There’s no match reaction thread today — my fault. I had a miscommunication with Matty, and it was my turn to do it and then I had to make dinner, so… sorry about that.
But it does give me an opportunity to just quickly pivot to an article I already had planned for tonight — my usual “things we learned” article after cup and European matches.
So what did we learn after a come-from-behind last gasp 2-1 League Cup win at mid-table Championship side Coventry City? Some potentially hard truths about this Tottenham team and its depth.
Good win, terrible match
OK, real talk — getting match winning goals from Djed Spence and Brennan Johnson was nice and fun and exciting, but this was a TERRIBLE game of football from Tottenham Hotspur overall. Spurs’ issues with converting possession into attack persisted into this game, only it was even worse than before, with the majority of Spurs’ reserve players looking even more like headless chickens who have no idea what to do with the ball once it gets into the box.
Timo Werner and Wilson Odobert were both pretty awful, and I feel bad saying it because both went out with injuries. In Odobert’s case he looks like he just needs more time to adapt. In Timo’s case, he just looked hapless and without any sense of what to do with the ball once he got it. Pape Sarr buzzed around a lot but didn’t make runs into the box like what we saw last season. The less said about Rodrigo Bentancur, the better.
Even when Ange Postecoglou subbed in his first team players like Son Heung-Min and James Maddison, they weren’t able to convert their xT into meaningful xG… until right at the death. At one point in the second half, Spurs had 73% possession and an xG of 0.10 to go along with a fully deserved 1-0 defecit. That’s simply not good enough.
Only the two late goals prevented this from being the worst Tottenham Hotspur performance I’ve seen since they lost to a Europa Conference League team whose manager was in jail. Don’t get me wrong — I’m glad we won! It was cool, and we now get a chance in the next round to do better and hopefully get to a point where we have a chance to win the competition.
Maybe today was just a bad day at the office. Those happen sometimes. But Tottenham’s problems today sure looked like a continuation of the problems we’ve seen in the first four Premier League matches, and that’s very very troubling.
Spurs desperately need to step away from Fraser Forster
This may sound harsh, but after that match I have zero confidence in Fraser Forster as a backup goalkeeper for Tottenham. He started out the match with a major error that nearly gifted Coventry a goal in the opening few minutes, and while he did make a couple of stops and looked semi-confident on set pieces, he was slow both on his line and off his line, and continued to dive like a felled redwood tree falling over. When Spurs were tied heading into injury time, I expected the match to go to penalties, and Spurs lose — again, like last season against Fulham — because Forster is a liability on PKs.
I don’t know what Brandon Austin has done to earn the ire of Tottenham’s coaching staff, but I did see a lot of him in preseason and he looked at least like a keeper who can do things in goal without making me sweat. If Forster really is Tottenham’s second choice keeper, than we better pray that Guglielmo Vicario never gets injured because we’ll be in real trouble.
Back from the Djed
We all wondered why exactly Djed Spence didn’t start the match today. Because he’s not in the Europa League squad because Postecoglou preferred to include Fraser Forster, we all assumed he’d get the nod here because there are now minimal matches in which he’ll actually get decent minutes, barring an injury to either Pedro Porro or Destiny Udogie. He finally came on as a sub at halftime and while he didn’t have a perfect match he looked pretty decent. Djed was one of the few players out there who looked committed to getting the ball forward and running at Coventry’s defenders, and he was rewarded with Spurs’ first goal (off of a lovely flick from Dejan Kulusevski). I still don’t know if Djed Spence is the real deal or not, but I do feel like he’s earned the chance to play more minutes and I’m not sure why he didn’t tonight.
We’ve given Brennan Johnson a lot of stick on this blog — much of it deserved, unfortunately — but I was very very pleased to see him take and score that winning goal. If nothing else because a) it proved he can be effective as a late match substitute, something which is probably his best role right now, and b) because it is a big thumb in the eye of the idiot Spurs fans who bullied him into deleting his instagram with some absolutely vile abuse. I don’t think BJ has played especially well this season, but he does not deserve the crap that he gets on social media, and I’m very happy that he scored tonight. Hopefully this is the boost of confidence he needs to improve his performances in the league, because if Wilson Odobert is out for any length of time, it’s Johnson who is going to have to pick up that slack.
