High-wire Spurs have no safety net and the dead weight of history but really could pull this off

Seventeenth place and seventeen years. These are the things Tottenham are up against when they try to rescue a miserable season in Bilbao on Wednesday night.

They sit just one place – albeit a great many points – above the Premier League relegation zone in 17th and they haven’t won any trophy in 17 years. And any argument that the latter fact is of no consequence or significance to the current group of players has been blown apart this week because they all keep talking about it.

They know. How could they not?

We hear the term ‘season-defining game’ fairly often, but rarely if ever has the concept been more clearly distilled than it is here for Tottenham. Even more so than for Man United, because while for them the low is even more crushing, the high just doesn’t hit anything like as hard as it would for Spurs.

As well as a first trophy in 17 years, victory on Wednesday would deliver a first European trophy for Spurs in 41. And that’s the real marker.

If Spurs win in Bilbao, shedding the trophy drought albatross and winning this title means it becomes their best season since 1984. But defeat leaving only that wretched league position to show for their efforts makes it the worst season since relegation in 1977.

And there is no middle ground here whatsoever. Spurs’ season has become an absurd high-wire act, and seasoned Spurs observers all have plenty of reason to strongly suspect how Spurs attempting an absurd high-wire act might pan out.

Lads, it’s Tottenham. Spursy. Dr Tottenham. Lose this and they will be mocked harder perhaps than any team has been mocked ever before.

Yet the widespread assumption that this is what will definitely happen doesn’t really survive any examination beyond the bantersome and superficial.

It’s long been clear that Spurs were having a very bad league season, but it’s also true that the sheer scale of the bottom three’s awfulness has allowed them to half-arse the league almost entirely for the last four months.

Spurs’ sole focus has been on the Europa League from the moment a run of three wins in three Premier League games against Brentford, Man United and Ipswich sandwiched Carabao and FA Cup exits to Liverpool and Aston Villa.

Those results had the effect of crystallising and focusing Tottenham’s entire season. The unthinkable yet previously real threat of relegation was gone, as was any other route to salvation. For three months, Spurs have been focused entirely on one thing.

Winning only one further league game in those three months – and that against Southampton at home – is clearly at the wildly extreme end of concentrating on one specific goal no matter the cost elsewhere, but it might yet pay off in the most astonishing fashion.

And the thing with Spurs’ half-paced, half-interested Premier League displays is that even beyond the obvious second-string nature of plenty of the XIs Ange Postecoglou has picked is that his football is not really football that can ever succeed that way.

It requires absolute commitment. And in the Europa League, that commitment has been there. What, perhaps more interestingly, has also been present is an acceptance that sometimes it’s okay and even really a very good idea to adapt to the situation in front of you.

There has been precious little Angeball during Spurs’ run through the Europa League knockouts and they’ve been all the better for it.

They produced a rock-solid defensive display at Eintracht Frankfurt and bettered it in conditions that appeared custom-built for Spursiness in the second leg at Bodo/Glimt.

There was much chortling at the idea of Spurs crashing out to the Norwegians, but a look at their record in home conditions on what is an atrocious artificial pitch with all wrinkles in it highlights that this was not the straightforward task Spurs turned it into.

Less overtly self-sabotaging clubs than Spurs have entered Bodo’s Arctic circle home and come unstuck. Spurs never gave them a sniff.

And a team that has barely been able to control a single Premier League game against anyone approaching any level of confidence outplayed the third best team in the Bundesliga this season by a far wider margin than a 2-1 aggregate score suggests.

Most compellingly, a Spurs team that concedes goals for fun in frequently comedic fashion domestically has been a far tougher nut to crack since showing they can be more than Just Who We Are, Mate.

Eintracht scored early at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium but could find no further goal across the next three hours of football. Bodo/Glimt’s only goal in the semi-final came via a wicked deflection from their only shot on target in the first leg.

Since a 1-0 last-16 first-leg defeat at AZ in which they were much more recognisably 2024/25 Tottenham, Spurs have shown a calm authority in these games that goes beyond easy jabs about the quality of opposition or personnel changes.

Even something as straightforward as Guglielmo Vicario going long at every opportunity in Norway was a stark reminder that sometimes compromising principles for results is okay. Admirable, even.

Spurs’ chances would clearly be greater still were even one of Dejan Kulusevski or James Maddison available but, unsettling as it is to say, Spurs’ run to this final has been built on endeavour and defensive resilience rather than attacking flair.

Against a Man United side who don’t generally require a great deal of breaking down and offer frequent gifts, the presence of Spurs’ first-choice backline may be of far greater significance than any absences further forward.

Most obviously, Man United’s back three is vulnerable specifically to wide players ghosting in at the far post to score from crosses. They have conceded almost the exact same goal five times in their last three Premier League games – twice against West Ham, twice against Brentford and against Chelsea.

It is a goal Spurs score frequently, with Brennan Johnson’s Temu Raheem Sterling act a genuine potential gamebreaker here.

Micky van de Ven’s outrageous ability to essentially teleport from the halfway line to the edge of his own area remains the single most vital element that separates Tottenham’s best from their worst, but we can’t shake the notion that Wednesday night pivots on what his defensive partner Cristian Romero gets up to.

A World Cup and Copa America winner in a team inevitably short on such trophy-winning calibre, but also, and this is the technical term, an absolute lunatic never more than 30 seconds from an inexplicable brainfade.

He will either produce the finest centre-back performance you’ve seen in your life, or he’ll be sent off within 20 minutes.

And just as with Spurs’ season as a whole, there is nothing in between. Spurs are atop the high wire with absolutely no safety net. We fear to watch, yet cannot turn away.