If Harry Kane is a throwback to the dauntlessness and uncrushable spirit that English football so likes to define itself by, then there is a certain irony regarding the team he plays for. Despite the emergence and influence of their puppyish local boy done good, Tottenham Hotspur are currently a side desperately lacking in heart.
The season is only three games old but Spurs’ submissions have been a recurring theme. In the curtain-raiser at Old Trafford the visitors began with promising vim but lost their nerve once Kyle Walker’s own goal put them behind. The following weekend, when Stoke came to north London, it was much the same story: no Tottenham player wanted to impose his will on the game after events conspired against them. Spurs were 2-0 up with 12 minutes to go but once Stoke pulled one back the extent to which the writing was on the wall was stunning. It only took another five minutes for the equaliser to come and at the final whistle the attitude emanating from the men in white was not anger or defiance but weary resignation.
And had Wes Morgan aimed his late header either side of Hugo Lloris last Saturday then Spurs would have gone one worse, turning victory into last-gasp defeat at Leicester. Instead they merely repeated the previous week’s trick, waiting until the game’s closing stages to magic three points into one.
Mauricio Pochettino has many able players at his disposal but the common denominator across the first three games – their desperate inability to reverse a match’s momentum – has nothing to do with talent levels.
Ahead of Saturday’s visit of Everton, the good news is Pochettino knows the problem. “We were a bit soft” was his assessment after Stoke’s smash-and-grab job, and such abject surrender must have made galling viewing for a man who was in his playing days backed up by the snarls and clenched fists of Walter Samuel and Diego Simeone. Last Saturday’s experience in the east Midlands was “difficult to accept”, he said after the game, citing their refusal to learn from the week before.
Perhaps it is telling that Spurs’ current captain is Lloris. The Frenchman is a splendid goalkeeper and doubtless a fine professional but one who has only been at the club for three years and who has done precisely nothing to downplay the speculation linking him with Manchester United. You do not envisage him lying in bed at night dreaming of Danny Blanchflower and Bill Nicholson.
And yet he is probably the best captain they have got. Of the players involved so far this season (Aaron Lennon and Emmanuel Adebayor have evidently been frozen out) only Kyle Walker has been among the first-team squad for significantly longer. Traits like character and commitment are immeasurable but they do exist; Spurs have too readily provided players with a short-term home in recent years, and it can only work to erode these qualities.
This summer alone saw the club wave its goodbyes to Lewis Holtby, Paulinho, Etienne Capoue, Benjamin Stambouli and Vlad Chiriches, a purging process during which few tears were shed by anyone. They were all players whose White Hart Lane careers lasted no longer than two years and were defined by their complete lack of defining qualities. It’s not so much that they failed but that they failed so passively. (Roberto Soldado also left after an underwhelming spell but unlike the others marked his time at the club with diligence and purpose.)
Pochettino seems grimly determined to persist with Erik Lamela but the forward’s place in the side is justified by nothing beyond a jumbo £30m price tag. Detached, peripheral and bound for the departure lounge sooner or later, Lamela is the poster boy for Spurs’ problems.
The trend runs deeper than this, though. Adebayor and Federico Fazio both lie on the unwanted heap with no willing takers thus far. Looking further back, the brief stop-offs of Clint Dempsey, Gylfi Sigurdsson, Steven Pienaar and Louis Saha are further symptoms of a recruitment policy where scattergun has tended to trump strategy. It is easy to think back to Ryan Nelsen’s stint in north London and wonder if it was all a strange dream, such was its pointlessness. It wasn’t.
And that is only the players; the club is currently on its fourth manager in five seasons. The atmosphere on the terraces should be conducive to spirit and resilience but the seesawing in its boardroom is not.
Perhaps the most obvious prescription for Spurs’ malaise is actually the last thing the club needs. The chairman, Daniel Levy, has drawn many withering assessments over the summer for the failure to reinforce the squad but there is a good argument to say that another influx of first-teamers would do more harm than good.
The club have signed South Korea’s Son Heung-min from Bayer Leverkusen in a deal believed to be in the region of £22m, and have seen two bids for Saido Berahino rejected by West Brom, but any more than a couple of additions would be a mistake. Spurs have finally whittled their squad down and the likes of Nabil Bentaleb, Ryan Mason and Dele Alli are youngsters who play with a resolve notably lacking in many of their older colleagues.
Such a continuity-led approach is not especially likely to yield immediate results, and a big-name signing or three would doubtless placate a tetchy fanbase. But as Spurs know all too well, big-name signings often look better on paper than they do on grass. Pochettino should instead concentrate of building a squad of players for whom London is not just another stage of a whistle-stop tour, and who want to win for each other rather than to help their own cause.
It is the perfect time for Spurs to take the French film director Robert Bresson’s advice that “one does not create by adding but by taking away”. Less isn’t always more but in this instance it surely is.
It’s a long-term strategy that could well mean sacrificing short-term results but Pochettino, well-known for his willingness to give youth its chance, was brought in for exactly that: the long-term. The club now needs to show the courage of its convictions. It is not all bad, either. For all the squad’s deficiencies, in Harry Kane – a model of infectious resilience – they already have the perfect man to spearhead the rejuvenation.
