Tottenham Hotspur, Thomas Frank said after Sunday’s 3-0 defeat to Nottingham Forest, are “not a quick fix”. That’s been true for probably 40 years, since they lurched into financial crisis amid boardroom shenanigans in the 1980s, becoming the first soccer club to list on the stock exchange and embarking on a disastrous programme of diversification (the highlight perhaps being becoming Hummel’s distributor in the UK, a role they performed so badly that Southampton took a page of their own programme to blame Spurs for the fact that their shirts were not being delivered).
Right now, Spurs would probably settle for even a little bit of a fix, a slow hint of progress, a flicker of hope, anything to break them out of the current grim spiral. They have won just one of their last seven league games. When they beat Everton on 26 October, they were third, five points behind the leaders. Sunday’s defeat leaves them 11th, 14 points behind Arsenal. Given that Spurs finished 17th last season, perhaps that is not so unexpected – and the compacted nature of the table means they are only four points off fifth and probable Champions League qualification. But, equally, 22 points represents their lowest Premier League tally after 16 games since 2008.
