Men behind the ball and time-wasting – Spurs will have to get used to being good again

Tottenham Hotspur, welcome back to being good.

For 97 minutes, this was one of those infuriating games against a team set up to defend and frustrate, and doing so to good effect.

It is what most Premier League sides do against its best teams — and with 10 points from the first four games of the season going into this one, that’s what Spurs currently are. The question is how you cope with that challenge, and up until that point at around 5pm on Saturday, it was one they had not overcome.

They had played well enough and had created enough to be ahead, but a goal remained elusive against a dogged Sheffield United side. Then, up popped Richarlison, off the bench, to equalise in the 98th minute and provide the assist for Dejan Kulusevski’s winner in the 100th.

It was the latest a team had been trailing in a Premier League game and gone on to win — beating their own record from the 3-2 win at Leicester in January last year. A 1-0 loss had somehow become a 2-1 victory, thanks to someone who had spoken so bravely earlier in the week about the challenges he’s been facing.

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If Spurs keep this up — the win took them into second place off the back of their best start through five games since 1965-66 — they will have plenty more games this season like Saturday’s. Not exactly like it, let’s not get used to 100th-minute winners every week, but ones that follow the pattern of teams respecting how dangerous they are going forward and doing everything in their power to try and break their rhythm.

Something similar happened back when Mauricio Pochettino’s team were emerging as a front-footed attacking force.

Here, Sheffield United did everything in their power to frustrate their hosts, combining well-organised defending with constant time-wasting (hence what ended up being 16 minutes of added-on time at the end of the second half; the first half also had an an extra four) and attempts to wind up the opposition, particularly James Maddison.

Tottenham were coming off scoring five goals in their previous game away to Burnley two weeks, and two in each of the three before that, so it made sense for a side with one point from their first four matches back in the top flight to be focused on somehow finding a way to stop them.

In some ways, it has ever been thus, with teams down at the bottom of the Premier League table setting up very defensively against the bigger ones. But not quite to this extent, and given how dangerous Spurs look, you’d expect the majority of their opponents will take a similar approach this season.

And so while jaunts in the sun like that one at Turf Moor are a lot more fun, the reality is there are going to be a lot more games like this, where all the teams they face are really focused on is spoiling Tottenham’s attacking ambitions. Even from the small sample size that this season gives us, you can see how much more of the ball Spurs now have compared to last campaign.

Spurs are increasingly the protagonist

Season

Average possession

PL rank

23-24

61.2

5th

22-23

49.8

9th

How well Tottenham do in this kind of match could well decide just how good a season it is for them.

As Saturday showed, there are a few factors that are crucial in this type of scenario. One is staying patient, which they did well, even after falling behind in the 73rd minute. Their new head coach Ange Postecoglou certainly remained circumspect, not making any substitutions for another seven minutes, which he admitted was partly influenced by being confident there would be around 10 minutes of stoppage time.

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Then it comes down to fitness and how good your bench is.

In the first area, as The Athletic reported this week, there is pride internally at how good Spurs running data has been in the first few weeks under Postecoglou.

Chief among the players putting in the hard yards is Kulusevski, who ahead of this game had covered more distance than any other player in the Premier League. And it was the Swede who popped up with their winner in the 10th minute of added time, after the similarly indefatigable Destiny Udogie had won the ball back high up the pitch.

As for the strength of the substitute options, debutant Brennan Johnson enjoyed a promising 26 minutes (16 of which were in added time) which included a disallowed goal, while Richarlison contributed his goal and an assist and Ivan Perisic swung in the corner for the Brazilian’s equaliser. Postecoglou was also able to freshen things up further with the introductions of Emerson Royal and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg in stoppage time, and the latter and Perisic were involved in the move for the winner, too.

Spurs substitutes making a difference has already happened a few times this season — the 2-0 win at Bournemouth, for instance. Postecoglou called it “a consistent theme” after the game.

He also reflected on how well his players dealt with the challenge of trying to break down a low-block opponent.

“It was a real frustrating game, with a lot of stoppages and dead time,” Postecoglou said. “Sometimes we didn’t deal with it well, talking to the referee in unnecessary moments instead of getting on with the game.

“It would have been easy for our supporters to get frustrated but I do think our supporters, even when things weren’t going to script today and we were 1-0 down, they can see the team trying to play the kind of football they want to see and I think that helps. They want to see aggression when we have the ball and aggression when we don’t have the ball. I think they’ve bought into that because they can see that’s what the players are trying to do.

“In this early phase (under a new manager) it’s crucial, because that hopefully fast-tracks our development as a football club. There’s no doubt that the players got energy from the supporters today.”

The supporters certainly stayed with the team, and they’ll likely have to be patient on a few more occasions over the coming months.

With endings like Saturday’s and the general buzz about the Tottenham team at the moment, that really won’t feel like much of a hardship.

That’s just what it’s like being good again.

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(Top photo: Stephen Pond/Getty Images)