Spurs set for relegation after latest nightmare performance against Fulham | OneFootball

This is happening. We are well beyond the ‘wouldn’t it be funny if…’ stage. Spurs are going down.

They are currently without question the worst team in the Premier League and they are running out of time and games to save themselves. The new-manager bounce they might have hoped for from Igor Tudor is already a lost cause after two horrific defeats.

Do not be fooled by the 2-1 scoreline at Fulham. This was not a close football match. Trawling through the archives of Tottenham horror shows, the closest thing this resembled was the infamous humiliation at Newcastle under Tudor lookalike Cristian Stellini. We noted after that game that things could get worse still for Spurs, something that now applies in spades with even wider ramifications.

Fulham didn’t get the goals Newcastle did on that occasion, but they had the same vaguely puzzled look of a team that couldn’t quite believe how easily and entirely they were dominating a game of football against a team theoretically of a similar standard from within the same league.

While for Spurs, there were – as there were three years ago at St James’ Park – just blank looks of confusion and despair. Not one player in the first half appeared to have a clear idea of what he was supposed to be doing, and without exception whatever they were doing was just awful.

Spurs looked, as we’ve grown accustomed to in recent months, all at sea in defence. They barely looked like scoring. And yet somehow the worst part of the performance lay at neither end of the pitch but in the near total absence of anything at all where a midfield was supposed to be.

This was abject stuff. The only saving grace for Spurs is that all the teams around them also lost this weekend. They will not always be so lucky.

The apparent closeness of the scoreline might leave some still doubting the scale of the trouble Spurs are in, but nobody who watched this game can surely think this is a team that can, will or should survive. They are still without a Premier League win in 2026, and putting that right looks further away than ever.

So far, the most tangible impact from Igor Tudor’s arrival appears to have been to nullify Spurs’ threat from set-pieces, which under the unwatchable anti-football of Thomas Frank was at least the one thing they were notably good at.

This was the eighth Premier League game in succession in which Spurs have conceded two goals. It could and should have been a great many more with so many clear chances spurned and Guglielmo Vicario pulling off one particularly spectacular save to deny Emile Smith Rowe.

But more often than not, two is proving plenty because Spurs’ attacking play is just deeply forlorn and entirely pedestrian.

The one brief exception to that tale here brought them, in theory, back into this contest. Mathys Tel, who was to his credit momentarily lively after being introduced as a substitute before being dragged down to the rest of the team’s level, did nicely to set makeshift left-back Archie Gray away down the left side of the penalty area, and he found the ideal cross for Richarlison to nod home.

A goal, of course, that simultaneously raised Spurs hopes while also confirming defeat because Richarlison goals are cursed things. No good can ever come of them.

In accordance with the prophecy, he picked up his customary post-goal booking here for performatively wrestling with Calvin Bassey to get the ball back to the centre-circle.

Always a good one, this: an action that has never in football history had any tangible impact on the speed with which a game restarts and is even more dunderheaded in the multiball era. If you must make a show of taking a ball to the centre-circle to tell everyone you mean business, just go and grab another one.

At least this Richarlison goal counted. One of the cruellest ironies for the Brazilian is that while all his post-goal yellow cards count, so many of his goals are subsequently ruled out. Seems terribly unfair, really.

Spurs wanted Fulham’s early opener ruled out, too. And there will be controversy about it, even if it should not and cannot mask the general awfulness of their performance.

There was a grim inevitability about Spurs conceding a goal which featured a small push in a defender’s back after last week. But two wrongs don’t make a right, and Randal Kolo Muani being on the wrong end of a poor decision last week doesn’t mean Raul Jimenez should be this week.

The second goal combined the best of Fulham with the worst of Spurs. A slick passing move from the home team was rendered only slightly less impressive by the fact it took place less against an actual defence made of humans than against a set of lifesize, humanoid cones, whose cruel creators had cursed them with just enough sentience to look confused and pained by what was happening, but not enough to do anything about it.

Alex Iwobi’s finish was spectacular in any event, of a type we can’t truly say we’ve seen before. It had about it the air of a video-game glitch as the ball came off the inside of his boot with unexpected power and seemingly impossible-to-achieve reverse swing to take it in off the upright.

For once, you could forgive Spurs the confused looks.

Somehow, Spurs contrived to make the whole experience feel worse than the reverse fixture in which they also fell 2-0 behind playing embarrassingly badly against a Harry Wilson-inspired team before ending up with a misleadingly competitive 2-1 defeat.

Having also collected a pair of 4-1 defeats against Arsenal, the tiniest imaginable crumb of comfort for Spurs is that at least a repeat of that pattern would see them collect three points from their next game against Crystal Palace in midweek.

They wouldn’t want to look too much beyond that game for good news from a continuation of such a pattern anyway, and any current omen predicated on a Spurs clean sheet appears in any case the stuff of the most impossible dreams.

For Spurs, this season has become the stuff of nightmares. And they’re only getting worse.