Tottenham have endured terrible problems with injuries this season, but how much are manager Ange Postecoglou’s tactics to blame?
The Premier League has arguably never witnessed a team like this version of Tottenham Hotspur.
Mired in the bottom half of the table and looking over their shoulder at the relegation zone despite having scored fewer goals (48) than only the top two, Ange Postecoglou’s side are an enigma.
In all competitions, there have been wins over Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Aston Villa, and there have been defeats to Ipswich Town, Leicester City, Everton and Crystal Palace among many, many, many others. Tottenham have lost 16 games already this season.
The explanation, according to Postecoglou, is plain to see. “I don’t know how else to explain it,” he said after last Sunday’s FA Cup defeat to Villa, when asked why his team’s form is so bad. “I don’t know how else to explain it if you can’t see that this team is just trying to play its hardest in the most extreme of circumstances.
“Two and a half months of asking 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds and senior players, with no rest, to play Thursday, Sunday, Thursday, Sunday, Thursday, Sunday, Thursday, Sunday. I’ll keep going for two-and-a-half months and if you think that is not at all a factor of how this team is performing then there’s nothing else I can say. There’s nothing else I can explain.”
The Australian insists his team’s injury crisis is to blame. At Villa Park, he was without 11 first-team players. He has been without at least eight injured players for the last 11 matches, since the home draw with Wolves on 29 December. They haven’t had fewer than five players missing through injury since facing Ipswich on 10 November. “Every time I’ve seen the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s usually been an oncoming train,” Postecoglou said last month of the crisis.
The Tottenham manager believes rotten luck has done for his team. The injury list has robbed him of many of the best players in his squad and has knackered the players who have remained available. It’s a disastrous recipe that has left the remaining players overcooked.
But questions have persisted throughout this crisis as to Postecoglou’s culpability for these problems. The decision not to relent on his intense style of football and relentless demands may only have exacerbated things.
Postecoglou has stuck to his guns when the topic is brought up in press conferences, insisting this group will be stronger in the long term and the team will be better off having continued to play his style of football with no compromises.
He might well be right. Only time will tell – if he continues to be afforded that luxury – whether these players will be better for this period of suffering; whether they will grow into a stronger collective force that can play Angeball to its full potential.
Tottenham are clearly planning for the future and gambling on Postecoglou being proved right. Five of the eight signings they have made in the last two transfer windows have been teenagers, and no heads have rolled in reaction to their terrible results. For now, at least, Postecoglou retains the backing of chairman Daniel Levy.
But does there come a point when the thinking needs to become a little less long-term? Would a move away from the Australian’s commitment to what he insists will benefit the team in the long run give his fit players a better chance of winning games?
That’s a difficult question to answer, but the numbers from Spurs’ season so far suggest Postecoglou’s tactics might not exactly have helped matters.
Muscle injuries tend to be caused by being overloaded more than being the result of a specific incident or impact, and of those, hamstring injuries are most associated with being overworked. Data from premierinjuries.com shows that 39% of the injuries that have caused a Spurs player to miss at least one game this season have been hamstring-related, compared to a league-wide average of 23.5%. Hamstring injuries make up 58% of Tottenham’s muscle-related injuries, compared to 41% across the whole Premier League.
Tottenham’s injuries have put more strain on the available players, in turn increasing the likelihood of more of them straining muscles or pinging hamstrings. But it also can’t have helped that Postecoglou asks his players to run and sprint more than any other team in the top flight.
Spurs run at high intensity more than any other team in the Premier League. They lead the top flight for total sprints, with 4,200, and are second to Ipswich (2,697.5 km) for total distance covered (2,693.8 km). Tottenham’s players have made more than 700 more sprints than Ipswich (3,473).
Postecoglou’s team barely seem to drop their intensity. The speed at which they restart play regardless of whether they are winning, drawing or losing is a topic we have covered before, and they run and sprint more than most teams whether they have the ball or not.
They press more intensely than every other team in the Premier League. They have pressured an opponent on the ball in the final third more times (1,505) than any other team in the league. Their PPDA (opposition passes per defensive action – a measure of proactivity without the ball) is the lowest in the division, at 9.4, showing they allow their opponents the fewest passes for every attempt they make to overturn possession. They also lead the Premier League for pressures made by a player sprinting, with 819 – 82 more than the team in second (Bournemouth – 737) and at least 160 more than 15 of the other 18 teams.
When they win the ball, the intensity barely drops. Their players have made more off-the-ball runs when a teammate has possession (4,155) than any other team in the Premier League this season, and more off-the-ball sprints (1,361) than everyone else, too. Their players have covered 9.1 km with off-the-ball runs, which is by a distance the most in the Premier League, while only Nottingham Forest’s players average a longer distance covered with each of their runs (22.0 metres) than Spurs (21.8m). Note that Spurs’ players have made more than 1,200 more off-ball runs than Forest’s.
Clearly, it is in the game plan to outrun the opposition. Their win rate when they outrun their opponents in league games this season is 53.8%, but drops to 9.1% when their opponents run further than them. They have lost every single game in which their opponents have recorded more sprints than them.
It isn’t possible to say for sure how much causation there is in the link between Tottenham’s running and sprinting numbers and their hamstring-related injuries, but the correlation is so strong that it is difficult to ignore.
In recent weeks, however, Spurs have suffered fewer muscle-related injuries than earlier in the season (though there has also been some undeniably bad luck in Radu Dragusin’s ACL injury and Rodrigo Bentancur suffering a concussion, while Micky van de Ven’s return has been delayed again). There is more light at the end of the tunnel for Postecoglou, with rumours that five key first-team players in Guglielmo Vicario, Destiny Udogie, James Maddison, Brennan Johnson and Timo Werner could all return to full training this week. Wilson Odobert could be on his way back, too.
The challenge will be for Postecoglou to keep the majority of his squad fit as he seeks to fulfil his goal to end Tottenham’s trophy drought this season, having insisted back in September: “I always win things in my second year.” With Spurs out of both the FA Cup and League Cup after a damaging last seven days, the Europa League now represents Postecoglou’s only hope.
There is a quirk in Tottenham’s recent numbers that may suggest the Australian is aware of the need to ask less of his players. They have only posted fewer than 150 sprints in four Premier League games all season, and those came in their four most recent matches.
Postecoglou also insisted last week that his team “have hardly trained in four months”. Even accounting for the likely exaggeration, the Spurs manager is clearly aware of how damaging it could be to continue to ask too much of his players.
It could also be, though, that the players in those four most recent games just didn’t have enough in the tank to sprint as much as Postecoglou asked them to. Whatever the reason, it will be interesting to see against United on Sunday just how much the players run.
The aim for Spurs now has to be to get their injured players back to fitness, while avoiding any more serious injuries. If they can manage that, it will then be a question of whether can start winning games in the here and now.
Do that, and they may somehow manage to save their season as well as their beleaguered manager.