Igor Tudor set for Premier League infamy after impossibly making Frank’s Spurs worse

Igor Tudor is already well on the way to becoming the worst managerial appointment in Premier League history.

It increasingly appears there are only two ways out for Tudor now, both of which condemn him to banter infamy. He’s either going to take Tottenham down, or have to be removed after a tiny number of games in a desperate – and likely doomed – bid to avoid it.

There are just so many astonishing things about this managerial reign already. First, that it even exists at all. That Spurs responded to the very real and present danger of relegation by gambling absolutely everything on a man with no experience of English football and whose last job at Juventus had ended with an eight-match winless run.

READ: Tudor sacked after triple loss as Tottenham caretaker’s final straw at former clubs remembered

Yes, his reputation in Italy as a fixer (the good kind, to be clear) was not without merit. But Spurs had no clue as to whether that might translate to English football and were simply not in any position to gamble.

The second extraordinary thing is that he already looks absolutely doomed. Appointing him ranks among the most astonishing gambles ever seen by a Premier League club, but doubling down on it after a surely inevitable defeat at Liverpool next weekend makes it zero points from four games would be far greater.

But the most extraordinary thing is that Tudor has come into a side that was already on its current form the worst in the Premier League and somehow made that team even worse.

Tudor has managed to address absolutely nothing that was bad about Frank’s Tottenham. They still concede two avoidable goals in every single game. They still concede a startling number of goals from unopposed shots at the edge of the penalty area.

Their defenders are still comically ill-disciplined; they remain as capable as Frank’s Spurs ever were of shooting themselves in the foot and looking a gift horse squarely in the mouth.

Frank’s team was, by the end, an impossibly slick Spursy machine. Tudor’s Tottenham are somehow everything that Frank’s Spurs were and more.

But he has somehow also contrived to make Spurs less than the massive pile of nothing they were under Frank.

At least Frank’s team could, pretty much right up to the bitter, painful end, pose a serious threat from set-pieces. They could do absolutely nothing else, but give them a corner and they were as big a threat as anyone bar Arsenal.

Now they don’t even have that. Seriously, just imagine being able to pull that off. To turn up at a team that has only one thing they aren’t terrible at, and the only meaningful change you make is to make them terrible at that as well.

We’re naturally wary of declaring anything peak Spurs at this time, because it feels like that’s something they’ve already achieved time and time again this season. But the final 15 minutes of the first half against Crystal Palace last week will surely take some beating.

It all began with what looked a glorious opportunity. The sort of gigantic slice of luck that can transform the whole direction of travel for a club. In the space of two minutes, Spurs benefited from a classic VAR offside decision to avoid going 1-0 down and promptly went up the other end and, in a vanishingly rare example of actual football breaking out, went 1-0 up themselves.

It was a monumental double-whammy, a gut punch for Palace and the sort of good fortune a proper team would make sure they took full advantage of.

But this is Igor Tudor’s Spurs and they are the furthest thing from a proper team we have ever seen. By half-time they were trailing 3-1, and down to 10 men having lost Micky van de Ven to a red card so stupid it would have made Cristian Romero blush.

In the space of 15 wild minutes, Spurs had secured defeat in a game they had been handed a magnificent chance to win, and also ensured Tudor would remain unable to pick a first-choice defence for another game.

Given that defeat at Liverpool – which Van de Ven will now miss – surely ends Tudor’s time in north London, it’s possible he’ll go without ever being able to pick both Romero and Van de Ven in the same Premier League team.

There is some sympathy for him on that score, but he hasn’t helped himself by constantly seeking to force square pegs in round holes. The contrast with Michael Carrick’s approach at Manchester United is obvious. Where Carrick sought to simplify, playing as many players as possible in their actual positions in a formation they understand, Tudor has added more complication and uncertainty to an already bamboozled and disoriented group.

Picking Conor Gallagher on the right wing might seem funny, but managers only do that when they are very distressed.

The most damning thought of all is this: Based on his first three games, it feels certain Igor Tudor’s Tottenham would lose to Thomas Frank’s Tottenham.

Which actually shows how unfair this actually is: any other team on the kind of nightmarish run Spurs are currently enduring would know there was a certain way out of it somewhere down the line with a game against Spurs.

Never has a team been more in need of a game against Spurs…than Spurs; alas, it’s the one thing they can never have.