It’s hard to pick yourself up from defeat. When you’ve lost everything and you need to carry on fighting meaningless battles just to fulfil your obligations.
That’s the problem facing Spurs just at the minute.
They were dumped out of the FA Cup, experienced heartbreak for their young stars in the Capital One Cup final at Wembley, suffered a narrow defeat at the hands of Fiorentina in the Europa League and now they’re in stuck in a limbo between the mid table teams and the Champions League chasers. They’re trapped in the Europa League no-mans-land – and that’s only if they can overhaul Southampton above them.
But that’s Spurs’ own fault, really. They’ve relied too much on Harry Kane at one end and Hugo Lloris at the other.
Kane’s goals kept Spurs within touching distance of fourth place until their defeat to Manchester United, and Lloris has cemented his place as one of the top goalkeepers in the country.
But despite the doom and gloom of the moment, Spurs have some good things to take from this season.
Kane and Lloris are two, but the emergence of other youngsters like Ryan Mason and Nabil Bentaleb have been others. And although they haven’t been able to turn Spurs into a Champions League team this season, they will surely represent a core of players that Spurs can rely on going forward.
What they need to do now is strengthen around that core. Because they really do need to strengthen.
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They haven’t been good enough this season for a top four finish, and that shows that they need a better squad. Partly this will come from the experience the young players have gained this season, making them better players. And partly this will have to come from summer spending too.
Spurs have scored fewer goals than the teams in the top four, but crucially they’ve conceded a tonne of goals too. They’ve scored more goals than both Liverpool and Southampton, but they’ve conceded more than double what Saints have. Pochettino may have jumped ship, but his new vessel is a much leakier one.
In fact, only the bottom three, Newcastle and Sunderland have conceded more goals than Spurs.
So if summer spending is what’s going to push them to the next level, Spurs should start by spending on defenders. Although their lack of goals in comparison with the top four is worrying to a certain extent, they have a goalscorer in Harry Kane to put away the chances they do create. They also have Christian Eriksen and Erik Lamela, who have been poor this season – or at least in the second half of the season. But they are two players who have lots of quality on their best days. The problem is, they don’t have that many best days.
They are two players who have been in the Premier League for two seasons now, so they should be acclimatised. They have no excuses for poor performances, really. But Pochettino might give them another season to find form. Eriksen has looked dangerous in fits and starts, and Lamela looked in the first few games of this season like he was going to show English football why he cost so much money and came with such fanfare. But he fizzled out surprisingly quickly. Since the turn of the year, the pair have chipped in with a miserly two goals and one assist in the league between them.
They’re two players who can provide goals and assists if they’re on form, and clearly they haven’t been this season. But if Pochettino can get them firing next season, the squad will be strengthened immeasurably. It would be like having two new signings.
So perhaps Pochettino can afford to give his attack another year to prove their worth to him, but he doesn’t have that luxury with the defence. They’ve conceded too many goals and that’s why they are where they are.
This season is dead for Spurs, but they need to seriously look at the squad and assess the weak points, and that surely has to mean bringing in a new defender.
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