There aren’t many repeatable descriptions of Tottenham’s performance at Fulham. The concourse at Craven Cottage is narrow and cramped and at half-time on Sunday the mood in there among the home fans was quietly optimistic. Their own side was playing with an unexpected flourish but, more importantly, they’d encountered a depleted Spurs side who’d travelled across London in a dreadful sulk.
An hour later, the mood had changed. Fulham have lost so many games this season and via so many preventable goals, that those fans should really be at the quiet resignation stage by now. Not so. After Harry Winks had stooped to head the game’s winning goal, dozens of the wooden seats around the press box snapped shut with irritation.
Rightly, because that was a game Tottenham never should have won.
They didn’t create, they didn’t exert any pressure and, for a time, they didn’t even know what to do with Ryan Babel and Aleksandar Mitrovic. And yet, when the time came to divide up the points, they snatched all three. Winks won possession deep in his own half and kept running. Georges-Kevin Nkoudou – Paul Mitchell’s sickest joke – took Cyrus Christie’s invitation to step inside and dropped a cross onto Winks’ forehead.
Pochettino loved it. The uninhibited celebration on the touchline testified to that, but so too did his comments afterwards. His players were due a kicking in that press conference, but Pochettino resisted, praising the spirit of the side instead and, in response to questions about Dele Alli’s hamstring, talking of the opportunity that this growing crisis affords to other players.
Now, attention has turned to Stamford Bridge and the second leg of the EFL Cup semi-final with Chelsea. There can be no greater contrast between these two sides than the dynamics presented by Gonzalo Higuain’s loan move. Maurizio Sarri is without a forward, albeit only in the sense that £70m Alvaro Morata is playing poorly and Olivier Giroud is not to his liking. No matter. A quick call to Milan and a hefty BACS transfer has solved that problem: Higuain will not be available to play on Thursday night and the more fatalistic members of Tottenham’s support, given how predictable that script would have been, will be grateful for the small mercy.
However, their own club’s season has been full of little oddities. Yes, a spiralling Nkoudou cross being converted by a Winks header was probably the strangest, but it wasn’t necessarily incongruous with the season so far. 2018-19 has been the year of Juan Foyth’s many penalties at Molineux, but also his winner at Crystal Palace. It’s featured Fernando Llorente in almost no capacity at all, other than his game-changing impact against PSV and Burnley. Paulo Gazzaniga has been strangely faultless, too, saving penalties at the beginning of this League Cup run and proving impressive in this semi-final’s opening act. And Moussa Sissoko. From parody to pivotal part within six months and now a player that Tottenham aren’t the same without.
Pochettino’s great contradiction can be seen in his dexterity. He retains a maddening habit of delaying his substitutions and yet, perversely, is at his most bold and creative with his selections. Long before Harry Kane limped off the pitch at Wembley and Dele Alli was being scraped from that Craven Cottage hoarding, he had had to build an entirely new midfield. Winks and Sissoko? It may sound appealing now, but there weren’t many advocating for it prior to Mousa Dembele’s sale or Victor Wanyama’s succession of injuries. But like almost every other change Pochettino has made, many of which have quickened the pulse, it’s worked extremely well.
And maybe he’s enjoying this – when he speaks of the opportunities for different players, perhaps hidden subliminally is an eagerness to prove himself. Of all his refrains to the media, the most common concerns Tottenham’s operating procedure. He talks of their different way and the need to grow and develop without the use of the transfer market. It’s a trait which many head coaches share, using it to frame their job performance or apply pressure to their employers. But Pochettino is no Jose Mourinho. He isn’t prone to attempting to influence the news cycle, instead using these inconveniences almost in self-motivation. Maybe he doesn’t actually enjoy the limitations he works under, but it’s safe to assume he’s enthused by the contrast it presents.
He competes, after all, in a part of the division in which – straight-faced – managers will frequently claim that the lack of a new £60m player precludes success. Maybe he feels the same way and somewhere, in the darkness of a private office in his London home, he curses Daniel Levy and Joe Lewis. Most likely not, though. This is his identity: he is part-traditionalist, part-underdog – someone for whom coaching rather than media handling remains the greatest virtue, and who seems to embrace the opportunity to confront disadvantage. Principally, perhaps, because he recognises that playing such a role is to the betterment of his reputation.
That’s been very much the theme of 2018-19. Behind the many dramas of the injury list, the lack of transfers, and the nebulous stadium situation, Tottenham have been growing more tactically mature.
In the hands of another, one can only imagine the palms-up response of some of his peers. All around him, managers have and continue to fuss over the wrong type of £50m midfielder or forward, while he has had to make do with nothing. His lack of self-pity and his refusal to toe anything other than a party line indicates that, while not a situation he welcomes, the emphasis it places on his core abilities is convenient.
Ideologically, Pochettino’s reputation for counter-pressing football has diminished since Jurgen Klopp installed his turbo alternative at Anfield. In the meantime, though, Spurs have become a more multi-faceted side, capable of deviating from their house style when necessary. Keen-eyed observers will have noted, for instance, their periodic use of a more direct approach, partly for the sake of variation, but also to create a necessary route around their problem midfield.
Elsewhere, the foundation strategy behind the counter-attacking seems to have been re-imagined, partly in response to the diminishing thrust available from full-back. One of the advantages of Sissoko’s adaption has been to alter the tone and direction of Tottenham’s midfield play, helping to alleviate the issues created by their lack of natural width and the break-up of the once incendiary Danny Rose/Kyle Walker axis.
What the effect on Pochettino’s reputation has been this season is difficult to chart. In the broad sense, his time at the club has been and remains notable for over-performance. But this last eight months and the challenges contained within have marked his growth in quite a specific way. No longer is he someone simply getting the most of a very talented group, he’s now also one of the game’s pre-eminent problem solvers, re-imagining players whose profiles had been presumed calcified and trusting those who, elsewhere, would only see the pitch after a game was comfortably won.
He’ll want Kane, Alli and Son back as soon as possible, that goes without saying, but for now Tottenham are held together by the strength of his mind and by the sort of binding vision more often attributed to his contemporaries. He’ll be fine with that; maybe he even relishes it?
Seb Stafford-Bloor