Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but Tottenham Hotspur are inconsistent this season. It’s become something of an annual tradition, like the Trooping of the Colour or the Grand National. Every summer, Spurs will have a reasonably good transfer window. Early in the season, the team will pick up some good results against top-quality teams. Expectations will rise among the fanbase, and people will begin to talk about the possibility of Spurs finally challenging for silverware – a cup, at least, even if they’re not quite at the required level to be challenging for the Premier League.
Almost as soon as the hope stage sets in, gravity and reality re-assert themselves, and it all comes crashing down for Spurs. They get inexplicably bad results against inferior teams. Players turn in performances that are miles away from their best. Without any rhyme or reason, the season falls apart, and Spurs are also-rans by Christmas. Everybody knows this pattern by now. There’s even a term for it; it’s called “being Spursy.” It famously drove Antonio Conte to the verge of madness a couple of years ago. It ended with the Italian coach leaving mid-season. Will the same thing happen to Ange Postecoglu now?
The Postecoglu Problem
It’s hard not to like Ange Postecoglu, Tottenham’s affable Australian coach. He has a long track record of proving people wrong. When he took the Celtic job a few years ago, Rangers fans were delighted. Nobody in Scotland (or England, for that matter) had ever heard of Big Ange, and so he was expected to be a disaster. Instead, he took Celtic to new heights, fixing many of the problems that had been left by the sudden departure of Brendan Rogers and the subsequent mediocrity of Neil Lennon. Still, though, when Tottenham came in for him, there was a feeling that he’d struggle to adapt to life in the Premier League. He didn’t.
By the standards of recent years, the 2023/2024 season was OK for Tottenham Hotspur. It wasn’t spectacular, but it certainly wasn’t a disaster, and that was the objective. After the drama of Conte’s reign, a season of stability was exactly what Tottenham needed – and that’s what Ange Postecoglu gave them. Sure, they looked a little frail defensively at times, but the new coach delivered on his promise to make Spurs a more attacking, exciting side to watch. They can still be an exciting side to watch now, but probably not for their own fans. The attacking elements of their game sometimes fail to spark, and their defence has deteriorated to the point where they’re capable of losing at home to Ipswich Town.
Hitting the Skids
Make no mistake – losing to Ipswich at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is the kind of result that would have got Spurs managers fired in the past. It was the first win of the season at the eleventh attempt for the Tractor Boys and their first in the Premier League since 2002. That’s bad enough, but for Spurs it was a third loss in six games. It’s a run of form that’s seen the team drop to 10th in the Premier League table, with the caveat that the league is especially tight this year, and they remain just three points off fourth place. That might be one of the factors that’s still keeping Postecoglu in a job.
The other factor that goes in the Aussie’s favour is that Spurs aren’t drawing the games that they aren’t losing – they’re winning them. They may have lost three of their last six games, but they’ve also won the other three. When Spurs are good, they’re very, very good. When they’re bad, they’re awful. This is a team capable of beating anybody, but it’s also a team capable of losing to anybody. That, in a nutshell, is the Tottenham Hotspur problem, and that’s the issue that the club’s notoriously trigger-happy chairman, Daniel Levy, has been reflecting on over this international break.
To Sack or not to Sack?
Levy, as we’ve already noted above, would have fired other Spurs managers by now. Losing at home to Ipswich would have been seen as a red line. It’s possible that he’s learned from his mistakes in the past, but it’s just as possible that he’s looked at the lay of the land and concluded that there isn’t a better coach available right now to replace the one he already has. There’s also the matter of Postecoglu’s trophy promise to consider. Ange, in his own words, always wins a trophy in his second season. Spurs won’t win the league, but they could still win the League Cup, the FA Cup, or the Europa League. After so many years without a trophy, that would be seen as progress by the majority of the fanbase, no matter how bad performances get in the league.
For Levy, though, will that be enough? Erik Ten Hag won the League Cup in his first season at Manchester United and the FA Cup in his second, and that wasn’t enough to save him from the sack after an awful start to his third season. The game has changed, and the FA Cup and League Cup are now seen as lower-hanging fruit than finishing in the top four of the Premier League and qualifying for the following season’s Champions League. Traditionalists might not like it, but it’s true. Ten Hag, ironically, might be someone that Levy could look to as a replacement for Postecoglu if he decides to act. Levy is a gambler. We know this. He’s proven it plenty of times over the years, and he’s someone who’s happy to spin the reels if he thinks he’s got a shot at making a return on his gamble. For real-world gambling, there are resources like Sister Sites new casinos to look at before you make such a decision. They’ll tell you what the odds are, how one casino compares to another, and how likely you are to see a positive result. For Daniel Levy and Spurs, there’s no sister site resource website to check, and no casino guide available. Now, in what feels like the tightest and most volatile Premier League season in years, the stakes are higher than ever. Leave Postecoglu in plac
