Tottenham play themselves into trouble at Inter in the latest instalment of their awkward and fitful stumble into autumn

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Louise Thomas

Editor

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Davinson Sanchez carries the ball out of the Tottenham defence, before cutting the ball out to Ben Davies on the left. Those are the bare facts of the transaction. Up in the San Siro stands, a guy with an expensive laptop will log the spot where Sanchez played the pass, the spot where Davies collected it, and a simple bit of computer code will draw a blue arrow between them. Pass complete. Chalk another one up, Davinson, you absolute legend.

But that’s not quite everything that happened.

What actually happened was this: Sanchez, not looking up, failed to spot that Davies was already well on the move, and thus ended up playing the ball about 15 yards behind him. Davies was thus forced to stop, turn, mutter a swear word under his breath, and scamper back towards his own corner to gather the ball in before it went out for a throw. By which time, of course, two Inter Milan players were hunting him down like hounds, forcing him into a rushed clearance. A completed pass, yes. But not a successful one, by any stretch. And as Tottenham continue to underwhelm, it’s the sort of pass that encapsulates their awkward and fitful stumble into autumn.

Inter’s spectacular late comeback may, in the long term, be the best thing that happened to Tottenham tonight. A scrappy win might have papered over the disjunctures, but a third consecutive defeat, and in the most humiliating of circumstances, offers no hiding place. There was even a certain lyrical justice in the fact that when Christian Eriksen gave Tottenham the lead eight minutes into the second half, it was via a wicked deflection off Miranda. Even when Tottenham score, they give the ball away.

Watching Tottenham try to pass the ball at the moment is like watching a roomful of people all talking over each other. They’re all speaking, but you’d be hard pushed to describe it as communication. Spurs’s completion rate in the last two Premier League seasons was 82.5 and 83.8 per cent. This season, just 80.6 per cent: ninth in the league, just below Wolves, just above West Ham. But even that only tells the bare skeleton of what’s been going on over recent weeks.

Similarly, Tottenham’s perfectly normal pass completion rate of 84 per cent here obscures as much as it reveals. You can pass the ball without it constituting – in any meaningful sense – passing. There’s a music and a flow to good passing, a marriage of rhythm and form and function that at its very best approaches art. Xavi wasn’t brilliant because he played loads of passes, but because he played loads of good passes, and looked great doing it. And under Mauricio Pochettino, it is an ideal that Tottenham have occasionally dared to approach.

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Two years ago, Eriksen scored against Hull City after a 30-pass move that barely touched a blade of grass it didn’t need to. Here, and against Liverpool on Saturday, they could barely string together three in a row. And although any team as instinctively creative as Tottenham will give the ball away occasionally, this goes deeper. It’s playing passes just a yard wide, or just a fraction too hard or soft. It’s playing passes with an awkward roll, or unwanted spin, making them harder to control.

A recent favourite is when a player under no pressure – often a centre-back, but occasionally Eric Dier – passes to a player under lots of pressure – usually a full-back, but occasionally and alarmingly, the goalkeeper. Most teams have a highly tuned pressing game these days, and by continuing to play poor or cowardly passes, Tottenham are not only throttling their own attacks and depriving Harry Kane of the service he needs, but needlessly inviting the sort of danger that even a defence as good as theirs can only withstand for so long.

Partly this is a function of confidence and cadence, of parts not quite in sync, which is unusual given that the last player Tottenham signed was bought in shillings and pence. Frequently a Spurs player will actually slow to a complete standstill and then point to exactly where they want their team-mate to receive the ball, like a director cutting a take because someone coughed off camera. Look, if I’m going to play this pass, then I’m going to do play it properly. Now, you just… oh, crumbs.

Tottenham did actually begin to pass the ball a little better after going a goal up, as they finally began to declench a little, as Inter’s press began to flag, as Harry Winks was introduced with 20 minutes left. And Inter’s two goals were more attributable to poor positioning than poor passing. The irony is that Tottenham went ahead when playing badly, and then pegged back when playing well.

Fair enough, Inter weren’t much good either, at least not until the final four minutes. And for all the pall of crisis that will doubtless descend in the days after this game – Brighton, their next opponents, will have been watching this game with scarcely-disguised relish – there remains enough residual talent in this team, enough good movement, enough athleticism, enough determination and enough nous, to turn things around. But it needs to happen soon. For Tottenham are literally playing themselves into trouble, and unless they can sort it, three straight seasons of Champions League football will not become four.