Consolation for City
I guess we had to let them have one game this season, eh?
Well, that's only pertaining to the Men's side of football, where our teams are much more evenly matched (especially with City Rodri-less) than on the Women's side. I hope the players enjoyed the international break because they're about to have a rude welcome back to the Women's Super League courtesy of Bunny Shaw & co.
In this issue: Manchester City recap | Previewing Manchester City | News from around the Lane
It's been a fairly busy news week, so stick around to the end of the issue for a roundup of the latest storylines across Spurs and the wider world of football.
PL Matchday 27 recap | Tottenham 0 - 1 Manchester City
Haaland 12'
I think there's an alternate timeline where Erling Haaland doesn't play in this match and we earn a result, but sadly, we live in reality.
I'm actually not that sad about it in the grand scheme of things; this outcome was never going to have an outsized impact on our season (the league is already gone) and it wasn't an embarrassing performance by any means. My only regret regarding Ange Postecoglou's decision to rotate for this match rather than the previous one against Ipswich Town is that we could have used the morale boost of a win heading into the all-important Europa League away leg against AZ Alkmaar. But I can also see the argument for prioritizing the more winnable match (definitely Ipswich, although this is the weakest City team we've seen in quite some time) and resting players for Europe.
Starting XI:
Mathys Tel got his third league start in a row (somewhat out of necessity) but has yet to score his first PL goal or register an assist.
As alluded to earlier, Postecoglou chose to rest a few starters, including Son Heung-min, Dejan Kulsevski, and Djed Spence. They were replaced in the starting lineup by Wilson Odobert, James Maddison, and Destiny Udogie. Odobert made his first start for Spurs since September 1.
It's also notable that Yves Bissouma was on the bench for the fourth game in a row in all competitions and ended up an unused substitute.
Top three things:
- Fullbacks struggling to get back. Our defense undoubtedly suffers when both Udogie and Pedro Porro are starting on the outside of the back-four, compared to Spence's strong defensive showings in recent games. Jérémy Doku in particular was getting a lot of space to work in on Porro's side, while Udogie's rustiness showed up starkly against an attacker of Savinho's talent. We are perhaps fortunate that neither of them registered an official assist or a goal on the day; Doku did put in the cross for Haaland's goal but it took a deflection from Brennan Johnson.
- Headers need practice. It was a strange quirk of the game that our best chances on goal were headers—not terribly common for Angeball—and also unfortunate since headers aren't really a strength of any of our forwards except for the two who are out injured (Richarlison and Dominic Solanke). That potential equalizer that Pape Sarr sent wide of the net in the dying seconds is going to haunt me.
- Far from free-flowing. Manchester City truly have become quite negative in Rodri's absence, often resorting to tactical fouls to slow the game down and prevent Spurs from getting into a rhythm. Head official Jarred Gillett also takes some culpability, however; somehow City evaded picking up a single yellow card throughout the match, while Spurs were given three. On a side note, Spurs have been pretty well-disciplined overall this season, with the exception of the two #6s.
Although Postecoglou tried to salvage a draw with a quadruple substitution in the 67th minute, City held out for the narrow win.
It's interesting that although we have a near-identical goal spread (53 goals for and 37 against for City to our 53 for and 39 against), we're separated in the PL table by eight teams. It's a bit of a source of pride that we've only suffered blowout losses to Liverpool this season but the numerous marginal results decided by just a single goal are having a tangible effect on our league campaign.
This loss broke a three-game win streak in the PL for Spurs.
SAtP Player of the Match: Guglielmo Vicario
It was another goalkeeping masterclass for Vicario, but as is too often the case this season, it was all for naught.
Notable & quotable:
• This was the second-youngest starting XI ever to feature in Premier League play for Spurs; they had an average age of 23 years and 243 days.
• Ange offered some thoughts on Odobert's first start in months:
I thought he was great. It was important tonight that Wilson, Destiny and Brennan got some minutes. Again, it’s one thing to get guys back from injury, but we have got to get them up to speed as quick as we possibly can. You could see Wilson hasn’t played for a while, but you could also see the quality he has. I think he grew into the game in the second half. I thought he was a big catalyst at the beginning of the second half when he was running at the opposition. He is an exciting player and if we can manage him through this period and get him to a really decent level of fitness, I’m sure he will help us finish the season strong.
• He also remarked on his somewhat controversial decision to rest key starters:
There's no point having a squad, and I can't be sitting here bemoaning not having a squad and then not use it.
Fair enough!
Ange acknowledged that in addition to resting those players, the other rationale for the swaps was to give players returning from injury significant minutes ahead of a crucial stage of the season when they need to be ready. Again, fair enough.
Previewing WSL Matchday 15 — Manchester City
I'm gonna lead with three positives around this fixture:
- If it goes badly, we can just forget about it for a couple of weeks because there isn't another game until March 16.
- It's the last truly difficult game of the season until the penultimate matchday against Chelsea. There's a solid run of winnable fixtures after the FA Cup weekend break on either side of the next international break.
- Since we're already out of both cups, this is the confirmed final time we have to face Bunny Shaw this season.
See? Silver linings.
Otherwise, I do think it's going to be another painful 90 minutes of Spurs Women football. Although Robert Vilahamn will surely be doing the best he can to make a difference and protect his job security, what with two WSL managers getting sacked over the international break: Matt Beard at Liverpool and Laura Kaminski at Crystal Palace. In fact, Beard's last game in charge was a 4-0 loss to City. Yikes!
In that context, limiting the damage to the goal difference and showing some improvement in the attack would count as progress and a base to build on after the weekend off.
We'll have a significant boost from the return of key midfielder Eveliina Summanen—still second in the team for goal contributions in WSL play despite missing several matches with a hamstring injury. Fingers crossed that she's fit enough to start straight away.
And after I lamented the lack of a mercy substitution for Clare Hunt in the previous game against Arsenal, fate has intervened in the form of the WSL rulebook; she's suspended for the City clash due to accumulated yellow cards.
As far as City's squad goes, we're getting a bit of a reprieve with several players out injured (Rebecca Knaak, Laura Coombs, Lauren Hemp, and Alex Greenwood) and the Japan internationals a doubt fitness-wise after a late return to the UK from the SheBelieves Cup.
Still, they have plenty of attacking threats to trouble our easily-troubled backline, including the aforementioned Shaw, Jill Roord, Vivianne Miedema, and new signing Kerolin. As an aside, I just had a moment of confusion seeing her name typed out as "Karolin" on FotMob. God knows they do their best at that app in general, but the lack of attention to detail when it comes to women's football is a constant frustration...
Could we finally see Olivia Holdt make her first start? I won't hold my breath, but it would be an exciting thing to see when the lineup drops. Apparently she scored a goal in a behind-closed-doors friendly with London City Lionesses over the break.
It was a mixed bag for our players on international duty, with Hayley Raso and Matilda Vinberg the most likely to return to club play with improved confidence.
I did find it interesting that when the club put together a list of five reasons why fans should go to the game at Brisbane Road on Sunday, they cited Beth England's status in the Golden Boot race. While she's technically joint-third at the moment, I wouldn't realistically expect her to overcome Bunny Shaw by the end of the season—Shaw has a four-goal lead currently.
I never feel confident predicting a win against City, but hopefully with Summanen back and a few players in goal-scoring/assisting form we can manage a better result than the reverse fixture.
News from around the Lane
• There were quite a few fixture date/time changes across the club, which can be found here and here.
• The club joined the UN-backed Sports for Nature Framework, the first to do so in the Premier League. Though as many outlets have covered in the past, such distinctions can seem more like a greenwashing attempt when juxtaposed with the unasked-for and unnecessary friendly against Newcastle United in Australia at the end of last season.
• Archie Gray received the Men's Young Player of the Year award at the London Football Awards. Harry Kane and Dele were previous winners of the award from Spurs.
There's a nice interview with Sky Sports where he talks about taking advantage of the opportunity to play different positions to learn new aspects of the game.
Ange Postecoglou had high praise for Gray's first season at the club:
He just wants to learn, no task is too much for him, he tackles everything with a real kind of calmness that belies his years. He wants to learn, he wants to get better. We are just very, very fortunate to have him at our football club.
• The Women’s Professional Leagues Ltd, the new company overseeing the Women's Super League and Women's Championship, is considering halting relegation from the WSL and Championship in order to expand the leagues.
Matt Hughes
The proposed changes haven't been approved yet and wouldn't take place until the 2026/27 season at the earliest, but the the clubs from both leagues were summoned for a "strategy summit" today. The Championship could also be renamed to the WSL2 as part of the reforms.
I think it goes without saying that removing relegation—as well as determining a process for which clubs would be promoted into the newly expanded WSL—would be an extremely controversial decision for the nascent WPLL to make.
I have a lot of thoughts on this subject, some of which we inadvertently touched on in the latest N17 Women episode (before this latest, more concrete news update had even come out!) and some of which I will surely be expanding (no pun intended) upon in this weekend's Tottenham Depot podcast. But to make a long story short, I think it's a terrible idea borne of bad intentions.
Robert Vilahamn wasn't as strident in his response during the latest press conference, but he did make his opinion known that expansion in and of itself is a desirable goal, but not at the expense of competition:
I definitely want to have a relegation battle. You need competition up and down in the table.
I'm a big fan of [expanding the league]. 12 teams is too few. Obviously, it would need to be fixed with clubs investing to make sure they compete so the league doesn't become too bad. I'm a very big fan of adding more teams to the league as long as clubs actually invest.
Although the report in The Guardian suggested that the WPLL believes taking away relegation and creating a (perhaps temporarily) closed league would encourage investment, I'm in agreement with Vilahamn that such a belief is naive. Spurs are already putting in the bare minimum of investment in the Women's playing squad in the majority of transfer windows, and it doesn't feel like a coincidence that Daniel Levy is already on record as favoring a closed league.
Sorry to end on a downer note there, but it's good to be vigilant to potential threats to the footballing ecosystem. I just wish we didn't have to keep worrying about so many of them in the Women's game!
Anyway, back to the WSL in a couple of days, ready or not!
COYS
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