Tottenham ailments treated if not quite cured by welcome visit to Dr Hoffenheim

We’ve seen so much of Dr Tottenham over the years that it felt disorienatingly confusing to see the error-strewn boot on the other foot.
Dr Hoffenheim may sound like a second-tier Bond villain, but it was a hugely welcome appointment for a Spurs team stumbling blindly towards complete disaster in the league yet somehow, inexplicably and often despite themselves, still at this time on course for glory on all other fronts.
While this entire match felt very much like a 90-minute version of the Two Spider-Man meme, let’s start with the very real positives for Spurs.
Most obviously, this is a win that keeps a top-eight Europa League finish in their own hands. Beat Elfsborg – who have lost all three of their away games thus far – on the final matchday and Spurs are there.
That would be huge, obviously. First, no team on earth is currently less in need of two additional fixtures than injury-ravaged Spurs.
But there’s also the issue of when those two games would be played. Spurs already face a potentially season-defining four days against Liverpool in the Carabao and Aston Villa in the FA Cup. Both legs of the Europa League play-off round would be played in the 10 days that follow, either side of a relegation six-pointer in the league against Manchester United.
Spurs, it absolutely goes without saying, do not need a two-week spell that caries the very real prospect – likelihood, even – of ending every single positive thing about their season and leave only the relegation battle left to fight.
They should – should – now at least avoid that.
And there were other positives tonight. Spurs started this game superbly. They opened the scoring nice and early with the sort of move we’d love to see them try just a bit more often.
Pedro Porro’s long pass – not long ball – was superb, and matched by the touch and finish from James Maddison. There were echoes of Lucas Bergvall’s goal against Liverpool in the Carabao semi-final first leg here.
Porro has that TAA-like long-range defence-splitter in his locker and it’s such a good option for a Spurs team that too often wants to pass teams to death but succeeds only in allowing their opponents to regroup and shut them down.
The second and third goals are certainly goals that will have looked very familiar to Spurs fans, their team having made conceding such goals an art form over several decades.
It was horrendous from Hoffenheim, it has to be said. Especially the timing of them. Spurs’ second goal came just as Hoffenheim appeared to be getting over the opener, but a no-pressure 10-yard midfield pass went horribly awry and Spurs were away. Son Heung-min provided one of the less convincing finishes of his career and was fortunate to see a deflection leave the floored keeper a slow-motion spectator.
Spurs’ third was just as much of a gift soon after Hoffenheim had, as they had threatened to do throughout the second half, reduced the deficit and put the world’s most collapsible football team under all-too familiar stress.
Another midfield snafu, another quick Spurs break, and this time a shift-and-shoot finish that was much more like the old Son Heung-min, the one we all knew and loved. Perhaps another big positive for Spurs there; while Son’s general play did nothing much to suggest his recent alarming decline can be reversed, the fact he ended the night with two goals and one of them so expertly taken can’t be ignored.
Other positives came the way they usually do for Spurs these days, from the youngsters. Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall continue to impress in this unrelenting baptism of fire, while Mikey Moore stepped off the bench to provide an assist as he did among the wreckage of Spurs’ abject performance at Everton last week.
And now, alas, the inevitable negatives. In the Premier League, it’s been a recurring theme that Spurs simply cannot win a game unless they do so with so much room to spare that not even they can f*** it up. They haven’t won many Premier League games, but when they do it’s by huge margins. Only once have they won by less than three goals. And that was by two goals.
In the Europa League it’s been slightly different, with a good few one-goal wins. But those have also been unnecessarily fraught and twice now featured a two-goal deficit being halved late on. This was not a compelling example of a Spurs team newly able to see a game out.
They spent most of the second half parking a Jose Mourinho bus on the edge of their own penalty area. One wondered if this was some kind of f*** you from Ange, but there does exist a middleground between 11 men behind the ball and 10 men in front of it. What we’d love to see is Spurs actually putting some of their players in said middleground.
They conceded two bad goals, could have conceded more, and needed VAR to (belatedly if correctly) intervene to overturn a penalty decision just as Andrej Kramaric was starting his run-up.
Easy and correct to say that’s just the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a game between these two teams; Tottenham and their non-union German equivalent.
The other big and obvious problem for Spurs is that, conservatively, nine of the players who put themselves and Spurs fans through the wringer here will have to do it all again in three days’ time.
Antonin Kinsky will presumably return in goal having been ineligible here. But the only other likely change would be a return to the starting XI for Djed Spence, who wasn’t registered for this competition at the start of the season.
That this made perfect sense in September but looks completely insane in January is just one of the many, many indicators of just how absurd this Spurs season has become.