16 Conclusions: Chelsea 2-0 Tottenham Hotspur

Chelsea went into their match against Tottenham in a bit of a dip in form, but Spurs were still unbeaten since Antonio Conte arrived at the club. Something had to give, and it did.

1) In an era when the physical differences between elite level professional footballers are becoming slighter and slighter, there’s something to be said about the psychological side of the game, and there are few ways in which football is more fascinating than in the weight of importance we all put on form. But there are two types of form, short-term and long-term, and while short-term form was very much in favour of one of these two teams going into the match between Chelsea and Spurs at Stamford Bridge, it turned out to be something a little longer-term that turned out to be the difference.

2) Short-term, Chelsea went into this match in something of a dip, with just one win from their last seven matches leaving them looking over their shoulders at the form of the teams below them, while Spurs arrived at Stamford Bridge fresh off the back of six wins and three draws from Antonio Conte’s nine Premier League matches in charge of the club. Spurs even had the shortest-term hit of euphoria possible just a few days earlier – two goals in the last ten seconds to win their previous Premier League match at Leicester.

3) But, as every single person reading this already knows, it’s not as simple as who’s won the most of their last seven or eight games either. A lot of us pay considerable attention to long-term form, as well, and Spurs also arrived at Stamford Bridge with the most pitiful of records, having won their just once in their last 36 attempts.

In theory, it shouldn’t make any difference what happened between two sets of completely different players representing the same clubs 20 years ago, but the idea that regularly losing has an effect on the psychology of a football club is appealing, and Spurs left Stamford Bridge with one win in 37.

4) There’s also one further irregularity in terms of assessing the recent form of these two particular teams; the recent Carabao Cup semi-final between them ended in a very comfortable two-legged win for Chelsea, the team who are supposed to be on a downward trajectory.

But at the same time, these matches have sat in almost complete isolation from the Premier League form of either club. Chelsea’s excellence over the semi-final had no impact either way on their faltering league form, while Spurs, when not on the receiving end of postponements, have continued to grind results out in the league – although they were helped out on their trip to Leicester by the sort of circumstances that definitely do not come about every week – despite having been swatted aside in the Carabao Cup by Chelsea without putting up too much of a fight.

5) Spurs, at the time of writing, have been inactive in the January transfer window, and it’s tempting to believe that Conte’s decision to put his team out in a 4-4-2 formation with Matt Doherty on the right was a statement to those running the club that they’d better pull their fingers out and get on with what he expects them to do in the transfer market. Doherty’s most significant involvement of the match, for the record, was a late tackle on Malang Sarr for which he might on another day have received a red card.

6) The game was trailed by Sky Sports as The Battle of the Mis-firing Strikers, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that neither Romelu Lukaku or Harry Kane ended the game on the scoresheet. Lukaku and Kane have scored five goals each in the Premier League this season, and during this match Lukaku was largely limited to half-chances – his one clear opportunity, a one on one with Hugo Lloris deep into the second half, produced a good save from the goalkeeper – while Kane was unfortunate at the end of the first half and did bring an excellent save from Kepa Arrizabalaga late in the second.

7) Chelsea came flying out of the traps at the start, with Spurs stumbling a little over their unfamiliar formation. Within a minute, Romelu Lukaku swung his right leg at the ball and sent the ball a couple of feet over Hugo Lloris’ crossbar. A comparison with their previous performance against Brighton, where they were almost completely sterile and scored with more or less their only chance of a first half which ended with their players apparently arguing amongst themselves, was obvious. From the very start, they looked a transformed team, aggressively dominating the midfield and keeping constant pressure on a Spurs team that was scarcely able to even get the ball into the Chelsea half.

8) Consequently, Spurs spent much of the first half hour looking very different to the team that gambolled around with the away supporters at the end of their last match at The King Power Stadium. That feeling of readjustment took about 15 minutes to start to lift, and the most creditable thing that could be said for much of their first-half performance is that they largely limited Chelsea to half-chances and snatched moments.

9) There was a flickering of life from Spurs a couple of minutes earlier, when Ryan Sessegnon broke away on the Chelsea left but, when faced with the choice between a shot and a cross, opted for something almost precisely midway between the two which almost hit the corner flag, but Chelsea had a major let-off when Harry Kane had a goal chalked off for a push on Thiago Silva to take the ball off the defender in the build-up to scoring, with five minutes of the half to play.

It didn’t look like there was very much to the tackle, which seemed about 20% push and 80% dive, but it was called back by the referee nevertheless. Half-time, which followed shortly afterwards, arrived with the game balanced on a curious knife-edge. Chelsea had dominated play and threatened for much of the half without having really  come close to scoring, while Spurs, who’d been on the defensive for the vast majority of the half, had the greater grievance over not going in for the interval a goal up.

10) It took two minutes from the restart to Chelsea to take the lead, and for the second game in a row Hakim Ziyech pulled something beautiful out of his bag of tricks, although Spurs did really bring the goal about themselves, putting in little resistance as Callum Hudson-Odoi cut in diagonally from the left. With Japhet Tanganga, who was already on a yellow card, in pursuit, a tactical foul was out of the question, and Hudson-Odoi was given plenty of time to find Ziyech, who bent a stunning curling shot around a freeze-framed Hugo Lloris and under the crossbar.

11) And with the second goal, familiar insecurities revealed themselves. A foul on the Chelsea left led to a free-kick. Mason Mount swung it over, Thiago Silva got the flick on, and they led 2-0. After all that expenditure of energy, it really was that easy to shove a knife through the heart of the Spurs defence. The irony of Thiago Silva, whose tumble seemed to have harshly denied Spurs the lead shortly before half-time, scoring the goal will not have been lost on Spurs fans. It’s the sort of narrative with which they’re already extremely familiar.

12) This all felt very different to the end of the first half, and much more like its beginning. It hadn’t worked in the first half of this match, but at the start of the second, Chelsea’s early blizzard worked very much for them as it had at the start of the Carabao Cup semi-final. Spurs had been blown away, and by the time an hour had been played it felt as though as we were already running down the clock a little.

13) With 17 minutes left to play, a Chelsea goal kick ended in what looked like the referee advising the Chelsea defender Antonio Rudiger not to go over for a short goal kick because missiles had already been and were likely to continue to be thrown to him. A pretty dismal end to a pretty dismal afternoon, and it’s likely that CCTV footage will now be used to find and ban the offenders. If football is your love to the extent that you pay the very large amounts of money to go home and away, to get banned for a period of what will likely be years because you can’t control your fee-fees seems like the height of stupidity.

14) At the start of play, a win for Spurs would have put them in fourth place in the Premier League, five points behind Chelsea but with four games in hand on them. There were just four points between the five clubs between fourth and eighth place in the race for that final Champions League place, and dropping points when others are picking them up is opening up this particular race. Perhaps, with less than two weeks left before the transfer window closes, this was a result that it will turn out they needed.

If the Spurs board do not pay attention to what Antonio Conte needs, there remains a realistic chance that the manager could walk and, as Martin Tyler pointed out during the first half of this match, ‘Spurs need Conte more than Conte need Spurs’. And if Conte were to walk from Spurs, it seems considerably more likely that Spurs fans would blame chairman Daniel Levy than Conte himself.

15) Prior to this match, Chelsea’s form had suggested they could yet be overhauled, while the stuttering nature of Manchester United, West Ham and Arsenal’s form has allowed Spurs back into the race, and Wolves below them. This result probably quells those concerns for Chelsea, no matter how slight they may have been.

It’s been a difficult few weeks at Stamford Bridge, with the team’s underwhelming league performances accompanying a falling out between Thomas Tuchel and Romelu Lukaku which would not have been anticipated when Chelsea paid £97.5m for him in the summer. Lukaku might not have scored against Spurs, but at least the team has got its pursuit at the top of the table back into some sort of order, even if the blip seems to have been enough to write off any realistic chance they might have had of finishing above Manchester City this season.

16) Spurs remain in a potentially strong position, certainly compared to their position when Antonio Conte arrived at the club, and for their first defeat in the league under him to have come after ten matches hints at the transformative effect that he can have upon a club. Spurs’ games in hand on the others casing those Champions League places remain potentially game-changing, but they do have to win them in order to take advantage.

In being brushed aside this comfortably by Chelsea, Spurs look so far off the pace with the clubs at the very top that it seems unlikely that they can or will.  The confidence that came with Antonio Conte taking over at Spurs was always brittle. Have their players learned enough from him to be able to shake this defeat off and keeping pushing for a return to the Premier League? Will Conte get supported in this transfer window? The next couple of weeks may come to define the rest of Spurs’ season.