Ange Postecoglou has serious shortcomings as Spurs manager. But he has hardly been helped by a team trying to do things on the cheap
The good news for Ange Postecoglou is that it seems relatively straightforward to recover from being Tottenham manager: his two immediate predecessors, Antonio Conte and Nuno Espírito Santo, are top of Serie A with Napoli and third in the Premier League with Nottingham Forest respectively. As the banner unveiled by Spurs fans during Sunday’s defeat to Leicester read: “24 years, 16 managers, one trophy”. Nobody really looks at Tottenham any more and thinks the problem is the manager.
But it is usually the manager who pays the price. Their last 10 league games have yielded four points. They’ve just lost to Everton, who hadn’t won in six, and to Leicester, who’d lost their previous seven. They’ve reached a stage at which it feels possible that they could lose any given fixture. The only saving grace is that they’re 1-0 up against Liverpool after the home leg of their Carabao Cup semi-final and that they’re sixth in the Europa League table, assured of automatic passage to the last 16 if they beat the Swedish side Elfsborg on Thursday.
This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition
