Antonio Conte could only laugh at this latest Tottenham Hotspur embarrassment.
The angry Conte at Turf Moor had been replaced by a smiling and laughing Italian within the bowels of the Riverside Stadium on Tuesday night.
There was no raging at what had been another eye-rolling defeat this season, this time to a Championship side in Middlesbrough who completely deserved their victory in front of a roaring Riverside, with more possession and more shots on goal than their lofty visitors.
Instead of anger, Conte wore the expression of a man who knows he has tried everything to either push or hug these Tottenham players towards some kind of consistency but they are not having it. Perhaps there was nothing left but to laugh.
football.london understands that after the dismal defeat at Burnley, the Spurs boss threatened his players with the prospect of remaining at The Lodge, the hotel at Hotspur Way, for three nights until the trip to Middlesbrough if they did not beat Leeds.
The indirect knock-on effect of that of course would have been time away from their families as they remained together in a unit to train every morning and afternoon. The result was a 4-0 victory at Elland Road, albeit against a poor Leeds side, and no such 'punishment' was required.
There are also those within the club who believe that with this younger group of players, they respond better to a guiding arm around them, as Mauricio Pochettino did to bring some of Spurs' best league finishes in recent years.
Yet ultimately you can only show the love and dish out cuddles for so long if performances are so Jekyll and Hyde in their nature.
"Sometimes you have to be strong, sometimes light," said a reflective Conte on Tuesday night.
"My old coaches in Italy, especially Carletto Mazzone, taught me that the coach sometimes has to use the carrot, sometimes the stick. I have to try the right way at the individual moment.
"After Burnley, I used the stick and we won! After Leeds, the carrot we lost!
"I repeat: the coach has to try to find always the best solution, not because you're upset, frustrated and disappointed.
"At every moment the situation has to be very clear. I know there's a lot of space for improvement for this team and we have to try to be more stable. Tonight we showed that we have a lot of space for improvement in this aspect."
It's the inconsistency that is killing Conte's Tottenham. 2022 alone has brought a series of results of wins and losses that reads WLWLWLWLLWLWL.
As the clock neared midnight following the extra-time exertions at Middlesbrough, Conte was not angry at all in his press conference, despite his hatred of defeats.
It could have been a deliberate attempt to show that he is not on an emotional rollercoaster that matches his team's results.
More likely it's a man who is simply seeing everything he has informed the club about playing out on the pitch.
There perhaps may also be a part of him that is less concerned about an FA Cup defeat because he had already stated the previous day that it would be difficult for this Tottenham side to win the competition.
Instead he now has plenty of training time on the Hotspur Way pitches to prepare for almost every Premier League game - his bread and butter.
The stats bear out that when Conte has had at least six days to work with his Tottenham players ahead of a match, they have won almost every one of them.
When the games have come three or four days apart then the results have become far more haphazard.
His critics suggest that the multiple title winner's lack of European success as a manager - just the one Europa League final appearance - comes from that need for more time to prepare, although he might argue that he was then winning league matches just a few days after European games.
Either way, it must surely now be clear to those inside Tottenham that the undeniable truth is that the club have to stop placing the blame on the managers and focus instead on this ineffective group of players.
Spurs chairman Daniel Levy has now worked with 12 full-time managers in his 21 years at the club, not to mention the many, many caretakers ones.
That would be a new full-time manager hired less than every other year, but it's actually worse because of Pochettino's five-and-a-half year tenure at the club, which now feels like not only a lifetime but a lifetime ago.
Managers have come and gone as the fall guys for mistakes made at the top of the club and in particular in the quality of the players bought.
Some like Nuno Espirito Santo lasted just a handful of months in charge of the group, some would say the Portuguese should never have been chosen in the first place.
Tottenham's transfer profile - signing young players and developing them as they retain or increase their value - has kept them financially stable over the years but it is not a policy that leads to sustained success due to the age of the squad.
The closest alternative is perhaps Borussia Dortmund, who have found more success through the model in the same time period, although whether the Bundesliga and Premier League can be compared in difficulty is another debate.
Levy has lurched from one type of manager to the next, from up and coming coaches to superstar winners.
They all have one thing in common now though. All but Juande Ramos have failed to win the trophies or find the consistency they have elsewhere. Even Ramos was sacked just a few months after that League Cup win that stands alone, gathering dust, in the ENIC era.
The most consistent Spurs years were in Pochettino's peak seasons, most notably the year his side finished second in the Premier League to a Chelsea team managed by, yes, Antonio Conte.
Now Conte is the Spurs manager and he has been surprised by the level of the club he has found. It is certainly not the Tottenham Hotspur he battled against that season.
His players are just not of the required quality for the kind of platform he wants to be competing on.
Perhaps he was suckered in by the thought that a team with Harry Kane, Son Heung-min, a World Cup-winning captain and Serie A's best defender last year must have the spine to be a real challenger.
Instead he found the same group of players who have struggled under all of his predecessors.
Even recent signings from last summer, Cristian Romero aside, have offered little and left the fans scratching their head.
Bryan Gil has already been farmed out on loan to Valencia and admitted this week that he had found the pace and physical nature of the Premier League difficult. Pierluigi Gollini was signed as the heir to Hugo Lloris but has so far looked anything but.
Emerson Royal, a summer signing who did not particularly want to leave Barcelona in the summer but had to due to their financial situation, is looking like a great deal for the Catalan club who got Tottenham to hand over £25.8m to them for the Brazilian.
At only 23 he can still improve, but his decision-making and technique at times are not those you would associate with a Brazil international. In fact, if there's a stereotype for a Brazilian player, Emerson is certainly breaking those walls down.
For Middlesbrough's goal, he was so disconnected from the Spurs defence that he was playing teenager Josh Coburn onside from a position that about six feet behind his team-mates.
That's not to say that those team-mates were covering themselves in glory, five of them clustered in a bizarre group on Spurs' left-hand side of their box.
The lack of organisation was bewildering and that surely cannot come from the instructions of the multiple title-winner who has overseen some of the game's tightest defences.
Tottenham's two January signings, Dejan Kulusevski and Rodrigo Bentancur, at least look more befitting for the level Conte wants to operate at and following his criticism of the club's recruitment processes, it's hard now not to imagine he had a big say in the duo's signing.
It's not just about the new faces though as Conte's star names have also let him down with their consistency.
Kane was unplayable against Manchester City and Leeds United, yet against Burnley and Middlesbrough looked like a man who has had more than enough of the Tottenham project.
Son was a shadow of himself at the Riverside. Perhaps having been overplayed since returning from his injury, his touch was poor and his decision-making worse and while he was getting himself into good positions, he had no confidence in what he was doing when the ball arrived at his feet for some big chances.
He was also incurring the wrath of his team-mates. Eric Dier marched out of his box to scream and point at Son after seeing him disagreeing with Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg after one situation that had shared responsibility and then even his biggest collaborator Kane berated him for one spot of poor decision-making.
The centre of the pitch was a mess. Harry Winks and Hojbjerg are no longer young players, both 26, and they should be dominating against a team a division below.
Yet not only did they look tired, the result of having Rodrigo Bentancur and Oliver Skipp injured and all the alternatives shipped out, but they also looked like they were playing together for the first time.
That Tottenham and Conte desperately need a 21-year-old coming off a season in the Championship in Skipp to return to add real drive to their midfield speaks volumes about their situation and the stats bear out just how vital he has been to them in the Premier League.
Among his midfield counterparts, Hojbjerg is a strange occasionally contrasting presence on the football pitch. Often he can be seen battling away and trying to drive Spurs on as a leader. Yet at other times he looks almost sulky and does not chase back on those occasions when he has lost the ball high up the pitch.
His hesitancy in playing quick balls killed some of Tottenham's attempts to get up the pitch quickly on Tuesday and that is something Conte will want Bentancur and Skipp back to help out with.
Winks has struggled to progress since emerging under Pochettino and becoming an England international. He may say his fragmented game time has not helped, but his mixed performances when he has played has not aided him either in getting him more starts.
His tackling is inconsistent, sometimes tough and sometimes producing the merest of half-attempts to win a ball. Likewise his passing can be probing and penetrative, yet at other times wayward and cause problems for his team-mates.
Perhaps Winks sums up the inconsistency that lies at the heart of Tottenham better than most. There is talent there but the application of it is so uneven.
While Conte says he can count on Winks, it's difficult at the moment to see him forcing his way past the other three central midfielders to become the regular starter next season he needs to be. The Spurs academy product must be considering following in Dele Alli's footsteps and trying to restart his career elsewhere.
This summer could well be the biggest in Levy's 21-year tenure at Tottenham Hotspur.
The transfer profile at the club needs to shift, even if just temporarily, to add the experience and quality Conte requires to build a competitive team.
There is no doubting the club's progress off the pitch but, on it, after how many years do you decide that a project or experiment has not worked?
That Conte was laughing away on Tuesday will concern Levy more than the raging Italian of six days before.
After that defeat at Turf Moor, the chairman held reassuring, positive talks with the former Inter Milan and Chelsea head coach and sent plenty of flattery his way.
Yet on Wednesday night, Conte seemed a man who seemed almost disconnected with the result.
Levy will be hoping that his head coach has not already decided that he has made a huge mistake in accepting the Spurs job and that this summer he will engineer a separation to move on to a club that will clean up this blot on his CV.
Levy cannot allow that to happen because it's difficult to see where he would go from there.
Even another attempt to bring Pochettino back to Spurs, while it would please some fans, would only see the Argentine return to a situation that does not feel far removed from the one he was rudely ejected from back in November 2019.
If he is not available then there are no more star names to appoint. Levy has handed the chalice to some of the game's most successful managers and even they have found the challenge at the north London club to be beyond him.
Spurs would have to start again with a young progressive coach and as Pochettino proved, there's no guarantee that that will take the club to the next level despite the progress made during his reign.
That's if those managers wanted the job. Last summer Graham Potter is understood to have rejected the chance to hold talks over the vacant post because of his concerns at leaving a stable environment at Brighton for the chaos that can be Spurs. After what happened to Espirito Santo and what's happened since, he will feel his decision has been proved to be spot on.
Instead, Levy has to throw everything he can at Conte this summer. The funds must be found to back the Italian, because this could be the chairman's last roll of the dice in making Spurs the elite club they need to be to match the facilities they have and the expectations the beleaguered fans have.
"The truth is that today we are talking about a defeat," Conte told football.london. "The last game we won, two games ago we lost, three games ago we won, and I think that I can't hide the reality no.
"The reality that we are having too many ups and downs. We have to try and work, and I think this is a problem now and maybe also in the past.
"In my opinion there is only one way to try to improve, and to continue to work many aspects and to persevere.
"To be patient because you need to have patience in this process, and to hope in the future the situation will be much better and not to wait for a long time."
Conte smiled at this reporter when he said the word 'patient', perhaps remembering that football.london had asked him just six days before whether he had the patience in the club that he was asking from the Spurs fans.
Despite his smile, his words on Tuesday night did not suggest he has. 'Hope', 'persevere', 'not to wait for a long time' are not the words a winner like Conte is used to relying on.
The see-saw nature of Spurs this season means that should Conte's seventh-placed side beat Everton on Monday night then they will somehow still be right in the chase for the European spots and even a top four spot that seems ridiculous to even contemplate.
This summer is expected to be a big one at Spurs but it needs to be one for the right reasons.
Conte and the Tottenham fans need to know that there is more to their club than this. There's only so much hoping you can do.
