Yesterday afternoon, Spurs slumped to a tame 2-0 defeat against Aston Villa in front of their own supporters to get their 2023 off to the worst possible start. Read the match report here, Antonio Conte’s post-match reaction here, and the player ratings here. Read the pick of the stats from yesterday’s match here.
You can also have your say on yesterday’s events from the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on the Vital Spurs fan forum here. Here, I will discuss my conclusions from yesterday’s defeat.
Upon thorough reflection, I think the best way to sum up yesterday’s events would be to say that not a great deal was learned by the general observer that we didn’t know before. I can bend everyone’s ears about tactical nuances and how Unai Emery played his cards right (which he did to be fair), but on the whole, it was a case of familiar failings and collective laments about the same things going wrong around the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
The obvious catastrophe to pin yesterday’s failings on would be the absence of Dejan Kulusevski, which is hardly surprising, is it? Without the Swedish winger, everything up top is a bit one-dimensional. Even with him in the side, some of our play at the back and midfield is one-paced at times, so without him, it just made the whole things worse. He connects our midfield to our attack, and without him, the game plan (whatever that may be at this moment in time) falls flat on its face, which it duly did yesterday afternoon.
His replacement, Bryan Gil, making his first start of the season, failed to step up when he was needed the most, and Antonio Conte’s damning (and downright accurate) assessment of our forward options in the absence of Kulusevski spoke volumes about the Spaniard’s (among others) shortcomings yesterday:
“We have different characteristics. We don’t have many players who are really good to beat the man (sic). We don’t have many creative players in our team”, Conte said in his post-match interview yesterday (via Eurosport).
Indeed, without Kulusevski, there is no one in the side capable of this – Heung-min Son, a usually reliable dribbler, has been a shadow of his usual self this year, registering an all-time low average per 90 Premier League minutes across all of an attacker’s key metrics since joining from Bayer Leverkusen in 2015: 0.16 goals per 90 minutes, a pass completion rate of 69.1%, 0.9 successful dribbles, 27.7 passes received and 2.5 loose balls recovered (via The Athletic).
With attackers incapable of beating a man, we are growing increasingly stale and turgid and becoming a very predictable proposition to face, even against opponents we ought to be wiping the floor with, with all due respect to Villa.
The terms stale and turgid can equally be applied to our midfield – in the absence of Rodrigo Bentancur, Antonio Conte spoke ahead of yesterday’s match of the need for Yves Bissouma to step up, particularly after a wretched hour against Brentford last week.
Fast forward 6 days, and just as Bissouma gave Vitali Janelt a free run at goal for the Bees’ opener last week, so too did he allow Emi Buendia and Douglas Luiz to waltz into our penalty area unopposed for both of the visitors’ goals yesterday. While Hugo Lloris and Harry Kane must take the lion’s share of the blame for both travesties, as a holding midfielder Bissouma has to be more alert to such danger.
Indeed, the goals were merely highlighting the overall picture of a midfield battle in which Bissouma and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg emphatically lost. I’m not saying Bentancur would fix all of our problems in the middle, but at the moment he’s offering an awful lot more than Bissouma, and with the Malian suspended for this week’s encounter against Crystal Palace, I don’t have high hopes that Oliver Skipp will be much of an adequate deputy himself. Big problems in midfield for us.
Ultimately, you can be stale in attack, and docile in midfield, but above all, you cannot – CANNOT – legislate for individual errors. Even if you’re firing on all cylinders, it matters not when you’ve got a keeper who seems to be taking increasing creative liberties in between the sticks.
Both goals were wholly avoidable, and who knows, if it’s 0-0 with ten minutes to go you’d have to fancy Spurs at home (not that we’d have scored yesterday but you never know), but the nature of both goals conceded was so demoralising that you could see the life sap out of the players once Villa’s lot wheeled off in celebration.
Indeed,, Spurs have gifted opponents five goals in the Premiership this season, at least two more than any other team (via Premier League). Of those 5 goals, Lloris has been responsible for three, more than any other Premiership player (via Premier League).
This has become a worryingly recurring theme and hints at a soft psychological underbelly that is undermining the hard work Conte is doing to turn his players into the winning machines his management style so heartily depends on. This sports psychologist we hired last year needs to start earning his money and addressing these individual errors would be a decent place to start ahead of Wednesday’s trip to Selhurst Park.