I’m still basking in the afterglow of Thursday night’s wholesome and wholehearted performance. Such warmth and serenity has been in short supply this season. It feels like meeting an old friend you haven’t seen for many years and discovering that you still get on.

We needed that. A semi-final holds the tantalising prospect of a trophy, sure, but what we craved, and what will last, is the manner in which victory was achieved. Under pressure, Spurs didn’t fold. They raised their game, showing teamwork, intelligence and commitment that sadly has been a rare sight for much of this campaign.

Frankfurt, a classy team playing at home in front of their fans baying incessant support, but we took the game to them. We became the disruptors, partly through our threat on the break but mainly through our combative attitude. We wound them up, basically, epitomised by the slight figure of Brennan Johnson, who without having a great game was in opponents’ faces, skirmishing down on the touchline. Not much going on, so let’s get a little agitated. Others rushed to join in. Teamwork. Unsettle them. Exploit their visible tension.

Second half, backs to the wall, brought out the finest qualities in our defence. VDV had already saved us early on. Not mere pace – he timed that challenge to perfection even though he was hurtling along. Romero shone in adversity. The cold, blank stare of this ruthless defender returned. I love to see this. Tackles, niggles, shoves, any and every part of the body in the way of his opponent, it was classic penalty box at-all-costs defending.

Udogie better now his fitness is returning – we underestimate how much recovery takes out of a player. Bergvall the star, the maturity and intelligence of his positioning, tracking attackers. Hard to believe he’s just 19. We have a real player on our hands. Solanke tireless and uncomplaining up front, lacked support but never gave up. Plus handy that their two best chances fell to a right-back

So our best back four were able to play together and we’re better. Of course, but what really impressed was our shape. Minimal space between the back four with the midfield cutting out space in front of them and Bergvall and Bentacur dropping back to cover and mark. Turns out Ange’s all-out attackers can defend like demons after all.

I freely confess I was not expecting this. Little in recent matches provided any clue that the side was capable of such a transformation. In the post-match interviews, Vicario shared that the team were determined to show this side of their character, for the fans and manager. Usual stuff – what’s Italian for blah blah blah? A keeper I like a lot, and who has been unfairly criticised in the past, he’s been so shaky of late, nerves radiating out from the goalmouth in Hugo-esque fashion to weaken the resolve of the entire team. But like the rest of them, he found something extra. Never mind the late save with his feet, more about coming right out of his goal to catch a deep cross. In charge of his box again.

If we look back, this is not totally out of character for Spurs teams. We rightly revere our proud history of cup success, which usually came alongside the inability to challenge consistently for the league over a 42 game season, although admittedly when winning stuff we didn’t fall as far as we have right now. In 1984, for instance, we won the UEFA Cup but finished 8^th, in 72, 6^th and won the Cup in 81, 10^th. The difference between then and now is that those teams were full of big characters and experienced players who led by example and whose ferocious will to win was evident in these big games. I would not say this applied to the current team. In fact, on the field leadership appears, from the stands at least, to be largely absent, but full credit to all of them to find something deep down to rise to the challenge and be the best they can be.

These defensive hold-outs have a lasting positive effective on team morale, more so in my view than a series of thumping victories, because qualities like determination, organisation and togetherness are abundantly obvious. Perhaps the players needed convincing that that could play like this, and proved it to themselves. Whatever, the scenes of jubilation in the stands and on the pitch as the players and manager piled in on each other were heartwarming and genuine. It’s been too long. Ange even smiled. Players, fans and manager, we all needed that.

On Monday, Spurs published their latest financial results. Revenue was down, and the word of the week was ‘sustainable’, as in Daniel Levy’s insistence that the club’s investment in transfers and salaries had to remain within sustainable limits dictated by income. Time flies – it’s Friday and it’s all about Ange’s ear. The team took the chairman at face value – losing at Stamford Bridge is eminently sustainable.

Over the years, I’ve said how this fixture should not be used as the benchmark to judge the team. I wish it were otherwise, that we could rise to the challenge and out-perform our bitter rivals, but for the moment at least, it’s beyond us and we move on. However, last night’s weak, insipid excuse for a performance sadly was indeed typical of how Spurs have been playing lately. Players drifted around the pitch without making any significant impact on proceedings, going through the motions of worn-out tactics that long since ceased to work on motivated opponents ready and prepared to exploit our predictable routines. There was simply nothing there. Nobody achieved anything. Nobody tried to change anything. Maddison was good for five minutes or so near the end. That’s all I’ve got.

I’d describe this as shocking, except I wasn’t shocked. First five minutes, they have a quick striker, long ball down the middle and we’re nowhere. Comedy moments as the ball bounces around and clatters against the post. I shrugged rather than shouted. Such calamity has become the norm.

And so supporters enter that state of purgatory all too familiar to Spurs fans, where we all know the manager will go but we continue to suffer until we can move on. The myths of religion suggest this is to a higher plane, except for Spurs fans it is more likely to be another state of suffering, but I shall cling on to the fragile hope of salvation.

I can’t envisage any scenario where Ange holds his job into next season. ‘When not if’ seems inescapably to be the only question. I take no pleasure in saying this. I wanted this proud, motivated man to succeed. He was right for my club, so I hoped. I applauded his brave, attacking football and his value-base of teamwork and support for his players, plus his passion for the game, a beacon of authenticity in an increasingly dreary, cynical football world driven by greed.

Except it hasn’t worked. Granted, we will never truly know what he could have achieved if not blighted by injuries. However, the benchmark for any manager, at any level, is whether they can create a team where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and in this respect Ange has failed. Indeed, we often play as a group of individuals with little connection or cohesion, and certainly the players’ confidence and ebullience of the early months has become a distant memory.

He’s done nothing to deal with our problems in defence, with too much space in front of the back four and our penalty box defending is shoddy, as was shown last night with their goal, where a midfield player can lurk unnoticed near our 6 yard box. Udogie should have come across but no midfielder tracked that movement. We constantly, predictably give the ball away. Players are easily isolated on the ball and concede possession. This has been going on for a season and a half.

Some of the players are not up to playing to the level he expects, especially in that central midfield area, and we’ll never know why the club did not act to plug those gaps with a different type of player, one who could also release some of the pressure on talent like Bentacur and Sarr, and enable them to flourish. Our attack, once fast and threatening, is now leaden and predictable.

Ange is rattled. He knows that it’s not working and has to face the bitter reality that he has failed. He cuts an isolated figure on the touchline and, as I understand it, within the club itself. The cupping his hand to the ear gesture will only serve to alienate supporters, bearing in mind that broadly within the ground he’s not been subject to significant negativity. Away matches may be different. I hear from good people who go away that at times the atmosphere has been hostile, which includes abuse directed towards the manager and players, some of it racist.

It is hard and I don’t condone personal abuse in any form, but he like any other manager has to understand that it’s not about his personal vindication, it’s about the team, about fans and team together. He’s created them and us, and it’s not on.

Managers come and go, the hierarchy that runs the club, dictates policy and shapes the ethos where at one of the wealthiest clubs in the world, winning something is a secondary, minor consideration, remains the same. Tottenham are a club devoid of ambition and self-belief, and this comes from the top. For the board, failure is indeed sustainable.

Two home games to come including a European quarter final yet optimism is at rock bottom. The mood among supporters is desultory and doom-laden as we watch yet another iteration of our team decompose then disintegrate before our eyes. It’s horrible, it’s a mess, it’s Tottenham.

Business is bad for the jerk chicken bar-b-ques in the Park Lane. It’s raining, and the crowds surprisingly sparse even though kick-off is only half an hour away. The aroma of succulent curried goat is tempting, the warmth and dry of the ground more so and fans scurry past. The speakers blast out Bob Marley, singing songs of freedom, but there’s no redemption to be found for Spurs fans in the shelter of the stadium.  

I concluded last week’s piece with the ominous comment that there may be trouble ahead. I take no pleasure in saying my prediction for Sunday’s game was on the money. Vardy scores on a breakaway, Spurs are disjointed and directionless and the atmosphere is more toxic than a nuclear waste dump. More telling perhaps even than the chants directed at the chairman was the lack of enthusiasm in the stands, the absence of any concentrated vocal support for the team a grudging acceptance of the inevitability of this outcome. People have had enough.

Protected by the thickest skin in English football, impervious to criticism, even our chairman must be feeling the heat through his cloak of invulnerability. Yet in response, the club have thrown out a couple of titbits that won’t sate our appetite of some robust, overdue and utterly necessary urgent action. Ange is safe, for now, and we hope to sign at least one player before the window closes, something Ange referenced in a press conference. These reports go on to say that we’re not after a midfielder.

I’m struggling to work out the strangest aspect of this. Is it ‘one player’ when the squad is on its knees? Strong competition from, ‘before the end of the window’, when they’ve had 28 days to respond to an urgent need. Both trumped for me though by ‘not a midfielder’. I realise we need reinforcements up front and at the back, but our defensive midfield is a tumbleweed void, a canyon of nothingness. There’s more material in the vast and endless vacuum of space. We’ve recruited some talented young players, no question, but this is at the expense of, rather than alongside, a search for experience, resilience and leadership, qualities essential for success.

For Leicester’s second, the bloke was out for a Sunday stroll, ambling across vacant grass, a touch here, another one to get it right, hold up a finger to gauge the windspeed and direction, pull up his socks and clean the mud from his toecaps before slotting into the corner of the net. He put more effort into his endless celebration than he had to do to score.

Spurs now have a managerial infrastructure to run the club. Yet their current strategy in the face of crisis is to let Ange carry the can as the only public face of Tottenham Hotspur. Daniel Levy – nothing. Donna Cullen – silence. Scott Munn – schtum. Johann Lange – shh! The whole operation geared, at enormous expense, to not carrying the can.

Ange to his eternal credit is prepared to front up, and all he gets for his troubles is, this week, media snark for being occasionally snippy with them. As if no other manager ever has taken umbrage with the media. One paper suggests that one reason they aren’t sacking Ange is that although that will be embarrassing for the board, appointing Mason as caretaker for the third time looks even worse. This is the stage we’ve reached. This is how one of the richest clubs in European football is being run, judging degrees of embarrassment.

The idea that Ange doesn’t have a plan B has been thoroughly debunked, although many pundits still trot it out because cliches and second-hand opinions are good earners. What he doesn’t have is a plan to tighten up when we’re under pressure from player exhaustion and a make do and mend team. For me, the big worry is that we don’t have the players with the skill-set to offer this option.

On Sunday, Bentancur had a poor game but he was essentially left to police the back four on his own, as well as build attacks when we get possession. Sarr was awful but we hear subsequently that he wasn’t fit. I admire the fact that he wanted to play, it shows the commitment the players have retained, but Ange should have been stronger and left him out if fitness was the issue. Then again, this reveals the real problem, there’s nobody else to play there. And so we’re back to the fundamental problem of a manager having to work with a squad not fit for purpose.

My dire warnings of the consequences of the board’s baffling negligence stretch back on this blog for at least a decade. The media have finally caught up. It is a football club and football clubs should be geared to performance. The board have their heads in the sand, refusing to fully invest in the team at a time of crisis and denying any responsibility for this, a crisis that was waiting to happen. 24 years of making the same mistakes, of a wilful inability to understand how to create a successful team, of denial that it requires substantial, sustained and strategic investment in top class footballers.

Or indeed investment in their support and supporters. They have created a vast gulf between themselves and the fans. Get behind the team. The Spurs family. The game is about glory. No wonder there is so much anger around. And it impacts adversely on the team, another deleterious consequence of the board’s attitude. They simply do not get us at all. As one banner said on Sunday: ‘Our game is about glory. Your game is about greed.’

This week, inconveniently for the board, figures around the wages/income ratio for the Premier League have been published. It’s a table that Spurs top. The opposition fans I know read this blog can insert their own joke about our trophy cabinet at this point. The only thing I want to add now is my continued bewilderment that in his own terms, Daniel Levy and the board have been hugely successful. Wages to income the lowest in the Premier League. The ground brings in an estimated £5m per game and the club is in an excellent financial state. This includes our position on PSR. Good. Well done, genuinely. This is the springboard to success as promised when plans for a new stadium were discussed nearly twenty years ago, yet we’re fast sinking to the bottom of the pool.

Spurs are not so much sleepwalking towards a relegation battle as zombie marching resolutely towards it, eyes wide open as if on some speed-fuelled bender. I’m old enough to remember the relegation season, and subsequent years that we spent near the bottom of the table. There’s something here about drift, about how a team with decent players but not strong enough as a whole internalise a defeatist mentality and can’t find a way to win, teams that wanted to play open football the Spurs way and got punished for it. This team isn’t ready for a relegation fight.

The idea that everything will be ok once the injured players come back is a fantasy. Before they return, best estimates still mean several weeks of playing two games a week. The glory glory nights of European football at the Lane now reduced to wanting a win on Thursday to avoid further fixtures. It takes time to get up to match fitness, more time still to reach the athletic intensity our tactics require, a period when players are vulnerable to further injury due to over-exertion. We’ve lost to Leicester and Everton, with Wolves, Ipswich and Southampton still to play, plus all of the teams at the top apart from AFC.

In response, on January 28^th, no new outfield players. The world famous Hotspur, rotten to the core.

In solidarity with my beleaguered football team, today’s piece is rambling, incoherent and smacks of desperation.

Sunday’s performance against Everton was a new low but then again, that statement applies to every match we play these days. How low can you go? Spurs’ response to the mess we’re in is to become more disjointed, not less. Players lose connection with each other. Mistakes proliferate. There’s no steadying hand, few moments of peace as we can’t keep the ball or stay tight at the back to absorb pressure. It’s constant, respite coming only when the opposition choose to take a breather. We’re in heaps of trouble and nobody knows what to do.

That’s the team. Re-read the last paragraph, and think how it applies to the board’s stewardship of the club. Fits like a glove. I didn’t intend to write it so. If only I had been so clever, but I’m bothered and bewildered too, trying to write above the inner voices that are bellowing, ‘not again, how could it come to this?’.

But there it is. I mean, I know the answer. This is the outcome of two decades of misguided leadership from the board. A lack of direction and consistency, where as I’ve repeatedly written before, it is beyond the chairman’s ability and understanding to align the three forces that fuse to create a successful football club – the manager/coach, recruitment and finance. Still, we’ll always have the Spurs dog of the day. Something we can all get behind.

Not going to go over that in detail again. Suffice to say that we have a chairman who wants a seat at the top table but is at pains not to upset his hosts by unseemly behaviour, such as winning trophies. He instructs his managers to aim for the top four without providing the resources to take that additional step towards a title challenge, or for that matter squad depth to take a proper tilt at winning a cup too. He rewards his players with a watch, provided by a sponsor naturally, for reaching a final, not winning it. He wants to take part in a European super league, just to be there. For the money.

Anyway. Look elsewhere for coherent thoughts about what to do now. My head is as jumbled and confused as Dragusin on Sunday. So here are some things. You will have others.

I would not dismiss Ange at this point. The prospect of another caretaker has no appeal. I can’t see how a coach appointed in the short-term could change significantly with this squad and this injury list. I don’t see what else he can do with the back four, and if that sounds hopeless, then that reflects how I feel. There are longer term issues about training, and let’s be honest, fans have absolutely no idea whether training has had an adverse impact on the players’ health. We can see, however, that the lack of squad depth shows we were inadequately prepared for this busy season.

One thing we can dismiss is the narrative pundits, the real ‘football men’, have constructed around Spurs. We’re not the only side to play a high line by any means. Ange does have a plan B, and a C, D and E. He’s adjusted tactics, notably the positioning of the full-backs, a better pressing game and we’re willing to go long these days too. What we still can’t do is adequately tie up the midfield for any extended periods. Players we rely on in that area like Sarr, Biss and Bentacur, cannot keep the ball for long enough, which is a major plank in our defensive construction. Players are prone to errors when the pressure is on and lose the ball at crucial moments. Plus they are knackered. We can demand more effort but there’s a physical limit that many have reached. The press has worked well, again it’s key to our defensive shape this season, but they run out of steam.

What we don’t have is a plan F, where everybody’s back, low block, backs to the wall lads eh! That’s the classic response when teams come under pressure as we are. We simply don’t do that well, for long enough. Coaching? We don’t have the players for it, not with that mindset.

Plus of course Ange came up with a plan G on Sunday, three at the back. This worries me, not just because it was a disaster but because it shows he’s rattled. We could not have possibly trained with that formation for any length of time. Gray is excellent but still only young. Frankly it smacked of desperation. And if that message gets through to the players, we’re sunk. Remember these players didn’t sign up for a battle at the bottom of the table. That’s not what they’re here for.

Levy has to take decisive action in this window, not mess around negotiating some cunning loan with an option to buy to protect the club and save a future fee. Rumours suggest we are looking at defenders and forwards. Nothing yet. Any chance of a defensive-minded midfielder who can pass the ball a bit? There’s no time to waste.

And by action, I mean buy players. The action he usually takes in situations like these is to sack the manager. Will he or won’t he? His previous form suggests he will, regardless of whether or not he has a replacement lined up. I wonder, though, if this time circumstances may be different. Certainly the word from “well-placed” journalists is that he has no immediate plans to do so, and I’m assuming this comes from something deliberately fed to them by the club, because that’s how these things work.

So has anything changed? After those decades of failure I mentioned, to be fair we do have a plan and Ange is integral to that. Attacking football and player investment, especially in younger players but not exclusively, supported by a developed and much-needed club infrastructure in recruitment and a head of operations to run the club day to day. And what are these people saying to the board? Levy tends not to respond to outside interference, but he may be listening to these people he has employed to advise him. We don’t know, but at the very least this is a different element to the process.  

There’s also another, new element to the Spurs story, a prevailing view that the structural, long-term problems evident at Spurs are down to him. Many supporters, including me, have long held this view, but there have been several big pieces in the papers that have been extremely critical of the board’s performance. Levy says he takes no notice of criticism, and if that takes the form of personal abuse, I don’t blame him at all, but this is different, a far greater focus on him, and it must have an effect.  

Finally, Ange remains fairly popular amongst the fanbase, albeit it may represent clinging on to forlorn hope rather than wholehearted support. Dangerous to generalise, but certainly his name is sung at games, although I gather things got nasty post-match at the away end on Sunday when he and the players came over. No songs towards the end for his three predecessors, though.

Sunday will be the test. Home game, we have 75% possession when Vardy slots his second, three down after also conceding from a set-piece. It could turn ugly.

So I predict we’ll mess around at the bottom of the table for a while, with some respite when our players return but not much. I’ve written about the short-term, but this could have a serious harmful impact on our medium and longer term plans, just when we have something in place, which is much more worrying.

Here’s a perfectly plausible scenario. We finish mid-table and don’t win a cup. We look to build in the summer, after all team building takes several windows and we have some cracking young players, but without European football we’re less attractive to classy, quality players in a competitive market. Plus the board will be even more reluctant to pay high wages because income will fall, so recruitment is tough.

Then, it could be hard to keep our best players. Romero and Kulusevski certainly will be in demand, VdV maybe. Also, this season has exposed the deficiencies of some players we do have. Recruitment at this point in the cycle should be about upgrading, whereas we need to replace some relatively recent signings who were supposed to be part of that development.  Dragusin and Werner aren’t up to it, and we’ll have to wait to see how close players out on loan, notably Donley, Vuscovic, Devine, Dorrington and Phillips, can get to the first team.

Plausible therefore that all the progress we’ve made goes out the window and we’re team building again for the 23^rd successive transitional season. There may be trouble ahead.