After a second North London Derby defeat of the season, the Tottenham fans understandably could not seem to agree on exactly who was to blame.
Is it Daniel Levy and the club's board for having no discernible joined-up plan for Spurs' progression on the pitch after more than 20 years in charge with just a single league cup to their name or seemingly any real understanding of the scale of investment required for the silverware-laden head coach they must surely have researched thoroughly before appointing?
Is it Antonio Conte, who after dragging Tottenham back into the top four last season has overseen a team this time around that can be difficult to watch with a rigid system and one that has gone backwards under his stewardship despite the club spending around £130m last summer on seven players, albeit with one set to arrive this summer?
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Or is it the players themselves, with a captain in Hugo Lloris who is making costly mistakes too regularly now in goal, last season's Golden Boot winner in Son Heung-min who is struggling to make any real impact against teams he used to run riot against and a defence that looks as brittle as the attacking players who have spent much of the season in the treatment room?
The answer is probably all of the above but there wasn't even an opportunity for the fans to vent their frustrations on Sunday.
Boos at the half-time whistle - a common noise this season at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium - were expected once again with Arsenal 2-0 up but they never came because of a strange moment before the break when referee Craig Pawson appeared to give the home side a penalty but never actually did, which just left most in the stadium simply confused as they headed towards the concourses at the break.
Then at the full-time whistle Spurs pumped out music so loudly over the stadium speakers that any potential murmurs of discontent among the 61,870 supporters inside the ground would have been drowned out.
There's just a boring predictability about Tottenham performances this season. When the players sit down to watch the video analysis of this latest home defeat the coaching staff could pretty much show them any match of recent months and it would look the same.
Spurs start games full of energy, pressing high up the pitch, causing problems and then it's like someone hits a switch about 10 to 15 minutes into the match and they become passive and drop deep for the rest of the first half. They concede a goal or two and come out in the second half looking desperate to make amends.
Against Arsenal, that resulted in Spurs having 17 shots on goal to Arsenal's 14 with seven efforts on target to their five and the Gunners' goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale was named man of the match for his string of fine saves.
Yet it didn't matter what Tottenham eventually mustered. It's the same blueprint for almost every match and when you play top six teams you simply cannot hand them that huge first half window of opportunity. Conte's record against the top six with Tottenham is poor and that's no coincidence.
The Spurs and Conte marriage is as strange as the one at his old club across London. There's a certain irony to the fact that Chelsea have appointed a project manager at a win-now club, and Spurs have hired a win-now manager at a project club.
It has left Tottenham in what feels like a sort of limbo or at least a period full of questions that form a vicious circle.
Does Conte want to stay at the north London club? If not, do Spurs want to spend money on buying players to fit a manager who might not be there next season? Has he done enough with those players already bought for him - Yves Bissouma the most glaring example as one of the Premier League's best midfielders in recent years who now in a Tottenham shirt looks a shadow of what he was.
Conte rightly points constantly to the injuries his squad has suffered this season - with the imminent return of Rodrigo Bentancur key - but it's also difficult to pinpoint which players have truly improved under him during this campaign and that's a strange case for one of the best coaches in the game.
The 53-year-old spent much of his post-match media interviews and press conference either praising Arsenal as real title challengers, saying he wasn't disappointed with his Spurs team while also saying he was, before going off on a tangent about the young players he has given game time to in recent weeks.
Quite how a North London Derby defeat press conference became the place for him to start speaking unprompted about Japhet Tanganga, who has started one Premier League game this season and wasn't even selected in the squad on Sunday, is unclear.
Conte has the air of a man who has dined at Michelin star restaurants for much of his life but is now having to eat regularly at fast food chains with his family. He's smiling and going through the motions for them while always reminding them all that it's not what he's used to so they should lower their expectations about what arrives on the plate.
It's not what Tottenham fans want to hear and if they were watching good football while falling short it might be slightly more palatable. They know that two matches against Manchester City as well as a tough game at a resurgent Fulham lie ahead in a nightmare fortnight in the Premier League.
There are just two weeks left of the January transfer window and Tottenham's season will hinge upon what Levy and managing director of football Fabio Paratici manage to agree in the days ahead.
When everybody in his squad is fit, Conte's options are plentiful but he's still lacking in certain areas. The right wing-back choices are clearly still not to his liking while Lucas Moura's persistent long-term injury makes another attacker a must for his squad depth.
Levy will know that while there are growing gripes about Conte among the fanbase, all eyes will remain on him as chairman because if the Italian fails then so, yet again, does he.
For all the off the field progress, on the pitch Levy and ENIC have been the constant with the 11 silverware-less managers and one - Juande Ramos - who won the league cup but failed in the Premier League the variables.
Spurs have one of the world's best stadiums, one of the world's best training grounds and they hired one of the world's most successful managers. Right now they should be sitting on the cusp of joining the top table of elite clubs, building on the forward strides of the Pochettino era and learning from the mistakes the club made during it.
Instead they're slipping backwards while others now stride past them. Arsenal showed patience in their project manager and it's paying rich dividends with a young, exciting team allied to spending money on quality additions at the right times. They now sit 14 points ahead of Conte's men.
Newcastle have not even really begun to tap into their new-found source of wealth yet sit above Tottenham while United stood behind Erik ten Hag in the Old Trafford power battles and are moving in the right direction.
Even though they lie behind Spurs, Chelsea are throwing ridiculous sums of money at their problems while building the most overstuffed squad in world football. A number of clubs, including Spurs, might well be keeping an eye on developments at Stamford Bridge to see who has to be pushed out the exit door before the window closes.
Tottenham feel like a team in transition yet again with key older players at the back who are struggling to state their case for a part in the club's future and a talisman in Harry Kane who is now in the final 18 months of his contract and would be forgiven for wondering whether there's any logical reason for him to stay beyond that.
Commitment is going to be the key word for Tottenham going forward. If Tottenham and Levy are committed to making the Conte appointment work and their decision to be proved right then the next fortnight will show that.
If they believe the Italian does not share that sense of commitment, then their response will also make that very clear.
Amid it all the Tottenham fans will be caught in the middle, reflecting on that Levy statement back in 2021 when he spoke about a "return to playing football with the style for which we are known – free-flowing, attacking and entertaining".
A year later he wrote: "We shall continue to work with energy and vigour to make all of our fans around the world proud to support Tottenham Hotspur."
Right now neither statement rings true for Spurs fans and that has to change.
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