1. If Sissoko Is Our Man of the Match, Something Is Not Quite Right
It has come to this. Moussa Sissoko was our star performer, seemingly the only man in lilywhite who recognised throughout the importance of the game. Rather than limit himself to his usual, highly effective but sensibly contained game of providing monstrous defensive cover and occasional forward runs as a supporting cast member, yesterday the notion struck him that if he did not seize the game by the scruff of the neck then nobody else jolly well would.
Consequently we were treated to the unlikely sight of Sissoko being the fountain from which most of our creative urgency sprang. Eriksen was either too well shackled or just too plain bored to get involved, and the option of feeding Rose an early ball and letting him set off at a gallop was oddly overlooked. The default seemed to be the usual turgid wealth of ineffective short passes, punctuated by some aimless long ones.
Sissoko at least had the decency to try righting the many wrongs surrounding him. Adorably, he tried doing his best Dembele impressions to force the issue. Ultimately they tended to amount to little, as he overplayed his hand on just about every occasion, but the effect was at least mildly galvanising to the watching hordes.
Lamela did little once introduced, bar earn his customary yellow card for his customary mistimed lunge; Lucas Moura remained unused throughout; and even Danny Rose was invited to try his luck as a creator from deep in the final fifteen or so, but like Sissoko, got a little carried away by his own high opinion of himself and got it in his head that the best option was to try taking on the entire Arsenal team from deep within his own half. The spirit was willing, the flesh was weak.
2. Eriksen Still Below Par
As alluded to above, part of the problem is that Eriksen remain off-key. Arsenal seemed well drilled in this respect, generally snapping around him, but even when afforded space and time, his act appeared tired and lacklustre.
Which points to a deeper problem within the fold, namely that when Eriksen is misfiring, to whom the heck do we turn for a creative spark? Occasions such as these suggest that Eriksen is the most important component within our DNA (for even when Kane is absent we have a system, of sorts, that enables us to cope). Remove or nullify Eriksen, and the whole delicately-arranged construction starts to come crashing down.
The immediate concern is that the chap is below par; the lingering longer-term worry is that he might not be too much longer of our parish.
3. Sanchez Mistakes
Davinson Sanchez’s progress in the last couple of years has been, if not quite blemish-free, then certainly on the pleasing side of such parabolas. However, he does retain the ability to make a fairly notable pig’s ear of things where none should really exist, and yesterday he threw in a couple of stinkers that, by rights, ought really to have cost us the match.
Having been at fault for Ramsey’s goal, I suppose there are massed throngs who will howl that he ought never to have been penalised for the late penalty as well, but this rather misses the point.
Rather than quibble about the minutiae of how much contact is required to justify the award of a penalty, I have long banged the drum that we would all be in a much happier place if those concerned simply steered well clear, and did not give the referee the option or chance to award a foul. And certainly not in the last minute, when the striker is haring away from goal and towards the byline.
Sanchez is not quite in the Juan Foyth school of Sudden and Massive Defensive Aberrations, but these are not isolated incidents either. With Toby likely to shuffle out the nearest exit come the summer, Sanchez will need to up his game a notch or two.
4. Son’s Diminishing Impact Now That Kane Is Back
One of the more curious findings from the day’s gallivanting was that since Kane has returned, our attack has seemed even more neutered than in those games in which Llorente stood in one single spot for 90 minutes and Sonny whizzed around him.
Kane, naturally enough, has waltzed back into town to receive star billing, diamond slippers and have an army of admirers tripping over themselves to light his cigarettes; all of which makes a strong bucketful of sense, since the chap, as is commonly recognised, is something of a freak of nature.
Nor is Sonny, with his permanent smile and boundless energy, the sort to go around upsetting apple-carts and spitting out dummies. Despite having been rightly showered with plaudits for his various acts of skin-saving over the last month or so, he has simply tried his best to adapt to life as Not Quite The Star Man.
The trouble is, it’s just not quite working at the moment. Kane and Son have resembled a couple of strangers whose paths occasionally and fleetingly cross, but between whom even the most die-hard romantic would struggle to say there were any genuine relationship.
And even this would be excusable if they were separately being nurtured by the rest of the mob, but service to them over the last three games has been poor, whilst opponents have been organised and sat deep. I’m not sure either man has had carved out for them a red-blooded and meaty chance worthy of the name in the last three games.
They sure as heck do not currently resemble a partnership, and nor is there any obvious conduit from midfield towards them. The mind boggles to recollect that just a couple of months ago these two, alongside ERiksen and Dele Alli, were absolutely shredding Everton seemingly at will.
I am certainly not advocating that we simply shunt out Kane, field Llorente and hope that Sonny can be restored to former glories; but sorcery of some type that elevates Kane and Son to the sum of their parts would be pretty dashed handy at this point.
5. Current Form: A Worry
This may prove a controversial opinion amongst the masses, but in the latter stages of the first half I rather fancied we were making a decent enough fist of things. It was hardly exhibition stuff admittedly, but every man in possession at least had an air of urgency, and there was a swiftness to our work.
What a glorious seven or eight minutes it was – Trippier whipped in a couple of crosses; Sonny beavered around the periphery; and in what was possibly the highlight of the past four and a half hours of outfield play, Kane dinked a cute pass into Eriksen. Who promptly missed a sitter.
Prior to that, and indeed throughout most of the second half, there was no discernible improvement in performance levels from the previous couple of mooches.
Now while I’m all for beating around the bush when the situation demands it, this is some pretty darned worrying stuff. Our heroes teeter between toothless and plain uninterested in attack, and have demonstrated themselves to be fairly consistently riddled with mistakes in defence, irrespective of the personnel selected. If ever there were a time for the Brains Trust to earn their weekly envelope, this might well be it
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