There are plenty of well-known checkpoints in the life cycle of a Tottenham manager and we have reached one with Thomas Frank. It is the pleading for time bit. “If nobody gets this, nobody will be able to turn this around,” he said after last Sunday’s 3-0 Premier League defeat at Nottingham Forest. It is not a “quick fix,” he added. And nobody was about to disagree.
Frank is veering towards another – the one where it is as if he wants to scream, to release the inner hurricane that he referenced in Nottingham. Is anybody seeing what he is seeing? In other words, the immense difficulties that he faces.
Frank does not want to make excuses for how his team have stuttered since the end of September after an encouraging start to his tenure because that would not be a good look. But he does want understanding, perspective. And so on Friday, as he looked ahead to the visit of Liverpool on Saturday night, he sought to get a few points across – in that deft and charming manner of his.
The Champions League is not the Europa League. It takes a greater physical and mental toll on the players, Frank suggested, and Spurs’s involvement in the competition, which has gone well so far in terms of results and them being set fair to qualify for the knockout rounds, must be factored in. Frank said his players had lacked energy at Forest. They played their sixth Champions League game of the season at home to Slavia Prague five days previously. It is linked.
Frank talked about how there were not many players in the squad who were used to performing every third or fourth day at this level and then there have been those who have barely been involved because of injury – “a few good players out with a lot of goals and assists in them,” as he put it. In other words, Dejan Kulusevski, James Maddison and Dominic Solanke.
Frank had a further bugbear, the one that seems to get to them all. It involves the distance between where Spurs are or have been and where they want to go. For Frank, it has been particularly pronounced given that Ange Postecoglou bequeathed him a team that finished 17th in the league. To repeat, as Frank did, there is no quick fix.
“What is the potential of Tottenham?” he asked. “That is: I would like to win trophies. And we would like to compete with the best clubs in the country and hopefully win the championship one day. That’s what all Spurs fans are dreaming about. That’s what I’m dreaming about. But how do we get that?
“Reality is: we finished eighth [in 2022-23] with Champions League [participation], then we finished fifth with no European competition, then we finished 17th with the Europa League. Now we’re in the fourth season and there’s been some players through the systems and so on. That’s the reality.”
It added up to a nice turn in expectation management and when you listen to Frank it is easy to nod along with him, to follow the logic. And yet another line that he uttered after the Forest match came to resonate. “No one will want to hear about this,” he said in the context of needing time and there being no magic wand. Nobody is about to disagree with that either.
Tough job, Spurs. You must challenge for the league title with a budget that is the sixth biggest, at best, in the competition. Definitely qualify for the Champions League. And do so playing the kind of exciting, attacking football that satisfies a home crowd which pays extremely high prices and is rarely slow to voice unhappiness if bang does not follow their buck.
Frank’s reasonable comments in pre-match press briefings go only so far. It is possible to wonder how much the board want to hear his thoughts on how bad the club have been for so long. But there is no doubt that the supporters want to see more from his team.
It is about results because if they have been good in the Champions League, they have been erratic in the league – three wins in their past 12 games in the competition; each of the five defeats during the sequence feeling like an earthquake. It is also worth saying that beating opponents such as Copenhagen and Slavia in Europe does not buy massive credit.
As big a problem for Frank has been the style of the performances, the collective identity. He has brought greater efficiency on set pieces and generally tightened things up defensively but they are not vote winners when the team can look so stodgy when trying to build through the thirds; so loose and disjointed.
He is acutely aware that his Spurs must be better in creative terms; their displays in half of their league fixtures have been anywhere between deeply frustrating and totally unacceptable. It has sparked a troubling question about the direction of travel and his future. What are Spurs evolving towards under him and is it a vision that the fans can get behind?
And so to Liverpool, who have often brought out the worst in Spurs in recent years. Spurs have beaten them twice in 18 attempts – and one of those was the 1-0 Carabao Cup semi-final first leg win last season, which was rather overshadowed by the 4-0 defeat in the return. The results in the league last time out? Two defeats: 6-3 at home, 5-1 away.
“We conceded a few goals in those games … it’s probably a good idea to also defend a bit,” Frank said. It would be a start but by no means an end.
