WAKE UP
De Zerbi Finally Named Joao Pedro In The Starting Eleven
For the first time since the window slammed shut, Roberto De Zerbi wrote Joao Pedro's name on the teamsheet from the first minute, and somewhere in the bowels of Hotspur Way a whiteboard got quietly binned. I have been writing about this club for long enough to know what stubbornness looks like, and what a corner looks like, and this was a man walking out of a corner with his hands up. We have not scored in the league since the second week of October. We have not scored at all, in any competition, since a scrappy cup tie against a side whose name I have already forgotten. The cavalry has been on the bench, smirking, for weeks, and the man in the dugout kept choosing the same broken front line and the same broken idea of what a number nine is for. So he changed it. He changed it the way managers change things when they have run out of things to change. He changed it because there was nothing else to do. Good. I would have preferred he changed it in August, but I will take the change now, and I will take the goals whenever they arrive, because they will arrive, because Joao Pedro does not go three matches without a goal, and because Tottenham have spent long enough pretending that the absence of him was a stylistic choice rather than a confession.
The run of games that made this inevitable
Let me walk you through October, because the supporters' timeline is the only one that matters in cases like this. We beat a Championship side in the cup and somehow came out of it looking like we had been in a war. We drew at home to a team we should be beating in our sleep. We lost at the Vitality, where the goals we conceded were the kind of goals you see in coaching videos labelled do not do this. Across those three matches we registered something like four shots on target, which is not a typo. Four. Across ninety plus ninety plus ninety. A goalkeeper for the opposition could have nipped to the loo for two of the matches and still kept a clean sheet. And through all of it, Joao Pedro sat on the bench in a nice coat.
Look, I understand the argument, because I have made it for managers I have liked less than De Zerbi. You do not buy a striker to drop him into a struggling side in the middle of a fixture pile-up. You integrate him. You give him cup minutes. You bring him on at half hour to chase a game. You let him smell the dressing room. That is the careful way. That is the textbook way. The problem is that the textbook is for when the rest of the side is functioning, and our side has not been functioning since the international break, and arguably not since the second match of the season, when Solanke did something clever and we all assumed he was about to become a different player. He has not become a different player. He has become the same player, only with more miles on the clock, and a hamstring he keeps rubbing in the second half, and a manager who keeps picking him anyway.
So when the goals dried up, and the xG dried up, and the crowd started doing that thing where they clap sarcastically when a centre forward passes backwards, the answer was on the bench, wearing a tracksuit top and grinning. And the manager knew it, and we knew it, and I assume the kit man knew it, because the kit man knows everything. The only person who appeared not to know it was the man picking the team. Until today.
Why it took this long is the more interesting question
I want to be careful here, because I like De Zerbi more than I have liked any Spurs manager since the first month of the previous one. He has done things with this squad structurally that I did not think were possible. He has made the midfield look like a midfield. He has finally, after years of disgrace, given Djed Spence a run that the FA has also caught up with. He has installed a defensive shape that does not require our centre backs to do a forty-yard sprint every time someone breathes on Saka. There is a lot of good. I have written about the good. I am not here to take any of it back.
But the Joao Pedro thing has been weird, and the weirdness is worth interrogating, because the rest of the season now depends on him and on whether he has the legs to do what we need him to do. The manager bought the striker, or the recruitment department bought the striker and the manager approved the striker, and then the manager declined to play the striker, week after week, on grounds that have shifted every time I have read an interview. First it was tactical. Then it was fitness. Then it was the need to bed in a new system. Then it was something about pressing from the front. Pressing from the front, with a man who is currently our top scorer in the Champions League, and who had scored the week before he arrived at the club, and who is Brazilian, and therefore was, by his own admission on a podcast I have now listened to twice, doing his pre-season at a beach in Trancoso while we were worrying about heart rate zones.
I do not think De Zerbi is a fool. I think he is the opposite of a fool, which is the more annoying kind of manager to argue with, because you cannot just shout play the lad and feel better about yourself. He had a plan, and the plan did not work, and today the plan got put in a drawer. That is fine. That is what managers do. The only reason the Joao Pedro situation felt different is the same reason the Djed Spence situation felt different for the first eighteen months: when a player is clearly better than what is in front of him, and the manager keeps picking what is in front of him, the supporter stops reading tactics and starts reading ego. And once you start reading ego, the relationship is different.
So we are now in a different relationship. I am not going to pretend the relationship is broken. I think the relationship is better for the change. But I am also not going to pretend the last six weeks did not happen, because they did, and we have the league table to prove it, and the table does not care about the cleverness of a defensive shape when the opposition centre back has had the quietest afternoon of his life.
What changes now, in the next three weeks
The fixtures coming up are the kind that decide a season's mood, and I do not mean that in the motivational poster way, I mean it in the actual table way. We have a home tie against a side we beat in the cup but will not beat twice. We have a European night, which under De Zerbi is usually a joy and occasionally a horror. We have a London derby at a ground where we have not won in living memory, although the last time we went there I said that and we did win, so I will not tempt it. None of those matches forgive a front line that does not score. None of them forgive a number nine who is not a number nine. Joao Pedro is a number nine. Solanke is currently a man playing a number nine's position. There is a difference, and the difference is goals.
I also want to say something about the broader squad, because the Joao Pedro decision does not happen in a vacuum. The midfield that has been carrying this side all season is one injury away from looking a lot less like a midfield, and I do not trust the depth chart to hold up over a December that has not been kind to us in recent memory. The back four, for the first time in years, is not the problem, which is a sentence I never thought I would write about Tottenham, so I am writing it again. The back four is not the problem. Spence and the other full back have been excellent. Romero looks like the player we paid ninety million for. Vicario has had the season of his life and is getting the recognition that a year ago was being withheld by a national pundit class that I will not name because my blood pressure cannot take it.
So the spine is fine. The head of the spine is not fine. The head of the spine has been held together with tape and optimism since the third week of August, and we are now into mid-October, and the tape is wet, and the optimism has gone off. Joao Pedro coming in does not fix the rest of the spine, but it fixes the bit of the spine that scores, which is the bit that wins you matches you should not win, and the bit that loses you matches when nothing else is happening, which has been the bit we have been losing matches on.
There is a wider point here, and it is the one I want to leave this piece on, because I have made the smaller points already. A new striker is not a tactical problem. A new striker is a referendum on whether the manager trusts the structure he has built enough to put the best players in it. De Zerbi has spent four months building a structure. The structure is good. The structure works. The structure is, in fact, the reason we are not in a relegation fight despite the goals drying up, which says everything about the structure and everything about the goals. So the thing he did today, picking the striker, is not him abandoning the structure. It is him admitting the structure is good enough to absorb the striker. That is a compliment to the structure. It is also an admission that the previous six weeks were, at best, a controlled experiment that did not work. Both things can be true. I am a Tottenham fan. I am extremely comfortable with both things being true.
Now he has to play him again next week. And the week after. And on the cold Tuesday nights in the European competition that we used to dread and now, somehow, enjoy. And if he does not, I will be back here, writing another one of these, with another headline, and another point to make. I do not want to do that. I would rather be writing about the goals. So would the rest of us. So would Joao Pedro. So would the kit man, who, I am reliably informed, has been laying out the away kit for the striker since August and is tired of putting it back in the bag.