well when teams come out to play against us — boy have we seen us punish some of those — but less so when teams sit deep and allow us to have the ball.
I think the signing of Radu Drăgușin needs to be viewed through this lens too. He is undoubtedly a physical phenom with incredible strength and neck muscles and decent recovery pace yet he is, in my view, a totally inadequate profile fit for the style of football we are trying to play. Ryan Gravenberch revealed after the 6-3 home defeat to Liverpool that they targeted Drăgușin — though frankly we needn’t have waited for the confirmation, it was evident through the eye test as it has been several times before.
Yeah we had a really good game plan, we wanted to keep them on the right side and press the right centre-back. Sometimes it went well and sometimes they did it good but by the end, I think we did really well.
Liverpool star reveals attack was focussed on one Tottenham man in brutal 6-3 pasting – Football 365
I appreciate that we needed to sign a centre-back urgently last January, but Ange signing off on Drăgușin to me seems really bizarre. In my opinion, he is going to need replacing within the next two windows and maybe we luck out and that’s Luka Vuskovic (or Ashley Phillips — unlikely in my view from a technical perspective — or Alfie Dorrington — unlikely in my view from a body-being-able-to-cope-with-Angeball perspective).
So my biggest gripe at the moment is that in order to see the fruits of Angeball we seem to require the perfect player in every role. If one is missing, we don’t click. Without a 1v1 winger on one side and a shot-heavy, back-post arriving winger on the other, we don’t maximise our chance conversion. Without a transitional eight we get caught often on the counter. Without a passing midfielder we lack the ability to break down a set defence. Without ball-playing centre-backs and a press-resistant six, our progression suffers. I think this has been heavily impacted by our player recruitment and our style of rotation — had we greater depth and/or more players used to playing with nine or ten of the ‘first XI’, the consequences of inevitably missing players would be felt less keenly. As it is, we suffer a terrible drop-off with a handful of injuries. And given that injuries are seemingly just a part of the process, it’s hamstringing (pun intended) us significantly.
One of my other most common complaints this season is how passive Ange has been in terms of his in-game management. So many times it feels to me that the momentum of a match has switched against us, and we need to change something in order to re-gain it. Fresh legs, a tactical tweak, something. I wait, and I wait, and a goal goes in, and I wait some more and then maybe he’ll make a like-for-like change. That’s how it feels, at least. Some people argue that this is a long-term strategy designed to encourage the players to find solutions on the pitch. I just can’t buy into the theory that a Premier League manager would deliberately risk dropping points for a potential future gain that may or may not materialise, particularly with the knowledge of having a trigger-happy owner standing over him.
It feels as though multiple teams have found multiple ways of stopping us playing and that we have little answer for it. When we have come up against competent tacticians — Thomas Frank, Kieran McKenna, Andoni Iraola — we have lost out. The main method has been to allow our centre-backs to have the ball and block the passing lanes into midfield, thus forcing us into either low percentage or high risk passes.
And yet, despite all of my complaints, the reason I wouldn’t be thinking about sacking Ange is two-fold. I don’t want us to rush the next appointment — maybe the grass isn’t greener. And, in the meantime, I think the principles that Ange is instilling are and should be the sorts of principles our next coach instils anyway. Playing out from the back. Pressing intensely. Possession-based play. Plus — you know — maybe it will click! Maybe we’ll have the right players available, maybe we’ll be injury-free.
That doesn’t mean to say that I think we should endure unfettered suffering (yes this is hyperbole) because of a ‘project’. Ange is part of a bigger project, not the project itself. The project — as I see it — is transitioning to becoming a team that plays modern, progressive football whilst developing young players, challenging for trophies and qualifying for Europe on a season by season basis. Ange is a means of achieving that (and I think it’s fair to say that he is achieving aspects of it – the principles identified above, certainly). If he were to win a trophy this season, for example, for me that buys him another year. But if the Rolling xG Trendline continues to be objectively bad, that cannot just continue indefinitely. There have to be tangible improvements. Hopefully that will happen when players get back from injury, and hopefully we don’t suffer another injury crisis. Hopefully we’ll strengthen in January. Hopefully we’ll find tactical solutions to the problems we’re struggling with. But I just worry that too many stars need to align for this to pan out well. I really hope I’m wrong.
The development of young players is both club strategy and makes smart business sense. On paper, Ange has objectively done a pretty good job of giving minutes to young prospects this season (Gray 1,137, Bergvall 525, Moore 288, Lankshear 135). I think the first three have become genuine options, but obviously especially Gray. I would add, though, that my earlier point about rotation does impact youth development. For example, Lankshear’s only two starts came in teams alongside Gray, Bergvall, Moore (and Werner) vs Ferencvaros and Gray, Bergvall (and Forster, Drăgușin, Davies) vs Galatasaray. If Lankshear is to be given a platform to succeed and the chance to be fully trusted as a first team squad member (which, remember, is why he was not sent on loan this season) then he would be best used amongst an otherwise ‘full strength’ (or close to) XI in my opinion.
The only reasons for firing Ange at this point, as far as I see it, would be if we were at risk of relegation (at 11 points ahead of the bottom three I’d like to think that wouldn’t be an issue) or a reoccurrence of bringing back a player from injury too soon. I don’t think we should persist with a coach who doesn’t learn lessons and continuously puts our players at risk of injury. Aside from that, I think he should be safe for the rest of the season. And hopefully we will manage to win a trophy!
Many people will be reading this thinking it’s too short-termist, not thinking of the bigger picture, being overly critical of Ange given the squad at his disposal. I know that, because we regularly receive those emails to The Extra Inch inbox. I am definitely sympathetic to these arguments, but I hope I’ve addressed above why I don’t accept them. I think even given the players at his disposal, we should be doing better. I think the bigger picture, the long-term is bigger than Ange.
I’m writing this ahead of the Nottingham Forest game. I’m not feeling confident. A win for them would take them 11 points ahead of us. We’d be unlikely to turn that around, I think. It’s really important that we win this game.
