Top 10 issues De Zerbi and Tottenham must instantly address to try and avoid calamity | OneFootball

Spurs have made their second desperate last-ditch managerial gamble of the season.

In a hilarious and adorable attempt at showing hints of permanence and long-term thinking, they are actually going to appoint a permanent manager in a season when they’ve already just had to get rid of an interim one.

That manager is going to be Roberto De Zerbi. It’s going to be… interesting.

The long-term problems of chucking an eight-figure salary and five-year deal at a volatile manager who has blown up within two years at every club he’s been at – most of those clubs being less intrinsically ridiculous ones than Spurs – are obvious enough.

Even if he does keep Spurs up, the idea that there would at long last be some sense of long-term security and permanence at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium appears laughable. Even in the very best version of how the remainder of this season plays out, we are still surely no more than 12 months away from calls for Mauricio Pochettino’s return again.

But the very best version of how the remainder of this season plays out is also not the likeliest version of how the remainder of this season plays out.

Spurs do appear determined to pile up further long-term footballing and financial problems with this appointment, but those are concerns for quite literally another day.

Here are 10 immediate – and in some cases entirely unsolvable – problems Spurs and De Zerbi now face. TL;DR – those problems are De Zerbi, his current players, and one former one.

Mason Greenwood

This was inevitably coming. From the moment De Zerbi left Brighton it’s felt certain he would one day be back in Our League. And from the moment he started praising Mason Greenwood as a ‘good guy’ who’d paid a ‘heavy price’ and suggesting that doing good football could absolve everything anyone had ever done, it was thus inevitable that De Zerbi’s prophesied return to the Premier League would bring Greenwood back to the Premier League.

Not literally. Not even Spurs are that f**king mental. But his name is back in Premier League conversation by virtue of being so indelibly linked with De Zerbi for the role the former Marseille manager has played in Greenwood’s ‘rehabilitation’. Which has consisted of showing zero remorse or growth but scoring several goals.

We suppose if it was as inevitable as it’s always felt, then grimly this might be the least bad way for it to happen. De Zerbi was going to rock up somewhere in the Premier League with all his Greenwood baggage, but at least this way it’s with a club that might well f**k off in seven games’ time.

Explaining himself

Nevertheless, one of the very first things De Zerbi will have to do as Spurs manager is attempt to explain himself. Whatever your views on Greenwood, you must at least acknowledge the divisiveness of the situation. It isn’t just utter woke nonsense. Multiple Spurs fan groups have expressed genuine dismay at this appointment and it is no idle concern.

You can call it ‘virtue signalling’ and not care, but it doesn’t make it all magically disappear. De Zerbi will be asked about it the first time he speaks as Spurs manager, and his answer will have to be spectacularly good and unbelievably convincing to satisfy anyone at all.

Admittedly, we’re not quite sure exactly what he could say or how he could say it that could be both good and convincing given all the other crass and unpleasant things he’s said on the subject in recent years, but that is also kind of his fault and kind of the point.

Togetherness

And, to reiterate, the crucial thing with that is that it matters whether you think it should or not.

It’s obviously unscientific, but one prominent Spurs fan’s yes-or-no X poll on De Zerbi produced the obvious split decision right down to achieving the exact cursed ratio of 48:52 at one point.

More significant even than the split result were the split replies. Again, social media isn’t real life but the replies are an almost perfect combination of “Who are these f**king idiots saying no?” and “Who are these f**king idiots saying yes?” with the occasional “I am now numb to Spurs bullsh*t and have checked out” ballot-spoilers who are, in truth, probably the only sane ones among us.

At a time when Spurs are in desperate need of unity and clarity of purpose they really might have now stumbled into appointing – at eye-watering cost – just about the most divisive and baggage-heavy manager possible.

Firefighter?

It’s not even like all those opposing De Zerbi’s appointment were consumed by moral concerns, either. There are clear footballing issues with this appointment at this time.

While it was a relief to have it confirmed by the estimable Football Cliches that De Zerbi does at least meet the minimum height requirements to be a for-real firefighter, his credentials as a footballing one remain severely open to question.

Spurs have just got rid of a manager who took one point from his five Premier League games. Igor Tudor leaves English football – and our hunch is that unlike De Zerbi he won’t return – as one of the worst Premier League managers ever.

Yet De Zerbi took just one more point from his first five games at Brighton than Tudor did in his first five games at Spurs. They even both had a chaotic draw at Anfield.

Of course coming into Brighton in September and Spurs in late March are not the same situation. Not even close. But only because this one is much, much worse. De Zerbi took two points from his first five games at a club that had just taken 13 from their first six games of the season.

Tottenham’s last 13 points have taken them nearly five months and 21 games to achieve.

The timeframe

Of course, De Zerbi did then start getting a very decent tune out of that talented Brighton squad. A total of 47 points from the remaining 27 games of that season after De Zerbi’s sticky start propelled Brighton all the way to sixth place and European football by the end of May.

So the question here becomes whether De Zerbi is older and wiser enough to condense that bedding-in period. When he took over at Marseille with a pre-season, all was well. He won four of his first five Ligue 1 games. If he can do that at Spurs, then an awful lot of other things will be forgiven by an awful lot of currently angry sorts.

But can the mini-pre-season De Zerbi will have between now and a trip to Sunderland next weekend be enough?

Can De Zerbi squeeze what took him five weeks with an in-form and confident Brighton squad into five days with a shellshocked, doom-addled, checked-out Spurs one?

The goalkeeper

Does feel like if you strip away every other ethical or footballing concern, De Zerbi’s chances of short-term success at Spurs rest massively on this hugely problematic position.

It’s no secret that De Zerbi’s preferred tactics in possession involve building up short from the back, drawing the opposition on to them and then playing through or round them.

This does generally require a goalkeeper who has enormous confidence as well as the faith and confidence of those around them. Spurs have Guglielmo Vicario and Antonin Kinsky.

One has been a liability all season, with the news of the injury he has battled through for months before surgery last week offering belated mitigation. The other infamously had to be hauled off for his own good 16 minutes into his Champions League debut earlier this month.

Based on the four-week timeframe suggested when Spurs confirmed Vicario’s issue, Kinsky will have to play the Sunderland game at the very least. It will be fascinating – again, quite possibly grimly so – to see quite how De Zerbi goes about it, to see quite how De Zerbi Spurs will look in that game having spent much of the season under Frank pointedly Going Long as a direct response and reaction to some of the wilder madnesses of the Postecoglou Era.

The ball receivers

But it’s not just the goalkeeper. De Zerbiball is one that places a high level of responsibility on the centre-backs and deep-lying midfielders to receive the ball confidently in tight spaces and make clear-headed decisions about where and how to proceed next.

Spurs do have players with the technical ability for this. At their best, Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven are among the more adept ball-playing defenders around. In recent times they have both been a long, long way from their best.

Romero’s infamous impetuous tendencies have never been more to the fore than in his first season as club captain, while Van de Ven has come to personify more than any other player the checked-out nature of this squad.

It does feel like Spurs’ hopes of salvation rest heavily on how the goalkeeper(s) and their two star centre-backs respond to and cope with De Zerbi’s approach.

Gray and ?

The deep-set double midfield pivot brings some happier news, at least. One of those two spots is easily addressed. It’s Archie Gray, a man who only recently turned 20 and the one beacon of light in the recent gloom upon which all hopes are placed.

Spurs fans would be advised to dwell on that rare piece of good news because, as per, the kicker arrives instantly. Because, alas and alack, there is only one Archie Gray and Spurs require two Archie Grays. At a minimum, really.

Who partners Gray in midfield is another vital issue for De Zerbi to address, and another one that appears to have no obvious ideal solution. The soon-to-return Rodrigo Bentancur has the requisite ball skills but not the energy. Pape Sarr the opposite. Joao Palhinha wouldn’t appear ideally suited to a De Zerbi midfield but he did make it work with Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg.

Lucas Bergvall is the high-risk, high-reward option. He has struggled to deliver upon the promise shown last season. Partly that can be put down to the non-linear nature of the progress made by young players. Partly it can be put down to injuries. But it can also in large part be put down to him being woefully misidentified by Frank as a number 10 rather than a player whose best work is done from much, much deeper.

He was rusty and out of sorts when introduced so calamitously off the bench against Nottingham Forest in Tudor’s final game, but it could be one area of the pitch where De Zerbi could be handsomely rewarded for early bravery.

The high press and playmaker

One thing Spurs did do conspicuously better under Tudor than Frank was run. They weren’t a better football team, but they were an apparently fitter one, covering significantly more ground per game. Tudor never saw the fruits of his labours there, but De Zerbi could we suppose.

Spurs’ forwards don’t appear ideally suited to a De Zerbi press, but you’d imagine big winners from his arrival will be Richarlison, whose energy is boundless if chaotic and only sometimes usefully channelled, and Mathys Tel who is one of the very few Spurs players this season whose effort at least cannot be called into question.

But more significant than any of it – perhaps more significant than anything apart from how and how successfully De Zerbi instructs his confidence-shorn goalkeepers to play – is that No. 10 position.

It is literally pivotal to any De Zerbi team and it feels like when everything is boiled down it may very well be that De Zerbi and Xavi Simons will either make or break each other at Spurs.

The sheer lack of alternative options does indicate that Xavi will at the very, very least get an extended run – seven games counts as an extended run now, shut up it does – in his actual position under a manager who doesn’t view the idea of having a player in the cheating position as, well, cheating.

The positive spin

We’ll end with some wildly desperate optimism to pierce the gloom. Not for the first time here we find ourselves spinning a positive from the sheer depths of Spurs’ despair. If it goes one way, at least it gets rid of De Zerbi and the Greenwood noise quickly.

But it might be that Spurs’ players are so broken that they prove more swiftly receptive to De Zerbi’s methods than a Brighton team that was already playing well under a manager they liked and respected before he came along.

Spurs have spent the entire year finding rock bottoms that have turned out to in fact be false rock bottoms that have even rockier and even bottomier bottoms beneath them. If there’s one thing Spurs fans have taken from this harrowing experience it’s that it absolutely can still get worse. This could still get worse.

But it could also get better. De Zerbi is a difficult individual with a lot of baggage and there are myriad ways this could go disastrously wrong. He is also the best head coach Spurs have employed this season.

They will play better-looking football than they have at any other time this season. It might even be effective. Maybe.