Tottenham Keep Forest Out — but Still Can’t Find a Goal
Tottenham drew 0-0 at Nottingham Forest, taking their first league point and first clean sheet of the season, but they finished the game without a single shot on target. The clearest chance fell to Omar Marmoush after a swift, well-worked move involving Pedro Porro, and he put it inches wide. That miss, more than anything else at the City Ground, is why we’re asking whether this Tottenham side lacks invention, execution, or both.
There’s a real tension here. De Zerbi was appointed to make Spurs both hard to beat and pleasant to watch, and by his own admission the patient-possession approach he wants to build was more visible against Forest than at any point so far. Yet Tottenham have now failed to score in their opening three league games for the first time since 1974, an unwanted stat that sits awkwardly next to the promise of expansive, attacking football.
Context matters too. Spurs had shipped five goals in their first two matches before shutting out Forest, so the clean sheet is progress on its own terms. But the source is clear that this represents a shift away from the more physical, direct approach that kept Tottenham up last season – a stylistic trade-off that was always going to take time to pay off in goals.
Marmoush’s misses point to a finishing problem
Start with the raw evidence: Marmoush dragged that 18th-minute effort wide after being played clean through by Porro’s chip over the Forest defence. Later in the second half he was sent clear again, only this time he ignored Andy Robertson screaming for the ball on the overlap and instead cut inside and blazed a shot over the bar.
Micky van de Ven and Dominic Solanke also had presentable openings that went begging. De Zerbi’s own post-match assessment was that Tottenham could have scored three or four goals had different decisions been made in the final third – which, generously read, suggests his sympathies lie with a lack of composure rather than a lack of design. The Marmoush situation, discussed at length in our recent look at his arrival, is instructive: the talent to finish these moments is there, on paper.
The creative picture isn’t clean either
Except decision-making is itself a creative failing, not just a finishing one. Marmoush choosing to shoot rather than release Robertson, who might have squared for Mohammed Kudus at the back post, is exactly the kind of missed final pass that separates a promising move from a converted one.
Elsewhere, Tottenham looked solid but unimaginative through midfield, which is a harder problem to solve than a single wayward finish. Savio’s debut was encouraging without delivering a decisive touch, and our wide-attacking concerns haven’t gone away just because one performance had more structure to it. Mathys Tel remains an option in reserve, though he’s been assessed as making too many wrong decisions in the final third himself.
Set pieces have gone quiet at the worst time
Ten corners against Forest produced one genuine goalscoring opportunity, for Van de Ven. Given how central set-piece efficiency was to Tottenham’s survival last season, that conversion rate is a marked regression, not a one-off blip.
It’s compounded by personnel change. Spurs are without their top three league scorers from last term – Cristian Romero (four), Joao Palhinha (five) and Richarlison (11), the latter left out of the Premier League squad entirely after asking to leave. Sandro Tonali’s replacement of Palhinha in midfield is a more rounded profile, and Jan Paul van Hecke is a classy but less physically dominant defender than Danso and Romero. Neither swap replaces the goals that have gone missing.
Verdict
The numbers are stark enough on their own: 0-0, zero shots on target, ten corners for one real chance, and a first three-game scoreless start since 1974. Tottenham are not yet creative enough, and they are not yet clinical enough – the Forest performance doesn’t let either excuse off the hook.
What it does offer is genuine tactical progress. Spurs, by the numbers and the eye test, probably should have won that game, and looked more like De Zerbi’s team than they have before. Whether that’s enough to sustain patience while the goals catch up is another question entirely.
