Tottenham fans have already seen this performance too many times this season.
Spurs were not necessarily good, but not necessarily bad either, and this 1-1 draw at home to 10-man Fulham was an appropriately mediocre result for this middling London derby display.
Though this time they claimed a point, Ange Postecoglou’s men committed similar sins to those present in their performances against Crystal Palace and Ipswich Town, both matches in which Spurs were stunned by inferior opposition.
It was too easy to bundle Postecoglou’s players off the ball, with Yves Bissouma and James Maddison squandering possession on numerous occasions and Timo Werner hurtling into traffic as he so often, so frustratingly, does.
It felt emblematic of an end-to-end encounter that Spurs’ goal came from a counter-attack immediately after Antonee Robinson had belted forward down the left flank thanks to poor position by Pedro Porro. After a quick turnover, the ball arrived with Werner, who in his only moment of real clarity crossed beautifully for Brennan Johnson to score his 10th Spurs goal of the season.
This was by no means a match Spurs had telling control in, but they did assert more sustained pressure after Tom Cairney, Fulham’s goalscorer with a fine second-half hit, had been sent off on 83 minutes for a dangerous tackle on fellow substitute Dejan Kulusevski, rested here by Postecoglou but called upon immediately after Cairney had equalised.
If Kulusevski’s absence from the starting line-up partly explained Tottenham regularly losing the ball in midfield, then the fact their attack did not click remotely as well as in last weekend’s 4-0 dismantling of Manchester City was in large part down to Dominic Solanke’s absence due to illness.
Heung-min Son played through the middle from the start, Kulusevski later on, but neither as effectively as Solanke surely would have done.
Fulham, like Spurs, did not deserve to leave with all three points, but they created a handful of significant chances. Tottenham were indebted, in those moments, to 36-year-old Fraser Forster. In the team for an indefinite period while Guglielmo Vicario is injured, Forster was the standout performer, denying Alex Iwobi and Raul Jimenez, twice each, with vital saves.
Erroneous passes aside, Spurs defended well, without first-choice centre-back pairing Micky van de Ven and Cristian Romero. In their place, Ben Davies and Radu Dragusin stepped up again, particularly the latter.
But further forward they faltered, failing to create enough clear-cut openings. It cost them.
