The deafening roar that swirled around Tottenham's magnificent billion-pound stadium at kick-off was a poignant reminder of what this club could and should be, and indeed after weeks of rain the clear blue skies above had infused Igor Tudor’s debut with the giddy optimism of an August opener.
Just over an hour later the sun had gone down, the stadium was grimly silent under winter floodlights, and Arsenal were rampaging through a Spurs side as utterly bereft as the Thomas Frank outfit of a week earlier.
Even by Tottenham’s standards the descent into abject disappointment was stomach-turning, and from a position of sunny hopefulness Spurs moved a step closer to the unthinkable.
When Tudor arrived the chances of relegation receded. After losing his first game it has never looked more likely.
There will be no new-manager bounce.
The bashing-heads-together approach brought some hard running, for a bit, but seemed to exhaust the players within half an hour.
The formation change was exactly as chaotic as we might have predicted in a division increasingly defined by its aversion to the back three.
And in the post-match press conference Tudor decided to praise Arsenal as “probably the best team in the world”.
Whatever you do don’t let him make his own coffee.
Spurs supporters will probably focus their ire on an inept second-half performance, one without any of the courage or calm required to compete at Premier League level.
They will understandably be concerned that it took all of 45 minutes for the panic to set in and the inertia of the Frank era to seize them in an icy grip.
But the first half was almost worse. What the second period tells us is that the Tottenham players don’t have the fitness for Tudor’s brutal man-to-man high press (which, yes, is bad) but what the first tells us is that even when minds are focused on Tudor’s instructions the tactics don’t work.
The shape was a 3-5-2 when out of possession and 3-4-3 when in it, with Conor Gallagher joining Xavi Simons as an inside forward behind Randal Kolo Muani when Spurs were on the ball.
This gave Simons a difficult hybrid role and, with the whole left side of the formation rotating to change shape, Tottenham were consistently confused down that flank.
All it took was Jurrien Timber overlapping Bukayo Saka to outmanoeuvre Djed Spence, who was often left unsupported by Simons or Pape Matar Sarr, the two Spurs players unsure when exactly it was their turn to track the full-back.
Timber and Saka got behind twice in the first five minutes and, unsurprisingly, Arsenal pushed the same button relentlessly in the first half until it led directly to Eberechi Eze’s opener.
When Spurs got hold of possession they did almost nothing with it. Guglielmo Vicario was instructed to hit it long – every single time – which created head tennis, at best, and another wave of Arsenal pressure, at worst.
There seemed to be no real plan for how to counter-attack the visitors.
By the time the system fell into disarray in the second 45 Spurs should have been behind.
But, being level, there was no excuse for the way Viktor Gyokeres found space for his first goal, nor for the ease with which Eze and Gyokeres went through to score their second goals, both of which betrayed the confusion felt by a Spurs defence navigating the thorny switch from a back four to a back three.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Tudor’s in-game tactical changes only made things worse.
He pushed Sarr into the forward line for the final 20 minutes, bizarrely leaving Yves Bissouma entirely alone in central midfield, and then for one final throw of the dice he brought on Mathys Tel to play as a wing-back.
It was shambolic pretty much from start to finish; an early warning sign that the concerns we had about Tudor – his inexperience in the Premier League chief among them – are well-founded.
Premier League relegation odds (via Sky Bet)
- Burnley - 1/33
- West Ham - 8/11
- Nottingham Forest - 5/2
- Tottenham - 4/1
- Leeds - 14/1
Odds correct at 16:25 GMT (23/02/26)
Tottenham supporters were filing out of the ground long before the final whistle, the rush of optimism at 4.30pm a lifetime ago; its earlier presence nothing more than a cruel joke.
They are four points above the relegation zone and on a nine-game winless run in the Premier League. It has long been assumed that Spurs are too good to go down, that the one remaining lever to pull – a manager change – would be enough to see them stagger over the line.
Tudor got very little out of the team on Sunday, other than a slightly angrier version of Frank’s hoof-ball. If it is a sign of things to come, then the outlook is quite simple: Tottenham are going down.
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