Spurs are the best and worst of football teams; is that enough for the fans?

Those 10 games at the start of last season really are starting to look like one of the cruellest tricks ever played on any Premier League fanbase. Twenty-six points Spurs got from those games. Twenty. Six. Points. Proper, no-doubt-about-it Premier League title form.

And since then, mid-table slop. With the emphasis on slop.

They are a relentlessly sloppy, infuriatingly stupid football team. That Ange Postecoglou has rocked up offering a glimpse of something real and better and an end to the Spursy behaviour and then actually built the single most ‘Lads, it’s Tottenham’ team the Premier League has ever seen is a remarkable act.

The thing is, while they are crap by ‘big six’ standards’, they are not crap by overall Tottenham Premier League standards. They are a lot of fun. They are, when the mood takes them, capable of playing some of the best football in the division. They are also, obviously, never more than one minor setback from playing some of the worst.

This itself becomes self-fulfilling because if teams never feel like they’re out of the game against you then teams never are in fact out of the game against you. Lads, it’s Tottenham.

Spurs know they could collapse at any moment. Every team they play knows they could collapse at any moment. It is always possible – likely, even – that the fondue they’ve set up on the nuclear power plant safety console is about to topple over.

Now there is a fairly substantial subsection of Tottenham fans who can live with this. Who actually wouldn’t mind going back to the pre-Big Six days of being reliably entertaining, of knowing that every season will bring its share of brilliant and memorable highs to go with the mortifying lows, while occasionally finishing fifth but more often winding up eighth or 10th.

It’s fine if that’s what you want; it’s certainly less stressful than having to be in a constant fight for fourth place that makes every single result matter and every single inevitable setback sting that much more.

But the problem you’ve got now is that this is not how Spurs see themselves in big 2024. They have the best stadium in the country. They have more money to spend than almost anyone. It’s rather overlooked that Big Ange has had more cash lavished on his underperforming squad than any of his predecessors.

There is always that disconnect with Spurs. They are a big club in all the ways that don’t really matter and not remotely a big club in the one way that does.

On the field, nothing is going to change under this set-up. There will be more ‘3-0 win at Old Trafford’ days, and plenty more ‘3-2 defeat at Brighton’. And so Spurs will remain forever stuck between how they are and how they see themselves, with almost no straightforward way to square that circle.

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