Spurs grateful it’s only Man United pursuing them as they cheer on West Ham and Arsenal
Both performance and result at West Ham suggest a Spurs team destined to finish fifth and thus required to cheer on both the Hammers and Arsenal over the coming weeks. It’s very, very Spurs.
Funny thing, this Spurs team. In pretty much every game there comes a 20-minute period where you watch them and think they’re about to become a really brilliant side.
But then there’s the other frequently painful 70 minutes of every game, which suggests they might be a complete myth.
The good 20-minute spells are mesmerising. In recent weeks, your best chance of finding one has generally been at the start of the second half.
In these golden spells, some alchemy or other makes Destiny Udogie and Pedro Porro somehow invisible to opposition midfielders while the defensive full-backs find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place deciding whether they should be marking Spurs’ actual wingers, or the two full-back mischief-makers who are popping up in all sorts of unusual hard-to-mark spots.
At West Ham on Tuesday night, Spurs reverted to a tactic they used for a while earlier in the season – having those brilliant 20 minutes at the start of the first half. They’d abandoned that recently, because it kept giving opponents too long to overturn the inevitable early deficit. Spurs went on a run that included four defeats in five games after going 1-0 up early, and it would have been five in five but for some inexplicable Manchester City silliness.
One of those early 1-0 leads turned painful defeat even came in the reverse fixture against West Ham, making it doubly surprising to see Spurs use up all their football early on again here.
It really was a brilliant start from the visitors, and the integral role played by the wide attackers and wide (nominal) defenders was highlighted by the goal, scored by the increasingly influential Brennan Johnson after being picked out by Timo Werner, and a further chance in which Udogie teed up Porro while both occupying the sort of spaces that in normal teams might be occupied by an attacking midfielder or number 10.
When Spurs are doing this kind of stuff, they’re fascinating to watch. West Ham couldn’t get a handle on it at all in those early exchanges and were fortunate not to fall further behind. Yves Bissouma and Rodrigo Bentancur had the freedom of midfield, James Maddison was popping up in all sorts of different positions and the home side were twisted this way and that.
Then Jarrod Bowen delivered a wicked corner that Spurs didn’t really bother defending, it went in off Kurt Zouma’s back, and that was the end of Spurs’ 20 minutes of excellence.
It was never the same game after that. West Ham sat a little deeper and looked to pick Spurs off on the counter, which is an entirely legitimate and effective tactic against Angeball anyway, but doubly so with Bowen to do some rampaging and Michail Antonio to hold the play up and wait for support to arrive where necessary.
Spurs never again found the gaps and holes that had been so readily available in that opening spell as the Hammers belatedly settled on sitting tight and inviting Spurs on without really limiting their own hope of getting something on a breakaway.
If Antonio possessed finishing to match his all-round nuisance skillset, West Ham might have been celebrating a league double over their hated rivals this season but he completely butchered a one-on-one after outlasting Micky van de Ven.
That said, football now being essentially a thought experiment, the Hammers might actually be grateful he made such a complete mess of such a glorious chance, because VAR may very well have chalked it off and instead given Spurs a dangerous free-kick on the edge of West Ham’s box. For Schrodinger’s Cat we now have Paqueta’s Foul, which was both a foul and not a foul until Antonio’s decisive final contribution was known. Makes your head hurt, thinking too long on this stuff of an evening.
West Ham never parked the bus, remaining a live threat on the counter as even a Moyes team must when it possesses Bowen, Paqueta and Mohammed Kudus, but were clearly happier to take a point than Spurs, who missed a chance to go back up to fourth above Aston Villa.
We do wonder, though, if West Ham might have shown a touch more ambition in a second half where Spurs never really got going. We’ve not quite pinned it down just yet, but are increasingly drawn to a theory that Spurs aren’t quite as good as opponents sometimes think they are, meaning that too many players are placed behind the ball – further stymying the not-quite-as-good-as-you-think-it-is Spurs attack – but also reducing the chance to really get at a defence that is at all times distinctly get-at-able.
On the other hand, Spurs’ record against teams willing to play them at their own game is strikingly good – they currently sit incongruously atop the Top Six mini-league, ahead of Arsenal on goal difference with three wins, three draws and a single defeat – so maybe that’s just b*llocks. Still, something to keep an eye on.
Another emerging curiosity of this season as Spurs’ fifth place becomes increasingly secure is that West Ham themselves may now have a huge say in what European competition Spurs play in next season.
Spurs are quite a silly team and absolutely not always – or even that often – a good one, but they are now nine points clear of Manchester United, with a goal difference advantage of 18 as well. Even a good United side would struggle to reel that in, and United are if anything even sillier than Spurs. Certainly, there is currently little to suggest they’re about to be nine points better than them over nine games.
With a difficult run-in but United probably too far away, it does rather look like Spurs are going to finish fifth. That’s delicious, because it leaves them very possibly relying on West Ham beating Leverkusen and/or Arsenal beating Bayern Munich over the next couple of weeks if they want to snaffle one of the bonus Champions League spots next season.
It feels very, very on-brand for Spurs to find themselves in this position, forced to cheer on two teams they hate for a prize they might very well not really be ready for anyway.
Funny thing, this Spurs team.