In losing the north London derby, Tottenham fell to their 11th Premier League defeat of the season. Ange Postecoglou is seemingly safe for now, but will he be for much longer?
Tottenham Hotspur are 13th in the Premier League. They’ll drop to 14th if Manchester United beat Southampton on Thursday night.
They have lost 11 games in the league this season following the north London derby defeat to Arsenal at the Emirates on Wednesday. Only the current bottom three have lost more times in 2024-25.
They have 24 points from 21 games. They are closer to the relegation zone (eight points off Wolves) than the top eight (10 points off Bournemouth).
They are on course to hit 43 points this season, which would be their lowest-ever total in the Premier League era.
But they’ll only make it to 43 points if they rediscover some of their early-season form. They have won only one of their last nine Premier League games – a 5-0 win at basement boys Southampton – taking five points from the last available 27. They have plummeted from sixth in late November to 13th in mid-January. If they don’t stop this rot, they could easily be facing a relegation fight.
They are in the midst of a full-blown crisis. Things haven’t been this bad for the 2019 Champions League finalists and 2016-17 Premier League runners-up in a long, long time.
And yet, while the pressure is unquestionably mounting on manager Ange Postecoglou, his job appears to be safe for now.
The obvious question is: why?
There are a few elements to the explanation. Firstly, the players are still playing for him. They haven’t thrown in the towel on Postecoglou’s tactics, still appearing to believe that going all in on Ange-Ball is a realistic route to success. Even in the face of this atrocious run of form, his exhausted players are sticking to Plan A.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, Spurs are still in all three cup competitions. For many of the trophy-starved fans, winning one of those this season was always the priority over qualifying for Europe.
They are one game away from an EFL Cup final following their first-leg win over Liverpool last week, should qualify for the UEFA Europa League knockout stage and are through to the fourth round of the FA Cup.
Thirdly, they have been enduring terrible injury problems over the past couple of months, playing with a second-string defence and goalkeeper, youngsters out of position, and an overplayed and therefore knackered group of attackers struggling to maintain the levels needed to perform consistently at this level with the intensity Postecoglou demands, all while playing twice a week.
The final point here is that there have been flashes of genuine brilliance among all the dross. There is still a decent amount of hope that Ange-Ball can work.
Spurs won 3-0 at Old Trafford back in September and 4-0 at the Etihad Stadium in November, becoming the first team to win by three clear goals away to both Manchester United and Manchester City in the league in the same season since Everton in 1992-93.
Their 1-0 win over Liverpool showed a resilience that has been lacking under Postecoglou, giving some hope that Spurs might be starting to learn how to win ugly.
They have come out on the wrong side of a lot of close games this season, with 11 of their 12 defeats in all competitions coming by exactly one goal. Spurs have come very close but lost very often this season. It all means the fans have something to cling to. Success with this team feels much closer than their league position suggests it is.
There is no getting away from those headline numbers, though. They battled bravely against Arsenal this week, surviving an early onslaught away from home against one of the best teams in the country with some committed defending and taking a lead through Son Heung-min shortly after Dejan Kulusevski had spurned an even better chance.
But it was a fairly one-sided game. Spurs can feel hard done by that they conceded after an incorrect decision to award Arsenal the corner that led to their equaliser, but they also didn’t create anything like enough to deserve to get something from the game. Arsenal’s relatively modest expected goals (xG) total of 1.45 compared to Spurs’ 0.78 doesn’t tell the full story; the hosts got into dangerous positions close to goal time and again but gave up huge opportunities to shoot on too many occasions. Those moves won’t have added any xG value to their numbers.
A better illustration of Arsenal’s dominance is their 63 final-third entries to Tottenham’s 37, and their 48 touches in the opposition box to Tottenham’s 21. Arsenal enjoyed a field tilt – a measure of territorial dominance – of 70.2%, showing that they were responsible for more than two-thirds of the game’s final-third passes.
Usually, field tilt numbers this high are a sign of a low block, but this wasn’t by design on Tottenham’s part. That’s not something an intensely idealistic Postecoglou would countenance. “[We were] too passive. It’s not who we are,” the Spurs manager said after the game. “Allowing Arsenal to play to their tempo. It just wasn’t good enough.” Arsenal dominated the ball all over the pitch.
In the end, it was another one-goal defeat to add to Spurs’ ever-increasing tally. Overall, they spent 52 minutes and two seconds trailing in this game but failed to create a single big chance or muster a shot on target after going behind. They might have felt like they were close to getting back into this one, but Arsenal looked more likely to extend their lead than concede an equaliser.
It’s a recurring issue, too. Since coming back to beat Aston Villa on 3 November, Spurs have gone behind in 10 different games in all competitions. They have only avoided defeat in two of them: a home draw with struggling Wolves and one on the road at Rangers in the Europa League. They consistently struggle against deep blocks, and it was the same old story at the Emirates.
Postecoglou has plenty of runners, particularly in attack, but arguably too few lock-pickers. They have legs for days on the wings in players like Son, Brennan Johnson and Timo Werner, but few players who can beat an opponent in a one-on-one.
At Arsenal, half-time substitute and central midfielder James Maddison completed as many successful dribbles as every other Tottenham player put together (3). The four wingers on the night – Son, Kulusevski, Johnson and Richarlison – were responsible for one successful dribble between them. It was as blunt an attacking performance as Postecoglou’s side have produced since their last north London derby defeat – a 1-0 loss at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in September.
Spurs’ problems this season have largely been in defence. Despite sitting in the bottom half of the table, they are the Premier League’s second-highest scorers, with 43 goals in 21 games.
But they produced far too little in attack to hurt their fierce rivals, and a third consecutive north London derby defeat is a bitter pill for the fans to swallow, particularly when they faced a severely depleted Arsenal in both games this season. Even more so given they took the lead at the Emirates.
There might be plenty of evidence to suggest they really are close to something good under Postecoglou, but only a few places below them in the league table is something really, really bad. Something unthinkable.
After their latest in a long line of defeats, it is a reasonable time to wonder how much longer the rare flashes of positivity will be enough to keep Postecoglou from the sack.
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