Spurs: Very, very good against PSG, apart from all the times they were very, very bad
How do you solve a problem like Tottenham Hotspur?
There really is nobody else quite like them. Which other club could go and lose a game 5-3 having already lost their previous game 4-1 and do so under the watchful eye of the Premier League’s most defensive coach? Which other club could go and lose a game 5-3 and have you legitimately thinking there were actually quite a lot of encouraging elements to it and it was much better than anything else they’ve served up recently?
The thing with this Spurs performance is that about 80 per cent of it was really good, really disciplined and full of everything the surrender at Arsenal lacked. They were committed and organised in defence and showed plenty of genuine attacking ambition when the chance to counter-attack presented itself. They fought hard and earned the right to play a bit of football, which they duly did to halfway decent effect.
But the other 20 per cent of this performance was f*cking braindead. And now, yet again, we simply have no idea what to make of them. Can you really take any meaningful encouragement from a 5-3 defeat, even if it is to the defending European champions? Normal clubs definitely can’t, but Spurs aren’t normal, are they?
Let’s run through the good. The midfield diamond actually worked. Lucas Bergvall often managed to emerge from the middle third as a spare man, with PSG unsure who should be dealing with him. He remains young, naïve and desperately raw in his final decision-making, but Spurs are undeniably less drab when he’s on the pitch.
Many promising moments came to nothing from his bad choices, but when he got it right, Spurs took the lead with a beautifully worked move involving Bergvall and then Archie Gray getting involved right up in the PSG area and creating the opportunity for Randal Kolo Muani to give Richarlison an unmissable opportunity for his third goal in three games. That Spurs have gone on to win none of those games is just so Richarlison rhythms.
Kolo Muani was the other huge positive. Again, somehow very apt, very Spurs, very ridiculous that their best player on the night actually plays for the opposition.
He was fantastic, though, following that assist with his first two Tottenham goals after the break and all while wearing a mask after fracturing his jaw in the also-absurd 2-2 draw against Man United before the interlull.
Having arrived at Spurs on loan on deadline day, Kolo Muani was short of match sharpness having been left out in the cold by Luis Enrique. He then suffered a dead leg that kept him out of action for a month before his latest injury against United.
It’s meant a deeply frustrating stop-start beginning to his brief Spurs career but on this evidence he could provide a meaningful solution to a lot of their problems. He is a more nuanced and versatile striker than the chaos merchant Richarlison, and they actually make a compelling duo. The goal Richarlison scored was solid proof of concept and it might just be that one possible solution to the impossible Spurs puzzle really is four-four-f*cking-two.
We have at times this season clean forgotten Kolo Muani is in fact a Spurs player this season, and we now find ourselves pondering just what is in fact the earliest after actually being a new signing that a player can become Like a New Signing? As with everything else about Spurs, we simply don’t know the answer.
Other good things on the night included the performance of Gray and, for the most part, Pape Sarr. One thing we do want to firmly insist Thomas Frank does from now on is ensure at least one of Bergvall, Gray and Sarr is on the pitch at all times. That alone feels like it could do something to address the creative malaise in the long-term absences of Dejan Kulusevski and James Maddison.
Now the bad. The stupid, ridiculous bad. Spurs completely switched off from a corner at the very end of a first half in which they’d held PSG at arm’s length with something approaching swaggering ease. Vitinha was not closed down, and slapped a wrong-foot swinger in off the crossbar from 20 yards.
Shortly after taking the lead for a second time, Spurs decided they wanted to see more of Vitinha’s long-range prowess and this time allowed him to switch the ball on to his left foot to curl an even more compelling finish inside Guglielmo Vicario’s far post.
Spurs were just warming up the ol’ comedy muscles, though. Having done so many good things for about an hour, they then decided to simply giftwrap a couple of goals to the best team in the world. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton.
The first gift, and PSG’s third goal, came from Cristian Romero deciding to try and play out from the back via an extremely marked Sarr. And minutes later Spurs conceded a corner unnecessarily and decided not to really bother defending it very much at all.
A quick burst of incredibly stupid decisions undermining all sorts of previous good work. We haven’t seen this sort of brainless collapse from a decent position by an inherently ridiculous team on TNT Sport since, well, Saturday morning.
The thing with brainless football, though, is that it can be contagious. And there was still time for PSG to catch the bug. The otherwise exemplary Vitinha gifted Spurs their third and Kolo Muani his second before restoring PSG’s two-goal advantage from the penalty spot to complete his first senior hat-trick.
To great surprise that was the end of the evening’s goals, but not the evening’s stupidity. There was still time for Lucas Hernandez to get himself sent off deep into injury time after giving in to his intrusive thoughts and deciding to just elbow Xavi Simons directly in the face while winning 5-3.
Why did that happen? No idea. Why did any of this happen? Not a clue. What does any of it mean? Maybe none of it means anything. Perhaps there is no moral to this story. Maybe it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.
Come back and ask us again after Spurs take an early lead before losing 2-1 at home to Fulham on Saturday night.
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