It was an image that threatened to loom over Tottenham Hotspur’s season: Ange Postecoglou bent double in frustration, hands on knees, after Richarlison had missed a chance to beat Leicester City in stoppage time last Monday.
It encapsulated the sense of exasperation after Spurs played so well for so much of their opener but went home with a 1-1 draw that felt like a defeat.
They failed to convert their early dominance into goals and were punished. One game into the season, they had left two points on the pitch that should have been theirs.
Postecoglou’s body language said it all after Richarlison’s late miss (Catherine Ivill – AMA/Getty Images)
The mood was so gloomy that it naturally informed all discussions of that game.
The result was not what people wanted, so the focus was on what went wrong: their wastefulness in front of goal, their defensive mistakes, their wobble after Jamie Vardy’s equaliser. That Tottenham played some fantastic football in the first 57 minutes, and created more than enough chances to win the game, was beside the point. Especially when compared to the narrative power of that one photograph of the manager.
When Everton arrived, many fans were still anxious about the lack of ruthlessness shown at the King Power Stadium. Again, Spurs started strongly, dominating the ball and playing almost entirely in opposition territory. Again, they took the lead — but this time, they got that crucial second goal as Son Heung-min pinched the ball from Jordan Pickford and scored his first of the season. Spurs scored twice more in the second half. That 4-0 scoreline was the joint-best of the Postecoglou era.
It was easy enough to build a simple narrative out of these two data points. The Leicester game was bad because Spurs were not ruthless. The Everton game was good because Spurs were ruthless. If Spurs could just bottle up that one simple quality they showed against Everton, and deploy it consistently through the season, well, there might be no limit on what they can achieve.
But we all know deep down that football does not work this way. Outcomes are contingent and not within the gift of anyone to keep replicating at will. After the Everton game, one journalist, lazily looking for a neat explanation, effectively asked Postecoglou whether it was as simple as keeping ruthless mode switched on all year.
Son scored twice in the win over Everton (David Rogers/Getty Images)
“Not necessarily,” said Postecoglou. “It’s about performance. If you perform like we have these first two weeks, and you keep producing that multitude of chances, then more often than not, you’ll win.”
And there you have it. Maybe it just took the validation of the Everton win for the truth to emerge about the Leicester game too: that Spurs played well, well enough to win, and if they keep playing that way they will be fine. For Postecoglou, the priority has to be the performance. That is why the Leicester game was not the end of the world.
Postecoglou added: “Once you start focusing just on the outcome on, on goals… even today, I thought we created some unbelievable opportunities and could have scored more goals. But the idea is that you keep your level of performance up.”
Why does this matter? Because if you misread the Leicester game as a disaster, if you thought Spurs’ wasteful finishing was a crisis that needed to be fixed, then you might have ripped up everything to start again. Had Spurs done so, they would not have reached Saturday’s level of performance or managed such a dominant scoreline. “What you don’t want to do after last week is change your approach, looking for goals,” Postecoglou said. “We haven’t changed our approach. We played the same way as last week.”
Tottenham’s performance improved but in a more fundamental way than just the finishing. For Postecoglou, it was in the “variety” of Spurs’ attacks. Against Everton, Spurs were good through the middle and out wide, and having Wilson Odobert in the team as a genuine dribbler helped there. When they had to go long, they often released James Maddison running in behind. They were good on set pieces, too, with Cristian Romero heading in Maddison’s corner in the second half. “If we can become a team that’s not just a threat in one way, that will help us.”
Finishing is not irrelevant and Spurs will pay the price if they consistently waste good opportunities — breaking their club transfer record to sign Dominic Solanke from Bournemouth proves that they are taking this seriously.
But if you evaluate a team through the prism of which shots went in and which did not, you miss the fundamentals of their performance. If you allow your analysis to be governed by the outcomes, you will never see the full picture.
Postecoglou was an image of frustration at the end of the Leicester game, which is why that photo struck a chord, but he knows that much of what Spurs did was good. Keeping that emotional consistency from game to game, trying to cut out the noise while replicating performance levels, will be far more important to Spurs’ season than whether they are ‘ruthless’ in front of goal.
(Top photo: Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)
