Tottenham Hotspur’s campaign hit an untimely bump in Sunday’s North London derby with a 2-0 defeat at the hands of Arsenal at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Read the match report here, the player ratings here, Antonio Conte’s post-match reaction here, or have your say on the match via the Vital Spurs fan forum here.
The pick of the stats from Sunday’s encounter at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium can be viewed here. In this article, having had a bit more time to digest Sunday’s proceedings, I discuss my own conclusions from the derby defeat.
Now, I get that it’s all doom and gloom at the club at the moment – and Conte’s comments about the club today have generally (at least in my view) been misinterpreted by many to be a perpetuation of this negativity – but, like Antonio Conte alluded to post-match, the performance was not as bad as many were making out on Sunday and are making out now.
Yes, the first half was a load of drivel, and the lack of confidence with which the players approached the game – irrespective of the current chasm in quality between the two sid – was simply shocking, as were the needless errors throughout the match, whether that be Hugo Lloris deciding to give Arsenal a head-start, Pierre Emile Hojberg whacking a simple ball to Dejan Kulusevski over the English Channel, or Sonny failing to control simple balls.
However, there was enough in that 15-minute spell directly after the break that was cause for a degree of optimism – had Ryan Sessegnon scored that chance, who knows what would have become of the rest of the match? It seemed that after that chance came and went, Spurs heads dropped, and the match fizzled out with Arsenal having to do the bare minimum to see out the remainder of the game with the points intact.
That drop-off after 60 minutes itself, however, concerned me just as much as the first-half passivity, as both are symptomatic of the existing mental frailty within our ranks that Conte has seemed hell-bent on eradicating from the minute he walked through the doors at Hotspur Way.
While we do have a long way to go in the mentality department, on the whole, I don’t see the need for the collective sighs of exasperation and incessant finger-pointing at the board and the management, and the latest moans and groans from the THST are not helping in this regard.
We’ve been here before – the defeat to Wolves last February, which came after 22 league matches in the season, left us 8th, on 36 points (3 more than we do now), and 5 points adrift of 4th place, albeit with several games in hand on 3 of the 4 sides above us. This was a near identical performance to the one on Sunday – an incredibly passive first half, riddled with unenforced errors, left us 2-0 down early on, and although several chances were created in an improved second-half display, Spurs never really recovered and faced a whole host of questions regarding the players’ commitment and quality.
This moment in time feels exactly like that match, and although it is not great to be in a similar position a year later, Conte has always warned supporters and the press that his process of transforming the club would be full of ups and downs. Like the Wolves defeat last February, this is merely another bump on the road to success.
What came after that Wolves match? A trip to the Etihad, and we all know how that went. Let’s get behind the team and hope that history repeats itself, but in the likely event that it doesn’t, let’s keep getting behind Conte and the boys anyway. They need us – and not these ghastly complaints from the THST – more than ever.