Tottenham’s £300m Squad Is Losing the Nerve to Shoot
Tottenham drew a blank against Everton for their fourth straight scoreless Premier League game of the season, and the strange part is they started brilliantly. The last time Spurs actually scored in the league was 16 weeks earlier, when Joao Palhinha’s stoppage-time poke against Everton on the final day of last season kept them up. Since then, nothing. The worry now is that the longer this goes on, the more the players seem to talk themselves out of shooting at all.
That’s not a small thing to admit about a squad this expensive. More than £300million has gone on transfer fees and salaries this year, six of the players who started against Everton were summer signings, and Richarlison – last season’s top scorer, someone who never needed style points to find the net – isn’t even in the 25-man Premier League squad. So there’s no senior figure to snap them out of it, and not much shared history for the new faces to lean on either.
Promising football, no shots to show for it
The opening 20 minutes against Everton, according to the primary source reporting, was the best Tottenham have played since the peak of Ange Postecoglou’s spell – an odd thing to say about a 0-0, but it’s true to what happened. Savio beat his man repeatedly, Archie Gray got forward with purpose from right-back, and Jan Paul van Hecke really should have scored from an Andy Robertson free kick. The pressing and rotation structure De Zerbi has built is clearly getting the ball into good areas. It just isn’t ending in the net.
When missing becomes a habit
What happens next is the interesting bit. Spurs couldn’t sustain that opening intensity, and as their levels dropped, so did their conviction. Savio and Mohammed Kudus, both naturally direct players, started picking safer options; Kudus and Lucas Bergvall exchanged cautious passes with five minutes left instead of pushing on, and Mathys Tel turned down a forward option to lay the ball back to Robertson. Fans noticed. When Mateus Fernandes finally forced a save early in the second half, it was greeted with ironic cheers – the kind of moment that tells you everything about where confidence sits right now. It’s the same pattern described in De Zerbi’s patient, central build-up approach: control without conviction.
De Zerbi’s job now
De Zerbi has framed this as a mental block rather than a technical one, saying Spurs need to improve their decision-making and shoot more often when they have the time and space to do it. He’s been here before – he described the situation when he arrived in March in blunt terms, and dragged Spurs out of a relegation fight by getting the players to believe in each other again. This is a different problem with a similar cure: belief, not tactics. Perhaps a scrappy set-piece goal is what actually does it – the kind of thing explored in pieces on Tottenham’s low chance creation from set plays. Aston Villa are next up, and Spurs will take anything that goes in off a shin at this point.
Verdict
Nothing here suggests Spurs need to rip up the approach. The service into the box has been good, arguably the best it’s been in some time. What’s missing is the last pass and the willingness to pull the trigger, and until one goes in – however it goes in – that reluctance is likely to keep feeding on itself.
