Tottenham vs Crystal Palace: Stale Spurs squad must stop hiding behind Harry Kane to give new stadium start it deserves

Tottenham Hotspur start a new era tomorrow but they are also coming to the end of one. The squad that got them through last season, tasked with doing the same thing again, has run out of legs and ideas. They have taken one point from their last five league games and suddenly the bright prospects for this season are fading fast.

This is the worst league run of Mauricio Pochettino's tenure and it feels so surprising because it came after an impressive November and December, when they rescued their Champions League campaign and briefly looked like setting up their third title challenge. But looking back that was the peak of their season, and now they have to ask what it is about this squad of players that has seen them run out of steam.

As Spurs have faded, their reliance on Harry Kane has become more pronounced. That might not be immediately clear looking at the results: Spurs won four in a row in the league during Kane’s six-week absence, and also beat Borussia Dortmund 3-0 at home, their last memorably good performance, seven weeks ago tomorrow. Since Kane has returned, results have collapsed: one draw and four defeats in their last five league games. So you could read into that and argue that maybe Kane is not so important after all.

But to do that would be to ignore the real dynamic at play with Kane and Spurs. Because there is a theory in the Tottenham dressing room that Kane is so important to his team that when he is out, as he was in January and February, every other player raises their game to make up. And that is why results were still good in his absence recently. But when Kane comes back - and here is the problem - the senior players hide behind his presence. The overall level of the team drops. And Spurs stop getting results.

That has been the case in the last few weeks. Kane has come back into the team and done as well as ever. Because that is one of Kane’s great strengths, coming back from these ankle injuries mentally refreshed and sharper than ever. In Kane’s first game back he scored an impressive equaliser at Turf Moor only to see his team throw it away late on. Then he was powerless to stop Spurs losing at Stamford Bridge, won and converted the equalising penalty against Arsenal, and scored the winner at Dortmund. At Southampton it was Kane, again, who put Spurs ahead only to see his team concede two more late on. And at Anfield on Sunday Kane was instrumental, his passing from deep leading to both Lucas Moura’s equaliser and Moussa Sissoko’s infamous miss.

So any analysis of Spurs’ struggles since Kane’s return should recognise that there have been little wrong with his own performances. The trouble is that other players have dropped since his return. Heung Min Son was the star in Kane’s absence, scoring 13 goals in a 16-game run in the winter, but he is not the same player when starting alongside Kane, and has not scored once since Kane came back.

Christian Eriksen has not looked himself for months. He is the man who knits the whole team together but this season he has not been as influential or as productive. Spurs have missed the Eriksen of the second half of last season and look - as they do when he is not at his best - as merely a sum of their parts. It should be remembered that Eriksen is counting down to a summer when his future will likely be decided, when he will have just one year left on his Spurs contract, meaning the club will have to sell him to avoid losing him for free. The expectation within the club is that Eriksen will be sold and if that does happen, he may only have eight game left for Spurs.

Hugo Lloris’ struggles this season are well-known and those who follow Spurs closely saw nothing out of character about his spilling the ball into Toby Alderweireld at Anfield on Sunday. His reactions and judgement are not what they were, he has struggled with handling and with coming off his line and it cannot be far away from the point when Spurs will need a change in that position. Alderweireld, the man who scored that famous own goal, is also set to leave if a team matches his £25million release clause this summer.

A Spurs squad that was all about youth and energy suddenly looks in desperate need of renewal and rejuvenation, of almost the same attention and money that has been spent on the stadium itself. Yes they still have some good young players - Harry Winks, Juan Foyth and Davinson Sanchez have all had positive seasons - but the rest of the squad now looks old and tired.

There is a reason why no Premier League club has ever gone consecutive windows without signing anyone: it lets the squad go stale. What has happened at Spurs in the last few months was entirely predictable given the lack of spending last summer or this January. The fact that they got this far - third in the table in early March, League Cup semi-final, Champions League quarter-finals - is testament to Pochettino’s management.

But Pochettino wanted an overhaul last summer and he did not get it. Spurs tried to sell Alderweireld, Danny Rose, Sissoko and Victor Wanyama but could not find buyers for any of them. Mousa Dembele’s move to China, which eventually happened this January, was put off for a few months. And with the costs of the new stadium spiralling, and the club having to borrow more and more to pay for it, they could not make the money they needed to buy new players. And they were forced to go into this season with last year’s squad again.

Whatever happens between now and the end of the season, this summer gives Spurs a second chance at that much-needed rebuild. And behind the high-profile cases of Eriksen and Alderweireld, there are plenty of squad players who could leave. Spurs will need to make a decision on Rose, who has two years left on his deal and has played himself back into the good books of Pochettino and fans after a difficult 2017-18. Wanyama also has two years left and is not the player he was. Neither Erik Lamela nor Serge Aurier have done enough this season for the club not to listen to offers for them this summer. Fernando Llorente is out of contract and Vincent Janssen, out of favour almost since he walked through the door, has one year left.

If Spurs can move on just a few of those players they will have the room and the money to rejuvenate the squad again, to give them the lift on the pitch that their new stadium deserves.