Can Tottenham Really Be Title Favourites?
News just in. Several bookmakers now regard Spurs as outright favourites to win the Premier League title. Now there’s a sentence you don’t read every day.
In fact there’s only a certain vintage of Tottenham fan who has the remotest idea what it’s like to process that kind of information. For the rest of us, it feels a bit like riding through town in a rented limo.
Sure the onboard champagne is pleasingly chilled and occasionally folk might peer through the tinted glass to see if there’s some coke-addled superstar hidden away inside. Everything’s fine, apart from that nagging sense that you don’t belong here.
It’s all so… alien.
Making sense of the remarkable numbers is task enough. Not only are Tottenham the top scorers in the League, they also have the best 10 game form, an unsurpassed goal difference of a whopping +28(!) and have conceded the fewest goals by a significant margin. The fewest goals.
Quite the turnaround. Whilst visiting Hityah and thumbing through some old posts from last season, I came across this passage to describe our then current defensive concerns. This isn’t from some far-off era of Paolo Tramezzani and Ramon Vega or Ardiles’ gung-ho, don’t-bother-marking-anyone side of the mid-nineties, this is just over a year ago. When we should’ve know better:
‘Boring inconveniences like ‘keeping it tight at the back’ hasn’t really worked out for us this season— the very existence of the Fazio/Kaboul defensive axis seems to have been forged exclusively for ‘Sh*te Defending’ MOTD
highlights packages.’
It was with a sense of nostalgia that I read that. Harking back to an age when Newcastle’s Rob Lee could literally walk through a Spurs backline and score; Stephen Carr and Clive Wilson parting like trains leaving the station in opposite directions. That’s the Tottenham a generation of fans like myself were brought up on. Not title challenges and airtight defences that only conceded 19 in 27 games. That rubbish.
So where’s the newfound steel come from? Well, for all his faults, Andre Vilas-Boas gradually instilled a never-knowingly-beaten culture in his time in North London. By no means were we what you’d call defensively tight under AVB.
But what we did exhibit at times was a mental toughness. Plenty of times in the 2012-13 season were points rescued from the jaws of defeat, thanks to a combination of supreme fitness— it’s no secret that Villas-Boas was an advocate of double training sessions— and an indomitable spirit. And Gareth Bale.
Mauricio Pochettino has used these foundations and built an empire. This is a team that flat refuses to believe the jig is up. At 1-0 down to Swansea on Sunday afternoon, even as the window of opportunity began to shrink, for the players, the idea that they would somehow lose, seemed unthinkable.
This sense of assuredness filtered through to the fans, too. Where in the past the White Hart Lane crowd might grow tetchy when the result looked to be slipping away, with murmurs and often yells of discontent leaking out onto the pitch: on Sunday there was no such worry.
When Nacer Chadli eventually levelled on the 70th minute, rerouting a speculative drive into the box from Kyle Walker, a wall of noise erupted from the stands. There was little doubt which way the game was heading. With the power shifting, Swansea boss Francesco Guidolin looked ready to cocoon back under his woolly hat and snood and call it a day.
This might prove to be a dangerous observation, but right now, Spurs look unbeatable.
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