On Sunday at 2, I watched my grandson’s under 12s side. They lost 7-1. They have done fairly well over the past couple of seasons, then for reasons known only to the manager, they joined a different league, the top one in the county, where they have been outclassed. Teams are faster and more athletic. They consistently pass their way through our shapeless defence. Constantly being caught on the ball and conceding possession. We can’t play out and are forced into a series of mistakes. The manager shouts tactical instructions without explaining to the boys what they are supposed to do. 

Then at 4.30 I watched the same thing all over again, only with adults. 

The NLD was certain to get me going. I’ve taken a short break from TOMM. Can’t say in all honesty it was a planned way of refreshing my creativity. Living gets in the way of football, a pitfall I’ve avoided for most of my life, so when it did, I just rolled with it.

And to be truthful, I wasn’t feeling it. Being a Spurs fan is more than just watching the games, it’s about being part of something fundamental to who I am. It’s about my life history, family and friendships. It’s essential to how I define myself. So it’s disconcerting when, if I am true to my emotional response to the game, I experience a sense of distance and alienation. 

It’s ok. Maybe this is a healthier response. Less wound up. Less frantic about getting there. I missed a few games and the world kept turning. I was more even tempered. But it’s not me. The scanners outside the turnstiles sometimes pick up my two metal knees and the stewards stop me. Or they could just be doing me a favour. But now I can leg it up to row 48 in the South Stand faster than the away end at the Emirates emptied after their fourth.

Plus there’s the inescapable feeling that after writing TOMM since 2009, I’m trapped into repeating myself as round and round we go. Same hopes, same mistakes, same outcome. No learning. 

Things don’t work out, so change is demanded, whereas at Spurs change is the problem, not the solution. The managerial and player churn undermines progress rather than assisting it. The board glibly invoke the Spurs DNA, yet the outcome as it stands is that we are a club with no distinct identity. We want to be a leading player, yet refuse to invest in players and salaries that bring success. We appoint, then dismiss, a series of managers with differing styles, who value different characteristics in the players they want to buy. The next guy inherits the mess, a squad composed of players he didn’t choose and from several different eras, different styles, competing philosophies.

The last couple of paragraphs should be the equivalent of a pinned post, prefacing any analysis of what is happening at Spurs on and off the field. Frank is that guy, fighting against the forces of history and decades of underachievement at Spurs. It’s not his fault or responsibility, but there’s nothing like the NLD to stir my emotions or to reveal to the manager the weight of the burden he carries. 

On Sunday, Spurs weren’t so much defeated as utterly outclassed by a team vastly superior in every facet of the game. Let’s be brutally honest here, in keeping with AFC’s brutal demolition of our feeble attempts to compete, theirs is the model of high level success that puts our efforts into perspective as the desperate, purposeless chaos they have been, with its flagrant disregard of the reality of the contemporary Premier League. Their board has come in for sustained criticism at times from their fans. However, they stuck by their man, stood by while he underachieved and made mistakes, spent an absolute fortune, but look at them now. They invested heavily on top class players and created a system that suits them. 

I don’t go in for a heavy dose of tactical analysis on TOMM (the Extra Inch are good on this if you are interested). But it’s fair to ask – if we’re playing a back five plus two essentially defensive minded holding midfielders, how on earth did we consistently give them so much time and space on the edge of our box? One answer here lies in our opponents’ tactical sophistication – their movement and interchanging through the middle to move our players out of position and outnumber them in decisive areas. When we have the ball, we are being caught in possession all the time (another comment I have made so often over the years). We shift the ball out wide, only for our wide men to be smothered, or else fashion a cross that forms heading practice for defenders, when we don’t have an centre forward able to make much impact. 

These are all tactical failings that are down to the manager. We try to play through the middle more when Simons starts, but he has become the face of the current Spurs side – worried, bewildered and anxious. More than taking time to adjust to PL pace, he looks up and there’s no one to pass to. Teamwork again, or lack of it. 

Coming to Spurs is a big step up for Frank. I thought (hoped?) he was ready for it but the signs so far are not promising. There’s the wide player thing from Brentford, and a mindset that concentrates on the opponent to the detriment of our own abilities. Again, the Derby was a perfect example, forcing players into an unfamiliar formation and a team selection that conceded the initiative from the moment the teamsheets were handed in. I appreciate organisation but we are justified in excepting more at Tottenham. He has some real creative talent at his disposal but I can’t avoid the feeling that he’s struggling to know exactly what to do with it. 

The most surprising aspect is his failure to instil the high level of intensity fundamental to his style. It’s a term used frequently these days to the point of cliche, but it is an essential quality in order to compete in this league. The derbies, including the CFC game in this, showed we could not match their application but it’s been apparent in other matches too. 

Lots of debate about the Paulinha/Bentancur axis not being able to pass forward. I like both players for their contrasting qualities. Bentacur looks smooth and easy when it’s going well, circulating the ball and moving it on. Except this isn’t good enough in a PL where most other teams are adept at pressing and cutting out time on the ball. The point I’m straining to make is that these are good players but they aren’t good enough for what we require them to do. And then we return to transfer policy. AFC and CFC have invested in better players in this key position.

Let’s name these feelings. Anger. Frustration. Disillusion. But changing the manager isn’t the solution to these feelings. The Derby ruthlessly exposed our faults. In the league we now have two home matches to begin a process of translating learning from mistakes into progress. Frank has to see this as an opportunity to adapt his approach, rather than a threat. He’s hampered by the loss of Maddison, Deki and Solanke, the latter a big loss in my view as he could form a figurehead around which the attacking play could coalesce. However, he has Simons, Bergvall and Muani available – they must be effectively integrated into the starting line-up. If things don’t work in these games, Frank will really find out how heavy lies the burden of anger, frustration and disillusion.

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.

Time away from Tottenham On My Mind, and more to the point from the ground. An opportunity for reflection. Take a step back. Big picture, overview, that sort of thing.

Nah. I’m unsettled, disengaged. Not feeling it. This is my longest period away from the Lane since my kids were young in the nineties and it’s done my mental well-being no good at all. I can see the game better on television, frankly, but that’s not the point. There are many ways of being a Spurs fan, all equally meaningful. It’s just that my way is being there. A lifetime connection not just with this football club but the thread of my life. Trace it to find my true self, boy to man, son to father to grandfather.  And so, if I don’t feel it, what then?

This should be about missing a few games for a perfectly reasonable reason. I now have a new knee and should soon be able to hold my own in the post-match sprint for the Northumberland Park queue. Instead, and perfectly unreasonably, it exposes the dogged obsession that my support has become. After a defeat, I’m irritable and distracted, my energies drained by the strain of suppressing disappointment and frustration.

Yet I’m even more consumed by not being at the Ipswich game. For most, a lucky escape. For me, bordering on an existential crisis because I couldn’t make the effort to watch on TV. If I’m not feeling it, this thing that has followed me and led me through my life, then what’s left?

 There have been times in the recent past where any sense of logic driven by finance and family could have meant I broke the chain and stepped away. More recently, the club have brazenly displayed their disdain of loyal supporters, with high prices, the Roma game being the latest example, and the changes in the senior concessions is a barefaced message to all fans that income matters, loyalty is just another commodity to exploit. Instead, everlasting support for the navy blue and lilywhite carried me through dark times that I would not wish on anyone. Now, here comes the biggest threat of all – indifference.

It’s ok. Just a blip. Back on the beat now. I’ll never let go. Haven’t failed the ultimate test – five minutes before kick-off at the Lane, where in the world would I rather be? Nowhere but here. I’ll enjoy it all the more when I’m back, because I know what I’ve missed.

My new knee is fine, it’s the rest of that leg that hurts. It has swollen to Paramot-esque proportions. My physio is keen that I define progress goals. When I said it was to climb to row 49 for the Liverpool game, she responded with a blank look, wrote something in her file then thought better of it and scribbled it out. Maybe it was, ‘hopeless case’.

So taking a step back to consider where the team is at might be the way to go. But little changes – is it two steps up and one back, or one step up and two steps back? This is Tottenham, there are never any neat answers.

It’s the former for me, just about. There’s progress without consistency. If I’m honest, this time last year I would have said that by now, we would be further down the road, but much of that comes from my frustration. I keep returning to Ange’s biggest problem, the burden of the past. Not his fault but he’s weighed down just the same and has to exert undue effort to escape the quicksand of thwarted expectation.

Tottenham should be a club with secure foundations to build upon. Now is the time, finally, or it should be. Ownership is settled, the club not merely financially secure but positively blooming, taking over £5m per home game. Yet the legacy of the last two decades is one of uncertainty and lack of purpose, with an absence of real direction. Such doubt and ambiguity has a way of seeping into the cracks and causing subsidence. Lloris’s recent comments in his autobiography about how before the Champions League final the chairman proudly presented each player with a watch, paid for by sponsors not the club, to commemorate being finalists may be taken out of context (I haven’t read the whole book) but have the ring of truth, that Levy is content to be at the top table without committing wholeheartedly and ruthlessly to be a winner. His proposed membership of the Super League is another example, entering a competition he had no intention of trying to win.

This season, we continue to evolve. We’ve played some dazzling football and have a squad full of talent. Also, Ange has shown his ability to alter his tactics to get the best from his players, although listening to most media pundits chuntering about the high line you wouldn’t know this, notably moving Kulu to be the fulcrum of our play (he’s had an outstanding season), which also enables him to play two out of three of Sarr, Bentancur and Bissouma, giving us more solidity in the middle. Solanke is an excellent buy, and I’m delighted with Johnson’s form. Our pressing is an important weapon now. The full-backs come inside but sometimes they don’t, according to what we need. That is as it should be.

Quincy Jones, the great arranger and inspirer of funkiness in whatever he tackled, died last week. Ange’s approach is football jazz. Some arrangers write out each part and the musicians duly play the dots, whereas like Quincy, Ange suggests a theme within defined chord structures, then allows his players to improvise.

I warm to the way he encourages and develops creativity and individual responsibility, and I think the players do too. Ange is creating positive change but two problems remain. One is where Spurs come up against a more drilled, systems based approach. Teams this season continue to exploit our weaknesses, either by a dense low block with no room in and around the penalty area and/or where they press and man-mark high up the pitch. More recently a couple of teams of gone three at the back which cuts out our favoured angled ball into wide channels.

We haven’t found a consistent answer to this, which leads to us giving the ball away in dangerous areas and players being isolated on the ball. If we can draw sides out, we are much happier, as against W Ham and Villa. At the risk of oversimplifying, this remains a fundamental issue facing our manager. We don’t protect our back four as well as other sides do, especially the full-backs, where our wide forwards do not defend well. I get it, I know why, but that leaves us vulnerable without compromise.

The other is us, maybe. How much time will we give him to sustain progress? Do fans have unreal expectations? Judging by social media, many do, but we forget a lesson that anyone who has ever watched the game should know, which is that these things take time. We have a relatively young squad with a great deal of potential. We are going to have to watch them make mistakes, and sometimes crumble.

That learning process would be accelerated if in January and the summer we are able to buy a couple of players with proven experience and leadership qualities, especially a dominant figure in centre midfield. Such players are few and far between but there’s something lacking there at the moment. They don’t have to be top class because of the talent around them, but some players exert an influence on their team-mates over and above their qualities with the ball at their feet, and we need someone like that. Even another Wanyama, a man with limited abilities but who alongside more talented contemporaries was smart and uncompromising and who enabled others to be the best they could be.

Not feeling this season yet. Until the derby. On the train, the buzz is back. The crowds, the blue smoke flares on the High Road corner, the extra rush to get to my seat. Shame the football had to spoil it.

But the emotion was there. Maybe like the players I need to ease myself into each season, especially as I get older, before I’m fully match fit. Because there have been so many seasons now, they tend to blend into one. Hope not, it will be over for me if they do. There’s nothing to compare with going to see the Hotspur, may that feeling never fade. I still feel a loss, detest a loss to the neighbours, but what’s important, essential, is that it matters. Joy and pain, I want to be affected by both. Apathy is anathema. I fear it, but the derby does it still.

It is without question the biggest game of my season. Other rivalries and squabbles pale into insignificance compared with the force generated by the weight of history. Battle of the Bridge and all that, old rivalry has turned into bitterness, it’s a nasty one, while WHam is the lopsided derby, good to win but it means more to them than it does to us. The NLD runs deep.

Because of that emotional involvement, look elsewhere for considered analysis. I watch games as a fan and as such, I’m far too frantic for this one. Sitting back and taking a considered view is the last thing I want to do in matches like these. I can’t analyse these games, I feel them.

Yet maybe that approach reveals some fundamental truths about where Spurs are right now. I feel frustration and some anger that once more, we’ve lost at home and to a goal that could, should have been prevented. What I felt is that this was another muggins goal, a free header 5 yards out. Mugs again. Mugs too often. That after a decent first half, we failed to up our game. Them lot were playing well enough but not at their most fluent or effective. There was our opportunity and we failed to exert sufficient pressure. That once they scored, we were never going to come back.

These feelings are all too familiar. Once we concede, we deflate. It all looks pretty similar, the shape, the movement, but nothing happens. There’s no edge. And here lies one big difference between them and us. They are resilient, disciplined and tough-minded, where we are not confident in ourselves. Ange talks about instilling consistency and belief, come what may, but it looks like we don’t have full and complete confidence in our method.

The gunners play decent, attractive football (by the way, this is a Spurs blog but unless we acknowledge that right now they are a better team than us, we’re deluding ourselves and we’ll never be able to move forward) with a precious clinical edge. Spurs are the opposite of cold and clinical. it’s freewheeling and risk-taking, albeit within established patterns. It’s great to watch and good fun when it works, but there’s no safety net and little margin for error. I like to see Maddison, Bentancur and Kulu weaving patterns in midfield but that deeper interchangeable role for Madders isn’t working because the foundations aren’t solid enough.

There’s a hole somewhere, something missing. Weakness where there should e strength. Nobody takes charge, there’s no authority in the middle of the park. It’s similar up front. Solanke will prosper, I’m sure. He adds a focal point and I like the way he contorts his body to get something, anything, on the ball to propel it goalwards. Old school centre forward play, that. But he was outnumbered two to one and overpowered yesterday. It’s a measure of our desperation that we have to stick a centre half up front for the last ten minutes in the vain hope of getting on the end of one of our wayward crosses.

The goal was an example of how they use this edge. I don’t think Vicario is as weak at corners as is often made out. Last season we left him unprotected and therefore vulnerable. Now, we have players around him and also the new interpretation of existing laws should help. So they put two players to pressure him, pushed away by two of ours. What this in fact did was increase his problems by creating a solid four man barrier in front of him. Their men didn’t want to get to him, they just wanted to commit two of ours. Gabriel slipped into that pocket, the ball was perfect, our marking less so, but they turned our defenders to their advantage.

Searching for explanations in the sulky silence of the journey home, there was one that stood out. It wasn’t about Angeball or tactics. We weren’t consistently exposed at the back and picked up more than enough possession. On the day, we weren’t bad, we were just ordinary, and ordinary isn’t good enough. if we’re set up to cross the ball, but barely produce a decent ball all afternoon, that’s not Angeball to blame, that’s just rubbish football. If we buy a centre forward, then leave him on his own as these crosses come in, or as yesterday sail over his head, that’s not Angeball, that’s rubbish football.

It feels as if the NLD is pivotal, a benchmark for progress. In fact it’s probably an outlier, given the frantic nature of these games not the best guide to the nature and quality of the football we play over the course of the season. But there are two inescapable conclusions to be drawn from yesterday’s game. One is that we don’t deal well with pressure, and we won’t get far until we do. The other that they are three years ahead of us in their development. With that comes that sense of certainty and resilience we have yet to learn.

We can make that progress, I’m certain of it, and the squad is full of promise, but of the many he must face Ange’s biggest problem is the burden of history, in particular two decades of unfulfilled promise and one trophy. So turn back the clocks. This is year 2 AC (After Conte). Then both the progress made and the distance to still to be covered come into focus. We have the best set-up and strategy at the club arguably since Levy took over, with focused recruitment and bags of potential waiting to be released but it takes time. As fans, patience is the gift that keeps on giving, but that’s tough even for an old lag like me.

My problem comes back to that emotional commitment again. I’m invested in Ange and I want him to succeed. I like his style, values and ethos. This is the right way to grow the club. But sometimes I wonder what he sees when he watches us play. I hear pundits drone on about Angeball and the high line but his tactics and shape aren’t significantly different from that of Man City, and other teams often play the high line. Our players are good but are they good enough to play this way? That’s the difference. Until then, patience. But while we’re about it, play a strong side at Coventry tomorrow so there’s some short-term joy.

Thanks for hanging around while Tottenham On Mind creaks into what passes for action for another season. I’ll post frequently but not necessarily regularly, basically when I’ve got something I want to say, starting with something about fans and the state of our relationship with the club. Click subscribe if you want to join about 500 other fans who get every post sent to their inbox. I’ll add links to Twitter and Bluesky, but will rarely post on the former because it is foul and bad for my mental well-being. Up the Spurs!