Spurs and Chelsea have a long and storied history of nonsense Barclays combat, but they’ve surely topped the lot with this absolutely absurd effort at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
1. Five actual goals. Five disallowed goals. A very weird hat-trick. The last unbeaten record in the Premier League up in smoke. Roughly 873 interminable VAR delays. The first documented sighting in the wild of the 0-7-1 formation. This really was quite the game of association football, wasn’t it? Rarely if ever can 90 minutes (or, more accurately, 111 minutes) have so entirely and perfectly captured the entire ethos of a football club as this one did for Spurs. A night that started with them racing out of the blocks and leading Chelsea a merry dance for 15 minutes in which they went 1-0 up and were an offside Son Heung-min boot away from being 2-0 up and on their way back to the top of the table ended with a catastrophic 4-1 defeat and quite possibly their entire season in ruins.
The main reason why Spurs weren’t ever really title contenders was because there were a few fairly obvious things that would inevitably happen over the course of a 10-month season to derail them.
Their paddling-pool-shallow squad would be exposed by a couple of key injuries in positions where they lack any suitable back-up. Cristian Romero would do a madness. Their ultra-agressive brave/courageous/reckless/naive/insane/batshit high defensive line would get caught out one time too many.
We all fully expected all these things to happen. Not sure any of us expected every single one of them to happen in the space of 30-odd minutes in the same game. But this is Spurs and we were wrong to doubt their capacity for chaos.
2. Such is the way of Spurs that the basic horror of a 4-1 home defeat to a hated rival led by a manager they once adored isn’t even the big issue. Had they somehow emerged from this game with their unbeaten record intact – and ludicrous as that idea seems, Spurs had a late equaliser ruled out for offside while Son had a very presentable chance to make it 2-2 with time running out, at which point you frankly wouldn’t even have ruled out a winner from this irredeemably silly club – it would have been an astonishing act of bravura escapology but ultimately still surely futile. They are now without Cristian Romero for games against Wolves, Aston Villa and Manchester City. Destiny Udogie will also miss the Wolves game. Most troublingly of all, Micky van de Ven and James Maddison could miss all those and much, much more if their injuries are anywhere near as serious as first impressions suggested.
Van de Ven’s pace and Maddison’s creative brilliance make them arguably the two least replaceable members of a starting XI full of vital irreplaceble components that had become extremely consistent but is now torn to shreds. Romero is not far behind that pair in third.
A team with a stellar first XI but almost nothing in reserve just lost four of those 11 players in one night. It’s not the first time Spurs have seen their whole season implode in spectacular style against Chelsea, but it’s the first time it’s happened in November.
3. And yet… such is the sheer intoxicating power of Angeball that you find yourself wondering if the Spurs manager can’t somehow against all odds make it work with literally any players. “This is who we are, mate” was his unmistakably Postecoglou post-match assessment of his decision to not just persist with a high line but to shunt that line all the way up to halfway while down to nine men and with a centre-back pairing comprising reserve right-back Emerson Royal and a rusty, discarded Eric Dier. That line would have been a madness with van de Ven in there; with that cobbled-together pair along with the occasional act of last-gaspery from Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg it bordered on insanity.
But what is more important? Postecoglou will argue that sticking to his principles even in the most extreme adversity and backing his players to deliver is all part of hammering home a culture and identity that is worth far more than a slightly better chance of nicking an unlikely point in one game. The response of the Spurs fans inside the stadium at least suggests they were on board with it. There have been many staggering things about Postecoglou’s early months at this club, but full-throated renditions of “Come on you Spurs” from 50,000 people in the immediate aftermath of a 4-1 defeat to Chelsea of all clubs is right up there.
The Eric Dier redemption arc starts here.
4. The obvious and probably drearily correct counterpoint to all that is that tactical inflexibility and stubborn adherence to a particular style or method no matter the situation is not really the hallmark of an elite coach. Jurgen Klopp is certainly an attack-minded fellow, but when down to nine men on this very ground he withdrew his Liverpool troops to their own penalty area and came within 30 seconds and Joel Matip’s shin of pulling it off. Tactical inflexibility is also what a lot of Spurs fans quite rightly disliked in the last few coaches, although admittedly the sheer drudgery of said inflexibility was also an issue with those guys. Say what you like about this, it certainly wasn’t dull. But just as there were times when even Mourinho and Conte should have released the handbrake, surely there are times for even the greatest front-foot purist to accept that needs must. We’re not sure where exactly that line sits, but it’s perhaps not a halfway line patrolled by Eric Dier while Mykhaylo Mudryk and Raheem Sterling lurk on either side. Chelsea, it is true, made inexplicably hard work of breaking down Spurs’ 0-7-1 but that probably says more about them than it does anything or anyone else.
This is a Chelsea team that has had a conspicuous and repeated nightmare trying to break down low blocks, a shortcoming that goes right back into last season as well as throughout this one. If there’s one thing Dier knows, it’s a low block. Against this Chelsea team, Hojbjerg could absolutely play centre-back in a 5-2-1 low-block and smash it out of the park with nothing more than judicious pointing and timely fist-clenching. Given the players both Spurs and Chelsea had on the pitch by the time of Udogie’s red card it’s pretty hard to argue the path Postecoglou chose was the likeliest of the various unlikely escape routes available.
5. Our head is so hot after that game we genuinely cannot decide which of the above conclusions is true. We’ve gone back and forth between being absolutely certain that the further and deeper indoctrination of a philosophy and style of play that Spurs take out of tonight outweighs losing 4-1 instead of maybe losing 2-1 but muddling the message, and then being absolutely certain that any tactical choice that ends up with Nicolas Jackson accidentally scoring a hat-trick against you simply cannot be the right one. We’ll let you know once we’ve settled once and for all on our final decision, which will be in May. And that’s May 2026. But what we do know is that the batshit method Postecoglou opted for was astonishingly good fun, somehow very nearly worked and also carried the fans along with it. So… thanks?
6. At the very, very least, the 14 Spurs players involved here who didn’t get red cards deserve credit for their commitment to the cause (or maybe that should be commitment to the bit). Nobody can say they didn’t throw themselves wholeheartedly into following their manager’s ultra-aggressive instructions. The sight of Dier, not widely considered one of nature’s front-foot defenders, urging Emerson Royal further and further up the field will live long in the memory. As will the tactic he hit on late in the second half of simply shoving Chelsea players into offside positions once they had realised there really was no need to risk going early with their runs into the acres of space available.
7. Romero and Udogie deserve only criticism, though. Both were already lucky to still be on the pitch when finally given their marching orders. Udogie was incredibly fortunate to survive a good old-fashioned two-footer on Raheem Sterling. Collecting a fraction of the ball as he careened through helped him a bit, but Sterling being wily enough to see the challenge coming and get the f*** out of its way was surely in the end the difference between yellow and red, between ‘top end of reckless’ and ‘dangerous’.
Romero then escaped after going full David Beckham on Levi Colwill only to plant his foot into Enzo Fernandez’s shin minutes later. It was very certainly dangerous. And it is perhaps the most worrying aspect of the night for Spurs. Romero’s propensity for madnesses is long-standing and well-known. This season, he has been rightly praised for pretty much eliminating said madnesses from his arsenal across 10 whole matches. This return to his bad old days is a huge problem for Spurs, who simply cannot afford him to be missing unnecessarily.
Udogie’s second yellow was partly a result of the high-line, high-wire act Spurs attempted to pull off but was still needlessly brainless given Sterling was running away from goal at the time. Postecoglou won’t mind that he chose a high-risk option – clearly – but he will mind that it was so low-reward.
8. Udogie may have survived that two-footer on Sterling, but what he did do in that moment was alter the entire direction and mood of the game. It galvanised a Chelsea side who up to that point had been baffled spectators trying to work out what the f*** Spurs were doing. They spent much of the rest of the game asking themselves the same question but for very different reasons.
9. It’s taken us an awful long time to get round to talking about the team that won this match 4-1, hasn’t it? But at the same time that feels somehow entirely fitting. The following sentence is as insane as playing an Eric Dier-led high-line with nine men against Sterling and Mudryk but at the same time we believe it utterly: Chelsea’s 4-1 victory here came in a match that almost entirely happened to them.
Almost nothing that happened here tonight was instigated by the visitors. Everything Chelsea did – from the very good to the inexplicably bad – was a response to whatever batshit antics Spurs were up to at the time – again, from the very good to the inexplicably bad. In the first 15 minutes, Chelsea’s response to the football in front of them was one of utter befuddlement. In the next half-hour or so, a kind of energised and focused rage. For half-an-hour after that an increasingly frustrated confusion as they genuinely struggled among themselves to work out how precisely to go about breaking down a defence that wasn’t there. And finally, the flurry of late goals when they worked out that it was really very easy indeed to do so if you just passed the ball around a bit first or started your runs into 40 yards of space from inside your own half.
10. And with that, we come at last to Nicolas Jackson and one of the more astonishing hat-tricks in Barclays history. Rarely if ever can a player have scored three goals and yet been nowhere near man-of-the-match contention. Or been so thoroughly outplayed by the man he scored those three goals against. Jackson had a good first-half effort brilliantly saved by Guglielmo Vicario, then in the second half missed an absolute sitter from a yard out, scored three goals, and then missed another sitter after that.
It was certainly a night’s work. And Jackson scoring a hat-trick may even be, ultimately, the weirdest thing about this ridiculously weird game. That his third goal came after he went round Vicario by accident was entirely apt.
What was bizarre about his very easy first goal was not really how facile it was in the end – slotting home from a Sterling cross after Chelsea’s Road Runners had finally managed to spring Spurs’ Wile E. Coyote ACME Offside Trap – but that it had taken so incredibly long for them to score precisely the goal that had been on offer from the moment Spurs went down to 10 men and even more so when they were down to nine. Even then, it was another 19 minutes and a few genuine scares at the other end, primarily through assorted Chelsea players inexplicably giving away free-kicks when free-kicks were the only possible way for Spurs to get back into the game, before Chelsea decided to repeat this extremely obvious and straightforward technique to put the game to bed.
Jackson’s third goal at least offered something a bit different, even if – especially if – Jackson took the chance without ever deciding how he was going to do so or even if he should instead pass to Mudryk.
It might be the strangest hat-trick we’ve ever seen.
11. There was, though, one Chelsea player who was an active and pro-active participant throughout. Cole Palmer. He may well end up one of the signings of the season. He was the one Chelsea player able to get his foot on the ball and progress it up the pitch with precision and purpose during Spurs’ fast start and he remained an oasis of calm in the middle of a game that overheated the heads of pretty much everyone else involved, up to and including the man who ended it with the match ball. It would be a fine effort from a seasoned professional; for a 21-year-old starting a Premier League game for only the eighth time it was extraordinary. If you can get through a game like this without being thrown off kilter by it all, then you’re probably going to be fine.
It remains to be seen what position ends up being Palmer’s best, but right now – and despite Jackson’s late efforts – there are arguably two or three spots in this team where he is the best candidate.
12. It may seem now like it took place in another game, possibly another season and very plausibly another sport altogether, but it’s worth reflecting on the opening 15 minutes more fully. We honestly don’t think we’ve ever seen Spurs play better than they did in those opening exchanges, which only makes the extreme headloss that followed all the stranger. The counterfactual in which Son is fractionally onside rather than fractionally offside when turning home Brennan Johnson’s pass to score what would have been one of the goals of the season would certainly make for interesting reading.
From Chelsea’s view, when the dust has settled on their ultimately astonishing victory in an astonishing game, there may be some lingering concern that the team and manager – how, by the way, has Mauricio Pochettino managed to end up such a peripheral figure in a 4-1 win for his Chelsea team at Tottenham? – were so thoroughly caught out by the precise tactics Spurs have deployed all season.
Full-backs playing against this Spurs team (when it’s 11-men strong, anyway) have a choice. Mark the wingers, or follow the marauding full-backs into central midfield. Chelsea in those first 15 minutes did neither one nor the other. The result was Dejan Kulusevski and Johnson enjoying plenty of space out on the flanks while Pedro Porro and Udogie were able to collect the ball unhurried on the half-turn and cause mischief while Maddison was free to pop up absolutely anywhere to potentially produce a line-breaking pass. Chelsea paid the price when Kulusevski exposed Colwill, who found himself retreating desperately and could eventually do nothing more than deflect the ball past the wrong-footed Robert Sanchez. Colwill found himself in what Gary Neville so evocatively calls the Land of Hope. It’s not where any full-back wants to be. At that point it looked like being a long and painful night for Chelsea. The first part was certainly true; the second absolutely was not.
13. A word on that long night. It seems every game these days needs a VAR update but this was a strange one. In its own intrusive and irritating way, VAR almost enhanced the experience of this one as we all pored over slow-motion replay after still image after slow-motion replay as 10 seconds of madcap action gets six minutes of attention while Gary Neville changes his mind hither and thither and generally has the absolute time of his life, briefly forgetting you can’t play someone onside with your hand here, losing faith in his own eyes there. But it all became just too much.
This was a curious one in that nothing that VAR did was wrong or even really particularly controversial. Udogie and/or Romero could both have seen red before they did, Reece James could have been in bigger trouble at the end of the first half, but none of those were clear-cut errors. All the offside decisions given were correct – the idea that Jackson wasn’t interfering with play when Moises Caicedo’s goalbound shot went through his legs clearly a non-starter. The Chelsea penalty was correct and the Romero red card was correct. But my word it all took an absolute age.
We were willing Eric Dier’s apparent equaliser to be given because Spurs making it 2-2 at that point thanks to a brilliant goal from Eric Dier was among the funniest of all possible scenarios and ultimately that is really what should matter most: how funny would it be to give or disallow this goal? But under the mundane laws we are currently saddled with it was very clearly and very obviously offside. And yet it took an age for the decision to come. It wasn’t all that close, but the VAR room was clearly by this point swept up in the general madness of the game and operating in absolute dread fear of making a mistake.
That’s fine, we’d all rather decisions took a little while and were correct than any repeat of what happened in the Liverpool game, but this was all in danger of getting a bit silly. And on a serious note there are questions to ask about what these lengthy delays mean for players. We can’t say for sure that a six-minute VAR delay had anything to do with van de Ven’s hamstring going pop, but it can’t have helped.
14. Postecoglou will get a lot of praise for not picking a fight with the officials after this. We’re 50-50 on this one. It is undoubtedly good and refreshing to hear a manager avoid the temptation – and in this case some pretty obviously leading questions – to blame the officials or VAR for how his side came unstuck. The behaviour in recent weeks of Liverpool and Arsenal in seeking to further undermine officials, situations in which ludicrously pompous official club statements have doubled-down on their managers’ complaints is massively unhelpful and has achieved nothing other than to legitimise and embolden conspiracy theorists and other assorted online cranks. Klopp and Liverpool at least over-reacted to an objectively legitimate grievance; Arteta and Arsenal’s response to subjective and borderline calls at the weekend has been an embarrassment.
Given those conditions, Postecoglou’s refusal to further fan the flames is undeniably welcome. But really what could he have said? Decisions didn’t go against him here. Not decisions by the officials anyway. We remain huge fans of the big Aussie, but surely we can’t already be at the stage of Officials Discourse where not talking self-serving over-the-top diversionary bollocks is praiseworthy in and of itself, even if you do pepper your fair-minded observations with liberal use of the word mate and even on this occasion a solid Simpsons reference?
15. We’ll end with two brief random thoughts from the evening. First, it is not yet even 450 days since the Antonio Conte-Thomas Tuchel handshakegate game. How on earth is that not at least three or four years ago now?
16. And at the end of perhaps the purest hit of Barclays on record, we mainly just find ourselves feeling a bit sorry for Brennan Johnson.
