Conte’s another cosmetic fix; Spurs must decide what they want
Spurs lost to Burnley and now Antonio Conte is hinting that he can’t fix this. But can anybody? Is it even possible in the Premier League?
The scene at the post-match press conference has become increasingly familiar over the last few weeks. Antonio Conte, bedraggled and bemused, sitting behind a microphone openly questioning what on earth he’d let himself in for.
“I came in to try to improve the situation in Tottenham but maybe in this moment, I don’t know, I’m not so good to improve the situation,” said this week. “It’s very frustrating because I know we’re working hard, working a lot and trying to get the best out of every single player.”
Frustration at what he’d just witnessed was understandable. The temptation to reach for ‘Spursiness’ in reaction to a dreadful performance at Burnley, simultaneously all the more jarring and predictable for the fact that it came three days after a season-best performance at Manchester City, is always strong. This game being played in high winds and driving rain gave it an undeniable edge of pathetic fallacy for their top four hopes. And the fact that Burnley are considerably improved on where they were a few weeks ago butters no parsnips when vast amounts of money are on the line because the handsomely-remunerated players can swing so drastically in terms of their performance levels from one match to the next. If they were just crap and that was that, then fair enough. At least everyone would know where they stand.
When I said I wanted Conte to be more like Poch, I didn't mean by having an overly emotional reaction to a bad result away at Burnley
— Ashley Lawrence (@AshleySLawrence) February 23, 2022
It’s been said that it’s starting to look as though Conte regrets taking this particular job, which again is fair. He’s now lost 11 of his 21 matches and Spurs are in the same Premier League position as the day he was appointed. There’s a coherent argument to be made that this isn’t doing anyone involved any good. But while Spurs supporters are already fully aware of the huge structural issues within the club that need to be addressed if success of any sort is ever to come in more than fits and starts, there are only so many times that you can pull the card that Conte has in post-match press conferences.
Shows of exaggerated humility are worth little if they’re repeated ad nauseum; if anything, it doesn’t take long before all this throwing his hands in the air and vaguely implying that he’s not “good enough” starts to look like an exercise in deflection to preserve his reputation for his next job. Conte says that “no-one deserves this type of situation – the club, me, the players and fans,” but when he adds “this type of situation,” what does he mean? No one particular football club ‘deserves’ success any more than any other on terms other than what happens on the pitch, and regardless, what happens on the pitch from the Spurs side is his responsibility. That’s kind of why he earns more money in a week than most of us do in a year.
But if, on the other hand, “this type of situation” refers to that cringing sense of embarrassment that comes with this sort of thing happening time and time again over a period of years, or having the manager setting this wearying cycle up after every loss, or having the feeling that he’s already planning his next move after just four months, then perhaps rather than caterwauling and complaining, Conte would be better off quietly getting on with continuing with trying to repair the damage that he’s spent that time apparently failing to.
Faux-proclamations of not being “good enough” are little use to anyone. Already, the news following this press conference is conflicting, with talkSPORT reporting that there’s no truth to the suggestion he might walk and that the comments were made to try and get a rise out of the players, while The Sun reports that Conte and chairman Daniel Levy are having ‘crisis talks’. Spurs are hogging headlines as a result of tripping over their own shoelaces in public yet again, and while it’s tempting to consider this to be close to pathological at this point, to do so only really shields those who have been making consistently bad decisions.
So how can he get Spurs to where they aspire to be? The stadium is finished, with all the advantages that should confer. The training ground is similarly state-of-the-art and they moved into that a decade ago. There are no more photo opportunities to be had, breaking ground in a brand new safety helmet and hi-vis jacket. With that work complete, Spurs now need to decide what they want to do with it. Like many other clubs, they have a vision of where they want to be: in a stadium full of waving flags and the Champions League music blazing out over the PA system. But also like some other clubs, they often seem to have little idea of how to get to this point.
Spurs owe a lot of money for The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, so spending their way up the table is almost certainly out of the question. But even if they could do this, should they? After all, there wouldn’t even be much certainty that ten £50m players would ‘guarantee’ anything. On the basis of the record over the last three or four years, there’s little evidence that those currently running the club should be entrusted with spending half a billion pounds in the transfer market.
The desirable alternative is the longer-term plan. The longer-term plan is a process. It’s a philosophy. It’s to rebuild the playing operation from the ground up. It’s to go for the forward-looking coach, but they can’t be used like a sticking plaster in the same way that Conte has. It requires a huge amount of trust and an even greater amount of patience from everybody, including supporters. It wouldn’t cost nothing and there’d be no guarantees of success, but it wouldn’t require half a billion pounds of investment either. But whether this even can happen in the Premier League in the 21st century – and still less at a club where the aspiration is a top-four finish every season – is debatable.
And then, of course, there’s the third way. Keep applying sticking plasters and stumbling from one crisis to the next, preferably completely in the public eye. Without the backing in the transfer market, Conte is just the most expensive version of that. He knows what he needs to achieve what he believes himself to be capable of, and he didn’t get it in January. Spurs fans should probably be hoping that there are talks going on between him and Levy after the Burnley defeat, because most of the signs of the last few weeks have been that no-one behind the scenes at the club really knows how to fix this.
Simultaneously utterly predictable and completely unpredictable, it’s impossible to say where Spurs go from here, either in the short term or longer. Their next two matches are against Leeds United and Everton, either of which could open up a black hole of crisis in the centre circle of the pitch at any point. And then it’s a trip to the masters of making entire housing estates out of molehills, Manchester United.
The hopes of Spurs supporters are hardly stratospheric. That’s inevitable when you have to be of a pensionable age to remember the last time they won the league. But Spurs supporters are entitled to expect better than to be no more than the Premier League’s ongoing soap opera, existing primarily for the amusement of others. Unfortunately, those running the show at the moment are uncapable of even achieving that.
