Ange Postecoglou buried his head in his hands for a few seconds in utter disbelief at the question he had just been asked. The 59-year-old’s eyes then blazed with fury as he staunchly defended Tottenham Hotspur’s players at the end of a bruising week that saw them eliminated from two cup competitions.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
Spurs have won two of their last 12 fixtures in the Premier League. They are closer to the relegation zone than the top four, which is why the cups have become so important to them as Postecoglou famously “always wins a trophy” during his second season at a club.
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They wasted a great opportunity to reach the Carabao Cup final by meekly surrendering to Liverpool on Thursday and never recovered from Jacob Ramsey’s early goal for Aston Villa. Their only chance of silverware now lies in the Europa League. Postecoglou was unhappy with the suggestion that his team had lost their identity and cannot function in his preferred style.
“No, because they’re tired, mate,” he fired back. “Do you think they can press like (we would want)? If we hadn’t played Thursday night and I hadn’t rotated that team we wouldn’t have been pressing aggressively today? Fair chance, unless you don’t think they’re human beings. Unless you’re superhuman and you think, ‘No, after playing Liverpool on Thursday night they should be flying tonight’. It doesn’t happen. They’re human beings. Why do you think Liverpool and others rotate 11 players? Why? There’s a reason and I wish I could do the same — so you can bring a freshness to the team.
“They’re not playing anywhere near the levels that we want or expect, but that’s not because they’re not trying. It’s because they can’t. This group of players, once we get the rest of the group in, will be an outstanding team. I have no doubt about that. Whether other people can’t see that, that’s of no interest to me. If you want to measure anything on what they’re doing at the moment, other than the extreme situation they’re dealing with, then your analysis is skewed and it’s not objective. That’s my opinion.”
Postecoglou makes a few fair points. Tottenham have had to cope without their first-choice goalkeeper, left-back, centre-backs, playmaker and striker over the last couple of months. There is a huge burden on some of the younger players, including Archie Gray (18), Lucas Bergvall (19), Mikey Moore (17) and now new signing Mathys Tel (19), which is starting to take its toll.
The problem of tiredness is not an adequate explanation for how Villa cut through Spurs so easily out wide and scored in the first minute. Or why there was a huge pocket of space behind their midfield that Ramsey, Morgan Rogers and Youri Tielemans kept gleefully running through. There was one moment in the first half when Tielemans picked up the ball and ran 60 yards with it before shooting from the edge of the box. It was similar to Bilal El Khannouss’ strike during Leicester City’s 2-1 win against them in January. Lessons are not being learned.
There were multiple occasions on Sunday when Gray and Kevin Danso were pressured by Rogers and Donyell Malen into awkwardly turning around and passing the ball backwards. When goalkeeper Antonin Kinsky received the ball, he would hit it long towards Son Heung-min. It is a tactic they used with limited success in the 4-0 defeat to Liverpool and nothing has improved. They were just returning possession to their hosts.
The starting XI against Villa contained a lot of technical quality across the defence and midfield including Gray, Bergvall, Rodrigo Bentancur and Djed Spence. However, they seemed incapable of stringing a series of passes together to draw Villa in and then move the ball around them. There was no conviction in what Tottenham were trying to do and that stems from a lack of confidence.
In the 17th minute, Kinksy passed the ball to a retreating Bentancur, who chipped it over Malen for Danso. It was an extremely risky manoeuvre that put his team-mate in an awkward position with a bouncing ball in a tight area and, unsurprisingly, Danso hooked it out for a throw-in. This team used to be brave in possession but now they look hesitant and jittery, which is understandable when you consider all of the hits they have received this season.
The other issue Postecoglou needs to address is the rising frustration within the squad. Spence ripped off his sock tape, threw it on the ground and headed straight down the tunnel with Yves Bissouma at full time. Pedro Porro jumped up after being nutmegged and left in a heap on the floor by Marcus Rashford. He then brought Villa’s new striker down with a wild kick on the edge of the box and somehow escaped punishment. The Spain international received a yellow card in the final 10 minutes for a tackle on Ramsey.
Bentancur was booked for dragging down Rogers. Bergvall jumped into a tackle on Rogers and then clattered into him later on. He eventually picked up a booking for a foul on Ramsey, too. These are the moments when Postecoglou needs his senior players, including the captain Son and Dejan Kulusevski, to calm everyone down.
Will Postecoglou be given the time to fix these issues? Goodwill is running low because of the limp manner in which they threw away two chances of silverware. The cup competitions were a distraction from their woeful league form, which will now come under a harsher spotlight.
Tottenham only play twice in the next fortnight because they finished in the top eight of the Europa League’s league phase. This has to be the moment they reset their season and rediscover the spark missing from their last two performances.
This could have been the week when Tottenham turned their season around. Instead, we might look back on these few days as the period when everything truly spun out of control.
(Top photo: Catherine Ivill – AMA/Getty Images)