There was a moment around six minutes in, when the score was still 0-0 and the promise of this game was still fresh and Tottenham still harboured fanciful ambitions of a credible 2-1 defeat rather than a 3-0 trouncing, and Harry Kane got the ball in the centre circle.
There wasn’t much on, but with a single, magical dip of the shoulder, he wriggled past Bernardo Silva and Rodri and bore down on the Manchester City penalty area. Alas, this was the point at which reality bit. Despite having just shrugged off two blue shirts, Kane was now confronted by four more. With no player in his vicinity, all Kane could do was keep dribbling until he lost the ball. Which, with a dulling inevitability, he did.
And ultimately, Kane’s doomed attempt to score by beating an entire team on his own felt like a pretty good representation of everything else Tottenham did here. If City were a gourmet chef with a reliable menu of recipes, Tottenham’s approach felt more like simply throwing random foods into a blender and then blaming the customers for complaining.
Naturally, this was José Mourinho’s recourse after their 3-0 defeat: “a fresh team against a very tired team,” as he put it. It was about as predictable as anything else his team had managed to serve up on a chilly night at the Etihad Stadium.
This, perhaps, is the major issue with a Tottenham side whose fall from the peak of the Mauricio Pochettino years feels ever more inexorable with every passing game. Right now, they aren’t just a bad team, they’re a boring, plodding, joyless team. And in many ways, that’s worse.
By way of illustration, let’s take the second and third City goals, both scored by Ilkay Gündogan but in wildly different settings. Four minutes after half-time, Gündogan advanced from midfield to smash home at the near post after a bewitching run by Raheem Sterling, cutting in from the right rather than his usual left flank. Then, more than an hour into the game, Gündogan tucked the ball past Hugo Lloris after a simple route-one clearance from Ederson: finally, Tottenham’s counterattacking strategy had resulted in a goal, albeit one into their own net.
Virtually nothing City did during those periods of play was predictable. By contrast, virtually everything Tottenham did over these entire 90 minutes could essentially have been scripted in advance.
When was the last time you saw any Tottenham player in an unconventional position, with the possible exception of Lloris? Kane’s solo thrust for glory was hardly an outlier: over the course of the game we saw Tanguy Ndombele or Gareth Bale trying to do likewise, the main point of difference between a team with a plan and a team with none.
Much has been made of Tottenham’s individual defensive errors over recent weeks. But confident teams shrug errors off. Tottenham, by contrast, seem to fixate on them, compounding the initial inconvenience by allowing them to condition their next move, to blunt and inhibit the appetite for risk.
The starkest contrast was perhaps between the two defences. While John Stones and Aymeric Laporte confidently stepped up to launch attacks, Davinson Sánchez and Eric Dier looked utterly spooked every time they received the ball, as if haunted by the memory of something foul and unspeakable.
Where Tottenham go from here is anyone’s guess. The top four remains within reach; there is a domestic final to contest – albeit against this Manchester City side – and European glory to be chased. But you wonder, too, how long the likes of Kane and Ndombele and Son Heung-min will be content to indulge this sort of structured, insoluble mediocrity. These are big-occasion players, ambitious players, eager not just to contest but to dominate.
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Kane, in particular, feels like a particularly urgent case study: a brilliant footballer with Tottenham in his blood, but also a 27-year-old with a declining window in which to claim the trophies his talent demands. Will he spend his peak years forlornly trying to revive this derelict corpse of a team? Or will he finally cut the cord and seek out a squad worthy of him? Right now, this feels like the only thing at Tottenham that can’t reliably be predicted.
from Football | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jKjp6H
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