Rockets and Rallies
There were two very satisfied goal-scorers at the club this past weekend. Although Matilda Vinberg had been playing consistently across all three competitions for Spurs Women, she had to wait until Sunday to finally get off the mark with her first goal of the season. Dominic Solanke has had very limited gametime, in contrast, but also looked relieved to finally be back scoring in the Premier League after netting a couple of Champions League goals already on his return from injury. Vinberg scored a rocket to equalize with West Ham United in the first half of the Women's match (Olivia Holdt scored the eventual game-winner, also a worldie of a shot), while Solanke pulled off a likely Puskás award nominee scorpion kick to equalize with Manchester City for Spurs Men.
The problem for the Men's team is that they're still stagnating at 14th in the league table. The individual brilliance of players like Solanke and Cristian Romero has kept the team afloat in the league (the Champions League campaign is a completely different, much happier story), but they're not making much progress as a collective. My opinion on Thomas Frank needing to go hasn't changed, and it's a shame that the efforts of the squad are currently being wasted by his poor tactical planning—until the players seemingly go rogue in the second half of every game and take matters into their own hands.
In this issue: West Ham United recap | Manchester City recap | Transfer talk | News from around the Lane
Today's recaps are going to be chock-full of fun (and a few not-so-fun) facts, and then it's time to wrap up the transfer window activity across the club, including my personal grades for each senior team's transfer window activity. I'll go ahead and warn y'all now that this issue got lengthy, so make sure to open it in a browser for the full experience.
After a free midweek, both teams are back in action this weekend with a trip to Old Trafford for Spurs Men and a London derby at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for Spurs Women.
WSL MD 14 | West Ham United 1 - 2 Tottenham
Martinez 10' | Vinberg 54', Holdt 74'
After Shekiera Martinez's early goal, which came very much against the run of play, I was concerned that we hadn't learned the right lessons from the loss to Liverpool. Two straight games of not taking our chances and giving up goals too easily would have been a tough pill to swallow and a quick deflation of our ambitions for the second half of the season.
Thankfully, something lit a fire under the team at halftime (likely a disgruntled Martin Ho), and they came back out with a point to prove—none more so than Tilly Vinberg. She's had a frustrating season so far, often negating her admirable work rate by making suboptimal decisions in the final third, passing up chances to shoot, and fluffing the ones she has taken. Thankfully, in this situation, she opted to take a low-probability shot from well outside the box and was rewarded with a goal for her audacity.
Olivia Holdt's game-winner was equally bold, albeit from a slightly more central position outside the box. There was still plenty of gametime left after her shot, and I worried that we might regret not putting away a third goal, but West Ham only managed one shot after that point, which Katrina Gorry sent well wide of the net.
The one sour note at the end of the game was Drew Spence's red-card challenge on Riko Ueki. It was a clear high-kick foul with her studs, so she can have no complaints about being sent off. Unfortunately, her three-game suspension means that we will be missing her for several key fixtures, including the first of three matches at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and presumably our FA Cup matchup at London City Lionesses.
I have to say a quick word on Tōko Koga, who would have been my personal pick for Player of the Match. She put in two superb goal-line clearances and generally was always prepared to back up her teammates, so it's a shame no one was able to do so for her when she had a slip-up of her own (literally). That moment probably won't linger in the memory of fans for too long since we went on to win the game, thankfully, but I do think it's fair to point out that the mistake happened so far up the pitch that the rest of the defense should have been able to recover and prevent West Ham from scoring on the counter. Other than that unfortunate error, Koga put in the kind of strong overall performance that we've come to expect from her consistently. She will be missed during the Women's Asian Cup.
We have drawn level with Arsenal on points again in the Women's Super League table, albeit only because their league match was postponed, and are within one point of Chelsea heading into this weekend's derby. Funnily, we sit in 5th place with a goal difference of exactly zero. It's true that we're not scoring nearly as many goals as the teams above us in the top four, but having the mentality to secure narrow results has kept us in the conversation for a Champions League qualification spot—at least for now. It does still sting that we dropped full points last weekend at Liverpool, since we could have gone as high as 2nd this weekend if we'd won that fixture.
Notable & quotable:
• Eveliina Summanen made her 100th appearance for the club in all competitions.
Obviously, I dreamed about it, but I never expected it. So, now, it’s amazing that it has become a reality. I feel I have grown into the league, the team and the club and I love putting on and wearing the Spurs shirt.
• Tōko Koga registered her first assist for the club on Matilda Vinberg's opener.
• Julie Blakstad made her first WSL start for Spurs.
• Olivia Holdt earned her fourth WSL Player of the Match award of the season.
• Drew Spence's red card was the first sending off for the team in any competition this season.
• Hanna Wijk is the only January signing yet to make a WSL appearance.
• Matilda Vinberg expressed excitement about her goal, but also acknowledged the pressure of competing for a spot in the forward line:
When I play on the right side, I think it’s really important that I can go inside and take those shots and take those chances. It was such a nice feeling—such a relief—to score for this club. It’s been a while.
It’s high competition right now in the front four positions, and to stay in the starting XI, it’s really important to be consistent, but also to get those [three] points. Whether that’s a goal or an assist, I think it’s important to show that.
• Martin Ho was pleased with Vinberg and Holdt's wonder goals:
Sometimes you need those moments of brilliance to open up a game, so I’m delighted for both.
...and also praised the resilience of the team as a unit to come back and win the game:
We showed character. You’re 1–0 down and you have 45 minutes to change it, and I asked that of the group. We needed to go out there and wear the shirt with more pride, really put ourselves about physically. If we want to come out of games like this, we must fight when we’re asked to fight. I’m delighted the two goals went in today and the players got what they deserved, especially after last week when we didn’t show enough in the final third.
PL MD 24 | Tottenham 2 - 2 Manchester City
Solanke 53' • 70' | Cherki 11', Semenyo 44'
Our streak of good fortune against Manchester City continues, though we obviously would have preferred a complete comeback to secure a win rather than a draw. Perhaps a team in better health could have finished the job. Alas, that is not the kind of team we have right now.
In a literal sense, we had to do without Cristian Romero in the second half as he was substituted at halftime due to feeling ill. This was probably a situation where he shouldn't have played in the game at all (watch the highlight of the second City goal for evidence of just how little energy he had to give), but time and time again, this manager—and the one before him, to be fair—has gambled with players' health and fitness.
But without our talismanic scorer, recently returned striker Dominic Solanke decided to pick up the slack and produced a brace in dramatic fashion. There was controversy over whether he fouled Marc Guehi in the act of scoring his first goal (plus an offside check by VAR), and then he scored the scrappiest scorpion kick I've ever seen. Once again, there was just as much contact with the ball as with the defender's foot. And let's be honest, most of Solanke's goals since coming back from an injury layoff have been of the scrappy variety, but they all count.
Side note: It's getting quite annoying how often we've had to say "ugh, not him" about an opposition goal-scorer. Antoine Semenyo securing points against us twice over the last month (one point in this game, three for Bournemouth before his transfer) has certainly stung. But regret is just a fact of life in football.
The other big talking points from the game were Xavi Simons putting in an impressive performance, including an assist for Solanke's first goal, and Conor Gallagher getting off the mark with his first goal contribution since joining the club, which was also an assist for Solanke.
There was also a nice reunion with club legend Super Jan Vertonghen.
Nothing really changed with this draw, despite it coming against the 2nd-place team; we remain in 14th in the Premier League table for the fourth week running. We're winless since matchday 18. We've avoided getting dragged closer to the relegation zone, but we're no closer to squeaking into a European qualification spot. It is what it is, but it's still not good enough.
And I maintain my position from last season that it's all well and good to prioritize the only remaining competition where you still have a chance—even if slim—of winning a trophy (the Champions League in this season's case), but we can't withstand several seasons straight of essentially disregarding the league. Not this club. This fanbase cares too much about watching good football to let that attitude slide for long.
I do think the fight in the second half indicated that this was not a game we were throwing, per se, but the continual poor first halves are unacceptable, and also a failure of Thomas Frank's brief (to make the team competitive on all fronts). The board seems content to let this plateauing effect persist for now, but I wonder how much longer that will last, especially with some of the emotionally-charged fixtures we have coming up.
Notable & quotable:
• Radu Drăgușin made his first Premier League start of the season.
• Jun'ai Byfield made his first PL appearance as a late substitute.
• Dominic Solanke scored his first two PL goals of the season.
• Solanke and Xavi Simons were both nominated for the PL Player of the Matchweek, but lost out to Casemiro.
• Randal Kolo Muani has yet to register a goal contribution in the PL.
• We have earned a worse result in every reverse fixture in the second half of the season so far with the exception of one, which was the second loss to Bournemouth.
• Although Micky van de Ven was already considered questionable for selection for this game, two more players were late scratches, with Kevin Danso and Djed Spence excluded from the matchday squad. Danso's situation doesn't sound good, as described by Thomas Frank:
He hyper-extended his big toe when he landed on the foot of an opponent against Frankfurt, that means the ligament snapped in the big toe. It's extremely unlucky, we don't know the length of it but we have an appointment next week where we can clarify that.
• On a happier note, Solanke was as ebullient as I've ever heard him in his post-game comments about his scorpion kick goal:
It's great work from Conor, as soon as he went I thought, "This is my moment." It was a crazy feeling watching it go in. I'm doing a roly-poly as I see it going into the back of the net! It's a very rare goal to score. We don't see many of those go in. Obviously, it's nice to try it, but when it works, it's one in a million. It's definitely one of the best goals I've ever scored. It's a goal that I'm going to watch back a lot for sure.
Transfer talk
The lack of any deadline day signings across the club was far easier to stomach on the Women's side, since significant business had been done early in the window, but felt nothing short of egregious on the Men's side, with the injury crisis taken into context.
Before I recap all of the transfer activity for the two senior teams and share my grade for their respective windows, let's round up the last few transfer moves across the club.
Final January transfer business
Spurs Women
Spurs Women Academy
- Beatrice Cunnison is going on a dual-registration loan to Real Bedford in the National League Southern Premier Division.
Spurs Men Academy
- Aaron Maguire is headed on loan to Hampton & Richmond Borough in the National League South.
- Alfie Dorrigton is going on loan to Salford City in League Two.
- George Abbott is going on loan to Mansfield Town in League One, joining Oliver Irow, who joined them on loan earlier in the window.
- Herbie James departs on a permanent transfer to Cardiff City in League One.
- Roman Egan-Riley departs on a permanent transfer to Burnley in the Premier League.
Grading the windows
I should probably start with the Women's team since the January business was much more satisfactory on that side of the club, but let's rip the band-aid off instead and start with the Men's team.
Note: I used to include contract lengths in this section for reference, but the club never shares that info anymore, and it's not always reported by media outlets. So unfortunately, we can't immediately tell if we'd made a terrible mistake with any of the new signings à la Anna Csiki's four-year contract debacle.
* Second loan denotes a change of loan club for the second half of the season. Academy players are only included if they've made a senior team appearance.
Spurs Men
Ins - Conor Gallagher, Souza
Outs - Brennan Johnson, Kōta Takai (loan), Yang Min-hyeok (second loan), Manor Solomon (second loan), Jamie Donley (second loan), Damola Ajayi (second loan), Alfie Dorrington (second loan), George Abbott (second loan), Dane Scarlett (loan)
Contract extensions - None from the senior team, but Jun'ai Byfield signed his first pro contract and has since gone on to feature twice for the senior side.
I mean, you can see the glaring problem right away just from looking at the rundown of transfers; there were far more outs than ins, even if several of those outgoing loans were for players who were already on the fringe. With the current player availability issues, having a lean squad is not a wise strategy. Of course, it's a bit of a moot point if the manager won't give gametime to young players to begin with.
The other big issue is that neither of the incoming signings has addressed the keenest areas of opportunity in the squad in a meaningful way. Conor Gallagher will likely prove to be a smart signing and is a useful midfielder, but not at the #6 position, where we are weakest and most in need of change—or at least extra reinforcements. We did need another centerback option since our two starters are injury-prone, but Souza is unlikely to get much gametime in his first half-season with the club. There is still a gap in the fullback depth chart, and with Brennan Johnson out the door, our right winger options are thin on the ground thanks to injuries.
Sure, you don't want to see the kind of "panic buys" that saddle us with contracts that are difficult to move on later, but I would not have said no to a panic loan or two, simply from a numbers perspective. We need fit players, period. You can't always make a distinction between quantity over quality, and loans are a useful compromise that we did not utilize this window.
It's also just frustrating to have such a disconnect between the stated intent of the club to invest in the team and the actual dearth of signings in the window. It appears from Johan Lange's transfer window interview that the club believes we have enough players coming back from injury soon to turn things around on the pitch, but I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, I'm unconvinced that there is a coherent strategy on the Men's side under this particular group of sporting directors, recruitment staff, and executive board.
Spurs Men January transfer window grade: D
Spurs Women
Ins - Signe Gaupset, Hanna Wijk, Matilda Nildén, Julie Blakstad, Maika Hamano (loan)
Outs - Ashleigh Neville, Martha Thomas (loan), Kit Graham (loan), Anna Csiki (second loan)
Contract extensions - Drew Spence, Ella Morris, Araya Dennis
Contrast the haphazard, insufficient approach on the Men's side with the fairly clear vision and execution on the Women's side. In Andy Rogers' discussion of the transfer window, he made it clear that the club is carrying out a rebuild of Spurs Women's squad, not just in this window but as part of a larger strategy that started last summer and is already in the planning stages for the upcoming summer window.
The sources for recruitment continue to be a constraint to our ambition, however. Although we broke the Women's team transfer record for the third time this season in signing Norwegian rising talent Signe Gaupset, the rest of our signings were more opportunistic, and all came from the same league, the Damallsvenskan, bar the loan signing of Maika Hamano (which comes with its own downsides, obviously). We cannot limit our potential player pool by relying so heavily on connections in the Scandinavian leagues, especially since the teams we are trying to better compete with are scouting far and wide.
On Hamano, I would have expected to see a little more of her already since she's ineligible to play against her parent club this weekend and will miss several games during the Asian Cup. Hopefully we see the remainder of her loan spell utilized wisely. Wijk has also gotten off to a slow start, with even less game time than Hamano so far.
The outgoings were where we really felt the painful part of the old "painful rebuild" saying. It was difficult to say goodbye to players who have all made big impacts on the club at different stages of their Spurs careers (or, in Ash Neville's case, consistently season upon season). There's still a chance that Martha Thomas and/or Kit Graham could return to the fold next season, but for Graham, it's even less likely with her contract situation. Football isn't fair, and it's definitely not fair that she had multiple seasons curtailed by ACL injuries.
But with the exception of Neville, whom I still think was an important player for us (and not just because we've seen Josefine Rybrink struggle at her position for several weeks running), these departures do make sense in the long term. We ask for the club to back managers, and Spurs are certainly doing that by molding the squad to Martin Ho's tactical vision.
As for the contract extensions, there's a good mix of player experience level to keep the squad balanced; Spence is a WSL veteran, Morris is poised for a full breakout season after her ACL rehab is over, and Dennis represents youth potential. Keeping Dennis at the club is also important from a homegrown perspective, especially since we've let go of a couple of the most promising Academy prospects over the past year (as noted in this issue).
There are still some light areas of the squad that must be addressed in the summer window (the lack of defensive midfield cover stands out most prominently), but overall, this was a decent window of progress and should enable Spurs to finish the season strongly as the promising new signings get up to speed and integrate.
Spurs Women January transfer window grade: B
News from around the Lane
• João Palhinha's overhead kick goal against Bournemouth has been nominated for the Premier League's January Goal of the Month award. Vote here!
• Spurs Men's Champions League knockout stage squad list has been confirmed. There are three swaps from the league phase squad: Ben Davies and Rodrigo Bentancur have been removed due to injuries and Brennan Johnson removed due to his transfer to Crystal Palace, while Mathys Tel, Radu Drăgușin, and Conor Gallagher have all been added.
• Spurs Men Academy's campaign in the UEFA Youth League came to an end with a 1-5 loss at Real Betis.
• Spurs Women Academy U19s have been drawn away to Dulwich Hamlet in the first round of the Capital Cup; Dulwich knocked us out of the competition last season at the semi-final stage.
• Time for a mini loan army update, Scottish Premiership edition:
- Mikey Moore contributed a goal and an assist for Rangers in their title chase, beating Kilmarnock 5-1.
- Dane Scarlett registered an assist on his first start for Hibernian in a 3-2 win over Dundee United.
Up next:
February 7 | Spurs Men @ Manchester United
Team news — Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven are both available for selection; Djed Spence is questionable; otherwise, the same availability as last game, including Kevin Danso's addition to the injury list.
February 8 | Spurs Women vs Chelsea
Team news — Drew Spence is suspended; Maika Hamano is ineligible to play against her parent club; no new injury concerns from the previous game.
I'll close with a meme that evokes the sad state of men's football, at least in the Premier League:
If you or anyone you know has been affected by the themes of the 2025/26 Premier League season, call our hotline
— mark thompson (@markposts.bsky.social) 2026-02-03T21:29:50.850Z
COYS
Thank you for reading!
If you’re enjoying the newsletter, make sure to sign up for a free subscription to receive new issues in your inbox. You can also buy me a Ko-fi to support my writing with a one-time tip. Your support keeps Spurs Across the Pond running and is much appreciated!
You can also find me on Bluesky and podcasting at N17 Women and The Tottenham Depot.
Member discussion