Spurs have had a lot of different managers with a lot of different approaches. But the endgame always has the same feel.
A growing, gnawing, nagging sense that whatever talent you know or believe yourself to possess as a coach, you are not going to be able to stop Spurs being Spurs. Eventually there comes a game that crystallises all those doubts and ends the debate. Some managers come to this conclusion slowly and sadly, some take a more Antonio Conte route, but they all get there in the end.
It really feels like we’re there with Postecoglou now. Spurs haven’t just been terrible since the ridiculousness of the Man City game – although they have been that – they’ve been predictably terrible.
Everyone inside and outside Tottenham knew this would happen. Absolutely not one person with any experience of them at all watched Spurs utterly dismantle the defending champions and thought to themselves it might be the start of something rather than just their latest bit of Spursy pantomime. The 4-0 at City was never the punchline, only ever the set-up.
Which is also why the “At least it’s exciting!” defence doesn’t really wash. Because it isn’t exciting, not really, not if you know it cannot lead anywhere. It was exciting at the start of last season precisely because we couldn’t 100 per cent know for sure that Angeball wasn’t the one chance in 14000605 for Spurs to actually win something. Now, of course, we all know better.
They were bad against Fulham but burgled a point. They absolutely stunk the place out here. When things come to the end for a Spurs manager, it’s usually on the back of precisely this kind of non-performance. A game where they are out-thought mentally and bullied relentlessly physically. We’re sure there must have been a 50-50 ball that emerged Spurs’ way at some point during this game, it’s just that we can’t remember it at this time.
You can’t say for sure that the players aren’t trying but it also doesn’t really matter. Whether they were trying or not it’s almost impossible to conjure an image of how it might look any worse.
Spurs have very often been bad this season, but we truly can’t remember it looking quite this disorganised, this shambolic, and most damningly this uninterested.
Angeball has failed, that much is now clear. There is sympathy for the fact he is without some key players at the back, but none for the way he insists that Fraser Forster, Radu Dragusin and Archie Gray should play in precisely the same way as Guglielmo Vicario, Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven.
Sticking to your principles no matter what isn’t noble or visionary; it’s stubborn and stupid. Spurs and Postecoglou threw themselves over that precipice here. At full strength, Spurs have the players to play that way and the positives outweigh the negatives. That is, plainly, not the case when this many changes are required.
What was somehow Bournemouth’s only goal was a genuine disaster for Spurs’ patched-up defence, the excellent Dean Huijsen making a straightforward arcing run to the back post that inexplicably earned him three yards of prime penalty area real estate in which to nod past Forster.
Spurs had actually been okay for the 15 minutes or so before that, but that was the end of any hint of competence from the visitors, who were rattled into oblivion by their own incompetence. If there’s something Spurs should be used to by now, it’s their own incompetence. One of the great bits that it always seems to catch them by surprise. The players, that is. Not the fans. Nothing about this caught them on the hop.
There was the brief threat of a rally early in the second half. Son Heung-Min got the ball in the net but had strayed needlessly offside. But there was simply no wit or purpose to Spurs’ attacking play beyond getting the ball to Dejan Kulusevski and hoping for the best. Their number-one second-half strategy was James Maddison whipping corners into the air in the hope the blustery wind might blow them into the net. It’s the sort of thing that might have a decent chance of working against Spurs, but not really against anyone else.
Whatever sympathy may exist with regards to the reduced numbers at the back doesn’t apply to the frontline either. With Kulusevski and Dominic Solanke – who took classy touches to a whole new level with an entire muted performance at his former club – restored Spurs were at full-strength going forward.
This was a night to suck the air right out of a football club. Just a blank empty space where the performance should be. Where it’s not clear whether or not the players even care, and you can’t even decide which option is the more damning anyway.
As with so many men before him, Postecoglou is not the cause of Tottenham’s ennui. It’s not his fault this is a club going nowhere. But never has it looked more stark than tonight that he is not the solution either.
It’s almost impossible to know who might be. Spurs could do worse than consider the man in the opposition dugout here; it would be an appointment to the one time they nearly got it right with Mauricio Pochettino anyway: a foreign coach with clear and interesting ideas making his way up in the game.
They’ve tried elite winners. They’ve tried leftfield Australians who have 15 different intonations of the word mate, able with subtle alterations to make it mean everything from, well, ‘mate’ to ‘c*nt’. They’ve tried desperately appointing Nuno Espirito Santo because literally every other human on earth has said no.
What they try next probably won’t work out either. But tonight was a night that sharpened the mind and made it clear that we’ll find out pretty soon.
Postecoglou is on borrowed time after a game that should have had a far more harrowing final score. The last half-hour in which Spurs were, in theory, chasing an equaliser, was instead an exercise in just how many chances Bournemouth could waste to settle it. The final tally was 23 attempts for the home side – their Premier League high for the season – and a lot of them were very, very presentable.
Profligacy, offside flags and Forster’s tree-trunk limbs kept the scoreline respectable, but the performance could not be saved. It seems absurd that a manager can look this cooked less than a fortnight after a 4-0 win at the defending champions, but Spurs are absurd. Always and forever, for better or usually worse.
It was Chelsea’s visit to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium last November that first popped the Angeball bubble. It seems entirely possible and fitting they will return a year and a month later to land the fatal blow.
