Our neighbours can keep their Invincibles. We’ve got our Incurables. Everything changes, and everything stays the same. We buy players, we don’t buy players. We employ managers who attack, managers who are cautious, managers whose methods have worked elsewhere, but then they come to Tottenham. Spurs are an open wound that nothing can heal.

Long since banned in these pages, spursy became a popular and ultimately meaningless signifier for Tottenham’s serial failures, which in reality were down to consistent, continual incompetence, and so it is with our form. Different players, varying styles, managerial churn, with this one quality of incompetence in common. Now, a new regime, new manager, new players but they all inherit a culture where winning is the outlier and being thereabouts is the loftiest ambition. The Europa League triumph is the ultimate proof of how embedded this has become. We win a major European honour yet the culture persists.

So what’s this regime’s problem? Long-standing supporters are numb but the pain still seeps through. Ask what’s going wrong and many of us merely shake our heads in dismal bewilderment. We look decent for a while, then it all falls apart. Every time. The one thing you can guarantee about Spurs is that however well we are playing, someone will make a serious error. We’ve had years of this, and as a good friend said to me after Saturday’s match, other teams know it and incorporate our brittle mentality into their tactics. However much the game was going against them, Villa had two quick forwards and the long ball became a serious threat.

Our creativity shines through only in the manner in which we concede. Dominate the first period. 45^th minutes, VDV off injured and down to ten men, then, and only then, does our most experienced player tamely clear straight to one of theirs. The cross finds their striker in the space where our centre half would have been. Hard to believe, and all too believable.

I’m pleased with one thing, that the Villa game showed some team development. For the first half an hour, we were excellent, controlling the game and making chances. Bentancur, our best player this season, picked up loose balls and developed our play from deep and then again as we reset further up the pitch. Their keeper played well but made saves you’d expect PL keepers to make. I’d prefer it if our players kicked the ball harder and further away from him, but that’s just me. At least we had shots on target. This is how low I’ve set my sights and I’m still disappointed.

Then for the third home game in succession, we totally fall away in the second half. The opposition tighten up in midfield and we lose that battle. They’re not unduly worried as we feed the ball wide because the wingers aren’t getting anywhere, bearing in mind also that this was not their first choice defence. We have an unerring capacity to cross the ball to where no Spurs player is standing. Villa pushed Jackson up on Van Hecke to expose his deficiencies.

The fundamental problem with Spurs at the moment is that this team doesn’t have a heart. It’s a collection of players, not a single organism. You can’t measure this with xG, field tilt or any other stat, but supporters know it, see it and feel it. There’s no leader, no focus. It’s all superficial. We’re not putting down roots, so when required to dig deeper, we’re easily blown away. Nothing to lift the team and change the game. Sometimes a gamechanger scores the goal out of nothing, More frequently games are turned around by effort and willpower. Often a tackle will do it. In this Spurs side, nobody says, right, we’re down and I’m not gong to stand for this.

Now I may be old but I like to think I’m not old-fashioned. Contemporary tactics, I get it, the game moves on. For instance, midfielders at this level should be multi-functional, able to run, chase and pass, something which to be even-handed to a figure I have severely maligned in these pages, Tim the Temp Sherwood declared over a decade ago, although I stand by my conviction that Nacer Chadli wasn’t the man to prove his theory correct.

On the way home, and I had plenty of time to ruminate on this, what with the main train station closed plus a tube severely restricted, and my decision to avoid London Bridge where there were more police than passengers on the way through as southeast London braced itself for Millwall v W Ham, I came to ponder this question: would Palhinha have stood for this? Palhinha is the closest we’ve come lately to the old-fashioned defensive midfielder,  although to be fair he’s more than that. At the end of last season, he was a major influence. Not everything he did worked, but his determination not only unsettled opponents, it spread to his teammates. 50-50 balls became 60-40 when he’s around. He creates a degree of uncertainty in the opposition, just enough for them to worry that they can’t hang around on the ball. To be old-fashioned about it, he got stuck in.

I still believe Spurs have the potential to get it right, or at least enough right to move up the table. Us old-fashioned supporters know it takes time to build a team. Our problem this season is that we’ve tried to take too big a leap. We’ve changed too much in one go, and it will take time to improve. I use Palhinha and what he gives to a side as an example. Greater solidity, granted at the expense of some attacking ambition, could have created the basis for improvement a couple of steps at a time. Lock down midfield and protect the defence, then build on that. When they settle, I’m sure I’ll enjoy Tonali and Fernandes in midfield. We need that progressive, pass it forwards FFS approach that we’ve missed for a long time, but for now we’re not ready for that change.

I say nobody. Conor Gallagher is the closest we have. He’s no creative number 10 but he’s always on the front foot. He doesn’t sit back and doesn’t accept losing easily. He made the near post run that the strikers failed to do. He’s not the long-term solution but we need that attitude.

To repeat myself, we can and will turn this around but for the moment, my biggest worry is that the manager seems worried. His post match press conference on Saturday was an odd one. He said he hadn’t given the players a message before they left for the international break, yet he was prepared to be openly critical of some of them. I never appreciate that quality in managers anyway. He declared that bringing Kudus on to play centrally was disruptive. I agree but it was his decision and he did the same against Everton, where his raft of substitutes produced only chaos and he had to change it for a third time. He bemoaned the players’ lack of fitness, he’s the one in charge of that. He speaks of Fernandes as a strong player, yet regularly doesn’t start him or takes him off early. He cuts a frustrated figure – it’s taking him more time than he expected to get his message through.

Players like Solanke, Maddison and Kudus now have time to get properly fit. I read this afternoon that Kudus has decided not to play for Ghana to work on his fitness. For once, I’m looking forward to the international break.