Forest 3-0 Spurs: Three Tottenham Talking Points

1. The Hangover

I took the liberty of indulging in a rare evening out in the metropolis yesterday, sinking a few in one or two of London’s watering holes, and shaking a leg on the occasional dance-floor, so it was a well-oiled AANP whose head hit the pillow in the wee small hours. As such, Sunday lunchtime did not catch me in my rarest form. The head throbbed, the breathing was deep and the exhalations were quite likely flammable. A gentle, restful afternoon beckoned.

This, however, was all acceptable enough, because I was not due to run out onto a football pitch and play, a princely sum having been thrust into my back-pocket for the privilege, with the expectation of being somewhere near my physical peak for the following 90 minutes. Put another way, I could be excused for moping about the place, the very embodiment of lethargy. For our heroes out on the pitch, no such excuse existed.

And yet. I’m not sure that in the entire match our lot strung together three consecutive passes of any meaning. Apart from Archie Gray’s instinctive turn-and-volley in the first half, I’m not sure we managed a shot on target either. AANP has never really been one for xG, the details of that particular data-point seeming to me often to obscure the actual game as it unfurls before the eyes; but its broad principle I do understand, and for our lot yet again to have failed to hit 0.5 xG in the entire match tells a gloomy tale (and not whilst playing any of Europe’s elite, mind, but a Forest side casting a nervous glance over the shoulder at the relegation spots, dash it).

To a man, our troupe looked thoroughly undercooked, from first whistle to last. As mentioned, the inability to string together more than a couple of accurate passes was bewildering, and every time someone or other did have the bright idea of swooping in to win possession, this minor triumph was fairly instantly sullied by an errant pass following it immediately.

The complete absence of quality throughout was loosely mirrored by a fairly minimal level of energy, all of which left me wondering by the end if the gang in yellow on display this afternoon had also been lurking in those drinking-spots and dance-floors, into the wee small hours last night.

2. Vicario

I prattled on a couple of weeks ago, in the wake of Vicario’s grade A blunder against Fulham, that the chap really needed to keep his head down and his nose clean for the foreseeable, and generally avoid drawing any attention to himself.

It was a sentiment that drifted to mind as I buried the head in the hands circa minute 50, at which time the ball gently rolled around inside the netting, Vicario having immersed himself in quite the pickle when dealing with a misdirected cross.

I didn’t hang around for the post-match niceties – the AANP hangover was bad enough after sitting through that 90-minute performance – so I couldn’t quote back to you the key points made by Master Hudson-Odoi when quizzed, as he presumably would have been, about whether that was intended as a cross or a shot. It seems a pretty safe bet, however, that when the moment arrived, shortly after he had twisted Bentancur’s blood to a level bordering on the inhumane, that on looking up from the left corner of the area, his strategy was to deliver a cross and rely on better-placed chums to do the rest.

Not being a goalkeeper, I’m not really qualified to opine in any real depth as to what specifically Vicario ought to have done, but in a broader sense, several decades of watching and occasionally playing the game has taught me that goalkeepers ought not let crosses drift past them and into the net.

So, wiser minds than mine would presumably be able to lay out the specifics of where Vicario ought to have planted his feet, and how his body-weight ought to have been distributed and so forth – but ultimately, surely, the drill would have been to have prevented ball from entering net. In this he spectacularly failed. While it was probably not the worst error a goalkeeper could ever make – frankly it was not the worst this specific goalkeeper has made in the last month – a goalkeeping error it nevertheless was, and the logbook of such misdeeds is now growing to troubling heft.

If he were in any other position in the pitch, I suspect Vicario would by now have been quietly demoted to the sidelines, with a view to clearing his head and returning a few weeks or months hence, fit and bronzed and ready to give that penalty area a jolly good marshalling.

However, he is not in any other position; he is in the unique position of goalkeeper, and Our Glorious Leader is therefore facing a rather delicate balancing act. The first reserve, young Kinsky, has shown himself to a goalkeeper possessed of various fine qualities, but also never too far away from an out-of-the-blue howler himself. While there is a legitimate question, of quite how bad Vicario has to be before he is dropped, the waters are slightly muddied by the fallibility of the first reserve. No point removing Vicario, I mean, if the chap who replaces him is just as creaky, what?

3. Thomas Frank

Talking of chaps whose performances are creaking like nobody’s business, at what point do we need to start talking about The Big Cheese?

As my Spurs-supporting chum Ian pointed out during the morbid, post-match back-and-forth, Forest are on their third manager of the season, yet the Dyche chap, approximately 5 minutes into the gig, seems to have slapped together a unit with some degree of identity – by which I mean that they have a shape, a playing style, and personnel each of whom seem to know their jobs.

Compare and contrast to our own Glorious L., and identity – as defined above – is rather awkwardly lacking. “A work in progress”, one might generously offer, and if still in generous mood one might also point to the notable absentees amongst the cast list – Messrs Solanke, Kulusevski and Maddison still all apparently chugging paracetamol.

However, to this I emit a rather cheesed off sort of tut, and point out that absent though that lot might be, the next cabs on the rank are hardly unproven youths from the academy, but multi-million pound A-listers such as Kolo Muani, Simons and Kudus (AANP has a moral objection to the classification of Richarlison as an A-lister, so I’ll stick with those three for now). Even making the presumption that Frank is prioritising the defence first, he ought still to be able to get some sort of tune out of that front three.

Irritatingly, our lot seem to have regressed since that Super Cup performance against PSG. The whole thing would drive me potty if watching it had not already sapped every ounce of enthusiasm from my being

 All three goals conceded were today had about them a touch of the unlikely (although I noted a compilation of long-range goals conceded by our lot this season ran to around a dozen, so something in the apparatus clearly isn’t quite working), but what sucked my will to live this afternoon was not so much the goals conceded as the complete absence of creativity or strategy in the other direction.

As ever, the gist seemed to be nothing more nuanced that Go Wide And Hope. Moreover, this GWAH gambit seemed explicitly to exclude use of the left wing, where Kolo Muani is rather mystifyingly square-pegged, leaving all our eggs in the Mohammed Kudus-shaped basket. (I slosh over the details of course – Djed Spence, for example, seemed task with much of the heavy lifting out on the left – but the vague point remains that we were oddly short of ideas beyond going wide and keeping fingers crossed.)

Four months into the season both results and performances are dreadful, and the occasional stroll against a European minnow is doing little to paper what is not so much a crack as a great yawning chasm. Frank needs to buck up his ideas and pronto.