Tottenham earning a point after successive defeats may not have ended relegation fears but shows all is not lost yet
At last, amid all the gloom, a sliver of positive news for Tottenham. On a day when their injury crisis reached yet greater heights, they met an out-of-sorts Liverpool resting players for Wednesday’s Champions League tie against Galatasaray. The result was a game of very high squad numbers that for long sections had the feel of an early round of the Carabao Cup, both in intensity and quality. And that is not the league, which from a Spurs point of view makes it a much less terrifying prospect.
The point certainly doesn’t suddenly end Tottenham’s relegation fears, but it does end a run of six successive defeats – and that is not nothing. Igor Tudor has his first point as Spurs manager and they are one game closer to the end of the season and still not in the relegation zone. But Spurs will not find many opponents quite so accommodating as Liverpool. This was a weirdly ragged game, somehow littered with chances but lacking much in the way of coherence or ordered creativity, a mess that could have gone either way. And Liverpool will wonder how on earth, having gone ahead against this Tottenham, they failed to win.
And that perhaps is the biggest positive of all for Spurs. They had their familiar wobble after conceding, but got away with it. They had a period of bleak directionlessness just after half-time, and but dragged themselves from the slough and might even have won it at the end. Richarlison is not the most universally popular of players but he had a lot to do with it; although he missed chances, he kept coming back, kept driving and, in the end, got the vital goal with a calm finish – although only after some inexplicably dreadful Liverpool defending.
Six minutes into the second half, Jeremie Frimpong broke down the Liverpool right. He could have played an early ball into Cody Gakpo, but opted to delay. When he finally crossed, the ball bypassed a clutch of players at the near post, falling for Rio Ngumoha at the back of the box. As Souza, bafflingly far away, hastened back, Ngumoha flashed his shot just wide. In the technical area, Tudor’s arms flew up, incandescently cruciform. Then disgust dawned and his arms dropped. He tried to raise them again, but the energy was gone. He gave it a third go, got up to about half-past four and half-past seven and then gave up again, turning away and shaking his head. Everything about his body language at that point radiated disbelieving futility.
But that was the low point. There was significant improvement after Xavi Simons and Randal Kolo Muani had come on. A team that had collapsed against Arsenal and Crystal Palace found a resolve. And given just how bad things had looked, that’s significant.
Spurs are in one of those spells when, just when it seems it’s impossible for things to get worse, they get worse. The injury-list was farcically long even before Cristian Romero and João Palhinha ran into each other, sustaining mutual concussion, then Yves Bissouma was ruled out with muscular problems and Conor Gallagher developed a fever.
This was a game for which Tudor had to scrabble around to get anything approaching a bench – have you looked in the bottom drawer? Could there be a centre-back down the back of the sofa? Might next door have a spare midfielder you could borrow? He ended up with three 19 year olds who were yet to play a senior game for the club, two goalkeepers plus Simons and Kolo Muani.
Picking Antonin Kinsky against Atlético unleashed a whole series of problems. It’s not just that his two early errors have almost certainly put Spurs out of the tie, or the long-term ramifications for the Czech goalkeeper being substituted after 17 minutes, it’s that the decision exposed how little Tudor rates Guglielmo Vicario. The Italian has been far from secure this season, his kicking getting worse as Spurs’ form has deteriorated. But being left out on Tuesday can’t have helped his confidence and he was at fault for the Liverpool opener, slow to move his feet to get across to Dominik Szoboszlai’s free-kick.
He did, though, then make a fine low save from Gakpo – and that was Spurs all over: there was much that was poor, there were mistakes and moments when conviction seemed lacking, but they did not capitulate. In the end the draw probably matters less for the point than for the evidence that they are still fighting. Tudor greeted the final whistle with a weary punch of the air.
The point should at least see him through to the international break, but the game against Nottingham Forest next Sunday will be very different. The corner has yet not been turned, far from it, but at least there is a sense that Tottenham are fighting to get off the despondency highway.
