In the Tottenham Hotspur shop, you can buy a replica of the historic clock that’s mounted on a lamppost on High Road outside the stadium. It’s a classy-looking thing, bearing the club’s name and topped by a golden cockerel. It costs a hefty £80 but would look great on any mantelpiece.
There’s just one problem.
Read the online description of the thing and the website warns you: “Please note this is not a working clock.”
That’s right. It’s just a lifeless block of resin. It will always be three o’clock in your home.
Surely only Spurs could try to sell their fans a timepiece that doesn’t tell the time, and attempt to charge them £80 for it.
I can’t help thinking this clock/statue/navy-and-white elephant says a lot about the team and the club as a whole at the moment.
Tottenham have one of the best stadiums in the world, a peerless training ground by all accounts, and even some great players on their day. But please note: this is not a working football club.
That might seem a strange thing to write about an institution that was declared “England’s best-run club” only five months ago. Right now, however, it’s a monument to dysfunctionality.
A team that was disappointed to finish fifth last year and aspired to qualify for the Champions League this season are now 15th after 23 games.
They’ve lost at home to the clubs placed 19th and 17th, drawn with the team in 18th, and lost away to the club in 16th.
They haven’t secured a home victory in the league since the first week of November, and won one of the last 11 Premier League games, against the rock-bottom club Southampton.
Perhaps most damningly, they haven’t won a single league game by a one-goal margin all season – showing that when the going gets tough, Spurs don’t get going.
Like a broken clock – or a clock that never worked in the first place – Spurs occasionally get it right, bulldozing teams 3-0, 4-0, 5-0. Far more often, they fail.
Several friends who support other clubs have been messaging me (while reaching for some popcorn, no doubt) to ask why Spurs haven’t sacked Ange Postecoglou yet.
It’s true the injury situation is unprecedented, especially the length of time that a realistically good first XI been ruled out for. But the squad is thin and lacking in quality compared to the best two periods of Tottenham history over the last two decades.
Harry Redknapp’s squad of 2010-11 had six senior specialist centre-backs – Ledley King, Michael Dawson, Jonathan Woodgate, William Gallas, Younes Kaboul and Sebastien Bassong – compared to three now, and four outright strikers compared to two now: Robbie Keane, Jermaine Defoe, Peter Crouch and Roman Pavlyuchenko. Mauricio Pochettino’s squad of, say, 2016-17 was also stronger.
That’s just looking at the numbers – the overall quality of the players has also declined.
Mismanagement stretching back years, when stars were allowed to grow stale instead of being sold for reinvestment, has left today’s squad overstretched. The few uninjured players are either knackered or mere teenagers, or both.
It’s no wonder that Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall – both excellent prospects at 18 years old – simultaneously fell to the ground in utter exhaustion as soon as the final whistle was blown in Hoffenheim last week. For that game, the outfield substitutes also had an average age of just 18.
I’m all for buying great young players. Spurs can only hope to recruit the next Jude Bellingham, for example, by swooping when they’re still teenagers, like Borussia Dortmund did for the man who is now England‘s star midfielder when he was 17 and cost £22m, not by waiting like Real Madrid until they’re an £88m superstar.
But youngsters need to be supported by more mature players, not the other way around. And we’re now 27 days into the transfer window with just a goalkeeper to show for it.
In not having sacked Postecoglou already, it seems chairman Daniel Levy must be accepting all these reasons.
So does all this mean the manager should escape blame? No. Postecoglou’s fig leaf dropped long before the injury crisis.
He initially deserved congratulations for his radical attacking revolution after the stodgy eras of Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, and 11 months ago I found myself thanking him in person at the London Football Awards, where he won manager of the year. That feels a lifetime ago now.
The end of last season was terrible and the start of this one was bad, before many players were missing. When they lost to Ipswich Town at home, Postecoglou had virtually a full first XI starting the game with a relatively strong bench.
It’s unfair to say he never, ever makes any tactical tweaks – but his stubborn pursuit of perfect principles is harming the team, badly.
When Spurs went from 2-0 up to 3-2 down against Brighton & Hove Albion, he refused to even try to change the game through early substitutions, arguing the team had been so bad that it wouldn’t have helped. When he said that he didn’t want three points if his team didn’t deserve them, he was wilfully ignoring the lesson of every successful team in history, that sometimes you have to win while playing badly.
And arguably it has been his relentlessly aggressive and energy-sapping tactics, combined with his relative lack of rotation by not using players like Djed Spence earlier in the season, which worsened – if not caused – the injury catastrophe.
After we slumped 2-1 to Leicester City at the weekend, a fan behind me shouted: “We’re getting f***ing relegated.” Postecoglou seemed to hint this was a possibility when he said a few days ago that the club would be “playing with fire” if they didn’t sign reinforcements.
It looks like the club is content to do just that, failing to support him and his players, while also declining to sack him.
Incredibly there remain some Postecoglou cultists at large, who tell me critics don’t appreciate how bad the injuries really are, or suggest there’s a media conspiracy against the man because he’s a big, old, grumpy Australian. Nonsense.
Perhaps the most pertinent point now is the difficulty in replacing him. It’s too early in the season to give Ryan Mason his third caretaker role, especially when we’re still in three cups and he’s hardly proved himself before. But which currently favoured permanent manager – like Bournemouth‘s Andoni Iraola or Fulham‘s Marco Silva – would possibly want to join us at this stage and in this state?
Some fans ask if other managers could do any better with so many absentees. Increasingly, however, most supporters seem to think it couldn’t get any worse.
Perhaps Postecoglou is effectively now a caretaker boss himself. Surely the board can only be hoping that he will somehow shepherd the club to safety – while they work out how to replace him in the summer.
But if he fails to beat Elfsborg at home in the Europa League on Thursday, potentially landing Spurs two further play-off games for more players to get injured in, that will surely have to be that for Tottenham’s Angeball experiment.