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It takes a series winner of £ 15 million a year to turn a club’s fortunes and slowly but surely José Mourinho is doing so with Spurs, earning a rematch of last year’s humiliating 3-0 defeat at Brighton. with Mauricio Pochettino at losing only 1-0 this time.
Haters and doubters will point out that this is still pretty bad against a team without a single win in their last 15 Premier League home games, while naysayers will say that this performance and the result are particularly damning because Mourinho’s Spurs somehow they managed to get even worse. than everyone expected them to be, which was really too bad.
This, it is fair to say, was a very bad performance. Evil cartoon. Like a parody of a bad José Mourinho playing badly from a fever dream in the head of José Mourinho’s worst enemy. If it hadn’t been real, you wouldn’t have believed it. People, blessed and fortunate people, who did not witness it will say to the survivors with dead eyes, “Oh, it couldn’t have been that bad.” You weren’t there, man. You were not there. Comparisons to last year’s loss here are quick and obvious, but there’s little doubt that this could be a narrower loss on the scoreboard, but it’s more damaging and discouraging overall. Coming from the back of … whatever that non-performance against LiverpoolThe Spurs just couldn’t get that poor again, and yet they somehow managed to get even worse.
Mourinho, after having fought with his two right backs this week, bet on Moussa Sissoko on the right back of a 3-4-3 that never looked good in a mortifying first half in which the Spurs defense was positionally for everyone sides. place and attack almost completely non-existent. Steven Bergwijn’s shot that crept wide from 25 yards in the half hour was the first of any kind for the Spurs in 70 minutes of football since Thursday night. They had been behind and theoretically chasing the game for 55 of those 70 minutes.
The fact that they were trailing just 1-0 at halftime is due more to Brighton’s fragile confidence and lack of composure and confidence in the final third. However, that is a bit more understandable, because Brighton is not very good. It is customary in pieces like this to say something like ‘Of course we shouldn’t lose sight of how well Brighton played’ before quickly returning to give the ‘great’ underperforming team a well deserved kick. But Brighton really didn’t play that well. If they had, they would have scored four or five. They started off brilliantly, correctly feeling that Spurs would lack confidence after Thursday and be unsure of their formation, and the goal was well worked. But just winning this game 1-0 is a big concern for Brighton going forward. They won’t have an easier assignment than this between now and the end of the season and, in theory, they remained vulnerable to missing the win until the final seconds.
The Spurs were marginally better in the second half than they had been in the first, if only because it was literally impossible to be anything else. Carlos Vinicius looked… good when he came in and, more significantly, the Spurs had their best (just not horrible) five minutes of the night just after Erik Lamela replaced the completely ineffective Gareth Bale on the hour.
Two moments in the second half summed up the entire game for Tottenham. The first was a visibly exasperated Lamela who went for the goal from a 40-yard free throw because he had no other choice. At least it increased the shots in the target’s stats. The second was a spectacular goalline block from Toby Alderweireld as Brighton looked sure to add a second in the final minutes. This was remarkable because it was by far the most striking and impressive thing any Spurs player did all night. That feels important. The highlight in Brighton for a Spurs team that led the league as recently as last month was a punt that kept the score at 1-0. That was the highlight. That was the best.
It was a really bad performance, is what we are saying here. We’re racking our brains over a Spurs’ performance worse than this, and you should be careful when evaluating any performance in the immediate heat of their offensive dread, and we conclude that it really could be in the eight-game two-point era. under Juande Ramos. The Spurs have lost to poor teams and been thrashed by the good teams many times since then, but rarely, if ever, have they been so deprived as they are here. Defensively confused, offensively irrelevant. The Spurs have gone from trying and failing on the courts 1-0 to trailing 1-0. Plan A which was based on scoring at least twice in three or four attacks had enough flaws with Harry Kane on the side. Without it, you are doomed.
Kane’s absence is huge, of course it is. But only to the extent that his scandalous brilliance has been masking at least some of the Spurs’ shortcomings for a long time. Still, the Spurs threat of attack has been on the wane for several weeks; Kane’s injury simply exacerbates existing flaws to the point of absurdity.
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A nine-point streak in nine games has taken the Spurs from the best at the table to also winners, with even the top four now looking past them; There are simply more than four teams much better than this, but it is a race that should put Mourinho in grave danger.
His favorite thing in recent weeks in the face of past bad performances has been to point out individual mistakes (never his own) in case things went wrong. That is going to be difficult to achieve here. The Spurs’ ineptitude here was, in its way, a triumph of collective action. They were awful as a group. There was no specific bug that could be identified that brought the entire game plan to its knees. It was simply the wrong team playing the wrong tactics in the wrong game, and doing it all in a heavy, terrible, and wrong way. This depends on the coach at least as much as the players.
And it really doesn’t look like it’s going to get better anytime soon. Mourinho will point out that Spurs are still competing for three trophies this season, and he’s right. But that achievement needs caveats. They beat Chelsea on penalties and two Championship teams after a break in the third round to reach the Carabao final. They have beaten Marine and Wycombe to reach the knockout stages of the FA Cup. Elimination in the group stage of the Europa League would have been an unthinkable disaster.
This year’s belated Carabao Cup final means that the illusion of competing for something will last a little longer than it would have otherwise, and knowing Mourinho, he will probably go and somehow win that final just to annoy us all. But things could come to an end head before Wembley. Spurs will face Chelsea, Manchester City and West Ham in the league over the next few weeks and have a good chance of extending their participation in the FA Cup at Everton’s expense. If those games follow the path that form and logic currently dictate …
With current speed and course, Mourinho may not return to Europa League soccer next month, regardless of the League Cup final in April. Right now this is a team and manager with no ideas. It was completely predictable that the Spurs would be bad tonight, and they still managed to gasp. And it still seems like things can go downhill even from here.
Dave tickner
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