Are Tottenham just not very good?

New York Times

05-04-2025

Tottenham Hotspur's 1-0 loss against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Thursday didn't surprise many, but it added to a miserable season for Ange Postecoglou's side.
They sit 14th in the Premier League table, 10 points off the top half and 17 points behind Manchester City in fifth. For much of the season, Tottenham's injury crisis was used to justify their poor league form, but even with many key players back, Postecoglou has still struggled to get a tune out of his side.
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On the latest episode of The View From The Lane, Danny Kelly, Jay Harris and Jack Pitt-Brooke discussed whether Tottenham are simply just a below-par team this season.
A partial transcript has been edited for clarity and length. The full episode is available on The View from the Lane feed on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Danny: Jack, let me pull the pin out of the hand grenade and pass it over to you. There are statistics you can produce here, or you can talk about the eye test. Are we just deluding ourselves? Are we just watching a rotten football team?
Jack: This is just a bad team that has occasionally had good days. It doesn't hold water anymore to say they're a good but flawed team. Good but flawed teams don't lose 16 out of 30 league games. They're a bad side who are capable of having very good days.
A lot of what we saw against Chelsea, we saw away to Fulham, we saw in the first half against Bournemouth, we saw away to AZ, and also in the home game against Man City. They've lost a lot of their intensity without the ball. They didn't make things difficult at all for Chelsea. It was incredible how many times Chelsea could knock the ball forward, then, all of a sudden, Cole Palmer or Nicolas Jackson would have a ridiculous amount of space to run straight through the middle of the pitch. There was no resistance at all from Tottenham.
It was so easy for Jadon Sancho to get one-on-one against Djed Spence, who was having to backpedal all the time just to stay afloat. Then, when Spurs got the ball, they had no idea what to do with it. There were no patterns. They didn't use Dominic Solanke properly. They never released Son Heung-min or Wilson Odobert into good positions. Occasionally, Destiny Udogie or Spence would run forward with the ball, but then it would all stop and they would knock the ball out of play. It felt like it took about 40 minutes for James Maddison or Son to touch the ball.
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It was really bad. And bad in a way that was generally familiar with what we've seen this season. This is not a team that's going anywhere.
Danny: Jay, I thought your head was going to fall off you were nodding so vigorously there…
Jay: There are a couple of things I wanted to highlight.
Like Jack said, this is just not a particularly good football team. The injury crisis became a convenient excuse for a team already playing quite badly. But you hoped to be proven wrong and that when players came back, we would see the shoots of progress.
Looking at the last month or so, when those players have been back, nothing's really changed. They're still performing just as miserably as they were before.
The other element is that the team did lose a bit of their composure and discipline against Chelsea. Sergio Romero getting booked for going up to Levi Colwill is just so silly. All because he and Colwill were tussling with each other at a corner 20 minutes before. You don't need to get involved. All that does is whip up the crowd at Stamford Bridge even more and adds to the intensity. That's when you need Son, Guglielmo Vicario, Maddison and the other leaders to calm the team down, remain composed, and ignore all that nonsense.
They just allowed themselves to get wound up. Even Pedro Porro, when he screamed at the linesman, it was so unnecessary. You could really see signs of the tension that these players are feeling.
You can listen to full episodes of The View from the Lane free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.