Damning De Zerbi stats illustrate Spurs fear and resignation | OneFootball

It’s not entirely his fault, is it?

That’s the first and important thing to say about Roberto De Zerbi. Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan and all that.

Spurs’ is a failure with more fathers than it is possible to count. Some are still at the club. Many are not. Among their number are players, suits and, yes, multiple former managers.

Most notably the two most recent permanent holders of the role. It’s hard to quibble too much about Ange Postecoglou’s decision to put all his eggs in the Europa League basket halfway through the 24/25 season. It was the only logical decision at that point and bore astonishing fruit.

That Europa League success does have something of the monkey’s paw about it, but just stop to imagine how bleak the last 18 months would look if Spurs were nudging towards 20 years without a trophy.

But there are a few things to note about that Postecoglou call. First, that it was an option at all. Okay, that league season hadn’t reached ‘one place above the dropzone’ bad, but it was already a write-off. By the time the Europa League reached the knockout stages, winning that whole competition was already a more realistic proposition than battling back into the top seven of the league.

Second, also obviously, that prioritising the Europa League was good and correct but it didn’t necessarily have to mean completely abandoning the pursuit of Premier League points altogether, injury crisis notwithstanding.

Which leads to point three, did Spurs’ approach to league football in the second half of that season break something fundamental? Defeats stopped mattering. They became normalised. And here we are, over a season later, and while the defeats still matter, that normalised acceptance of them remains.

It then obviously didn’t help that Spurs accidentally hired the most small-time manager a big club has gone for in so, so long to replace daft old Ange in Thomas ‘We Will Lose Football Matches’ Frank.

The rot that set in under Postecoglou was allowed to worsen so much in Frank’s short reign that it easily made the short hop from normalised to normal.

And that’s without even getting into the various catastrophic decisions made at boardroom level, or by the vast assortment of managers of every stripe who preceded that pair, or to excuse the players themselves, old and new, from their own pitiful, error-strewn under-performance.

But it does feel like Spurs’ current mess has to be considered chiefly a failure of management. And right now De Zerbi is not shifting the needle.

And the really interesting thing about this is that last season he decidedly was able to do so. He shifted the needle decisively and (necessarily) quickly, with what was on paper a far worse squad than the expensively assembled collection of players from his own wish-list now at his disposal.

How did he do this? Pragmatism and man-management. De Zerbi’s smartest and most significant decision when he took the job amid the desperate urgency of last spring was to realise he couldn’t perform the complicated surgery Spurs required – not yet, anyway – and that he would have to find a practical route through the maze even if that came at the expense of some of his core principles.

And that’s what he did. He put arms round shoulders. He convinced players who were no longer at all convinced of the fact that they were good at football. He found a messy but just-about-effective-enough and above all else deliverable halfway house between Frank’s passive, pathetic miseryball and his own high-energy game.

He didn’t get everything he wanted in the summer. But he got damn close to it. Closer, certainly, than anyone could have expected when Spurs scraped home in 17th on the back of a fraught 1-0 win over Everton on the final day.

It remains their most recent Premier League victory. They have, and this feels a genuinely insane thing to be able to type, gone backwards.

This version of De Zerbi’s Spurs, with his players and after what was in theory a full pre-season, looks more like the worst of Frank’s team.

What we’re seeing is what Mourinho and Conte’s Spurs teams would have looked like without the twin cheat codes of Harry Kane and Son Heung-min.

How much of it is down to De Zerbi, we won’t know until it all comes out in the wash, but what’s clear from watching Spurs is the fear. De Zerbi himself spoke of fragility, which is also accurate. But we think fear is the better word. Fear and resignation.

Spurs are fragile, but those are the two reasons why they’re fragile. They’re afraid of their own shadows, and once hit with any kind of setback are immediately resigned to their fate. De Zerbi moans about this, but has so far been entirely unable to correct it.

It is so hardwired into Spurs that even the new players have succumbed instantly and entirely to it. Andy Robertson keeping the ball in to set up Villa’s equaliser while Spurs were down to 10 men was a cry for help.

That was an individual brainfart that can exist only in the midst of a collective fog brought about by the fear. Spurs are a self-fulfilling catastrophe.

But that’s for De Zerbi to solve, and he hasn’t scratched the surface of it. All these issues predate him, but none have improved under him. Spurs haven’t won any of the last 48 Premier League games in which they’ve fallen behind, which is ridiculous. But even here the trend is downward.

There are two, related stats about De Zerbi’s Spurs that stagger us and damn him. Spurs have not scored a single equaliser since he took over, and they have not scored a single winner after conceding an equaliser.

This is a team that can only win from the front, but doesn’t know how to get to the front. Any setback is instantly the end, and they know it.

De Zerbi’s biggest problem, then, is that right now this club is one giant never-ending setback.