ANFIELD DIARY
De Zerbi Rotated Anfield And Got It Exactly Right
I am sick to death of the word "disrespect" being thrown at this club every time we do something sensible, so let us get one thing straight before the rest of this post. Roberto De Zerbi left four or five first choice players at home for the trip to Liverpool on Sunday, and we came away with a draw that should have been a win, and that is the most important thing that happened in the league for Spurs this calendar month. The men in studio suits were already sharpening their knives before the team sheet dropped. Same faces, same hot takes, same tired little lectures about the league, the badge, the supporters, the fact that a footballer is somehow contractually obliged to break a leg if Sky Sports is in the building. None of it landed. None of it has landed for a while, if we are honest with each other. This is a club that has been told, for the better part of a generation, that rotation is a sin and youth is a phase and the league table is the only scripture that matters. We have internalised all of it. We have repeated it back at each other in queues at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and in group chats and in the back of cabs going up the High Road. And then a manager who is not from this country, who did not grow up being haunted by the words "Spursy" and "St Totteringham's", walks in, looks at the calendar, looks at the squad, looks at the fact we have Chelsea after the international window, Brighton away midweek, a cup quarter final and a European night inside ten days, and makes the obvious call. He rests people. He plays the lads who have earned it. He trusts the group. And the world acts like he has personally insulted someone's nan.
The team sheet was not the story, the reaction was
Let us set the scene, because context matters here. We went to Anfield on the back of three wins in seven days, a Carabao Cup run that is starting to feel like the one from two seasons ago, and a Champions League group where we have been professional without ever quite catching fire. The first eleven that started the previous Saturday at Bournemouth included Cristian Romero, Micky van de Ven, Pedro Porro, Dejan Kulusevski, James Maddison and Dominic Solanke. Four of those names are pushing through something. One of them, and I will not name him because the medical staff have asked for calm, is playing on a foot that should probably be in a boot. De Zerbi saw all of that, and he made a decision. He brought in a centre half partnership that has played together exactly twice. He played a 20 year old at left back. He started a winger who has not started a Premier League game since August. He named Brennan Johnson on the bench, which is not a sentence I ever thought I would write in a positive light. And then, with all of that, we went 1-0 up inside twelve minutes through a Pape Matar Sarr strike that he will be showing his grandchildren on a phone screen in about forty years, and we held that lead until the 78th minute, when a Liverpool equaliser came off a deflection off a Spurs leg, which is the most Liverpool thing that has ever happened at Anfield, including Steven Gerrard's slip.
The post match conversation on Sky and on BBC and in every pub from here to Enfield was not about the performance. It was not about the fact that our second choice midfield competed with theirs, that Archie Gray handled Mohamed Salah for most of an afternoon, that our set piece coach, whoever that is this month, had clearly identified a weakness in their second phase. The conversation was about respect. About the badge. About whether De Zerbi owes the supporters a certain kind of team selection. As if football is a wedding. As if we are entitled to a particular aesthetic at the cost of actual points. I cannot tell you how tired I am of this framing. We have lost more Premier League games in the last five years to tired legs in the 70th minute than we have to tactical naivety, and yet somehow the discourse is still that a manager who rests a 34 year old centre forward for a Tuesday night in Europe is not taking the league seriously. Take the league seriously how, exactly. By losing 3-0 at Brighton with three games in a week? By going out of the FA Cup to a Championship side in extra time because we could not lift our legs in the third round replay? We have been taking the league seriously for years. It has not worked. Maybe try something new.
The young lads who actually played deserve their own paragraph
One of the things I want to put on the record, because I do not trust the club communications department to do it for me, is the performance of the four or five academy players who got their chance at Anfield and absolutely did not flinch. I have been writing on this site for years, in one form or another, that the path through the youth system at Hotspur Way is the single most underused asset in English football, and that the only people telling us it does not work are the people who have never watched a Tuesday night under-21 game at Leyton Orient's ground in the rain. On Sunday we got to see what that path looks like when it is given daylight. There was a midfield performance from a 19 year old that I am not going to name in full here, because I want him to have one more quiet week before the circus finds him, that would have started a bidding war if he had been wearing blue. There was a centre half who is still officially a first year scholar, by my count, who did not put a foot wrong. There was a wide player, on the right, who has had to be patient all season, who took his chance, who got the assist, who is going to be linked with half of La Liga by Wednesday and is going to be on the bench against Chelsea because that is the way this works, isn't it.
This is the part of the day that got buried, and I am not going to let it be buried. The point of a squad is not that the eleven who start against Liverpool are the same eleven who start against Chelsea. The point of a squad is that the eleven who start against Liverpool are the eleven who are best equipped to win the game in front of them, while the eleven who are rested are the eleven who are best equipped to win the game after that. That is not rocket science. That is what Manchester City have done for a decade. That is what Arsenal have learned to do, slowly and painfully, over the last four seasons. That is what Liverpool themselves do with the Brazilian goalkeeper who cost more than our entire bench. We have never been allowed to do it, because the discourse says that any rotation is weakness, and any drop in quality is betrayal, and any loss is the fault of the manager and any win is despite him. I am not having that conversation about De Zerbi. I am not having it about the lads who played either. They did their bit. They held the line at Anfield. They gave us a point that keeps the unbeaten away run going, that keeps the mood going into the international break, that gives us a chance to reset with a fit squad for the run that starts at Stamford Bridge the week after next.
Liverpool's goal should have been disallowed, and we should not be the only ones saying it
I want to be careful here, because I do not want this site to become the kind of blog that lives and dies on refereeing decisions, and I have made that point on this site more than once. But the equaliser on Sunday, the one that came in the 78th minute off a deflection off the heel of a Spurs defender, came from a phase of play where a Liverpool player was standing in an offside position and actively interfering with the sightline of the goalkeeper. I have watched it back seven times, which is four more times than is healthy, and I am clear in my view that Guglielmo Vicario was blocked, that the assistant referee had a clear line, and that the goal should not have stood. Now. PGMOL will release a statement on Wednesday morning, in that dead-eyed, lawyer-approved prose they use, that will say the officials got the major decisions correct, and that will be that. The VAR will not comment. The audio will not be released. The Premier League will move on. And I will move on too, because I have to, because we all have to, because that is the deal we have accepted by being Spurs supporters in 2026, which is that the structural unfairness of the officiating environment is just part of the weather, like the rain in November, like the away end at the Emirates, like the guy on Twitter who thinks he knows more than our entire coaching staff.
But it is worth saying, out loud, on this site, on this date, that we have now had three separate major decisions go against us in our last four Premier League away games, and that none of those decisions have been acknowledged in any meaningful way by the people whose job it is to acknowledge them. We have had a clear and obvious penalty not given at Old Trafford. We have had a goal ruled out at the Etihad for a marginal offside that the linesman did not flag in real time. We have had this one at Anfield. Three games. Three points dropped. None of which will appear in the end of season review that the league publishes, because the end of season review is always a victory lap for the officials and a quiet word for the managers, and the quiet word is always, somehow, that we should focus on ourselves. I am focusing on ourselves. I am saying, with love, that we were good on Sunday, that we deserved the three points, and that the system we play inside of is engineered to make sure we do not get them. That is the whole post, really. That is the whole beat.
What this actually tells us about where we are under De Zerbi
I have been writing on joshuamerrin.info for long enough now to know when a Spurs side is actually changing underneath me, and when a Spurs side is just having a good run. The evidence from the first two months of this season, and from Sunday in particular, is that we are changing. The shape is different. The pressing triggers are different. The way we use the fullbacks is different. The way we rotate the front line is different. The way the manager talks after games is different, which sounds like a small thing, but it is not, because the post match interview is the only public-facing part of the job that the supporters actually consume in real time, and for the first time in about three years, I do not feel embarrassed by what our manager says. That is a sentence I have not written on this site before. I have written the opposite of that sentence so many times that I lost count during the Thomas Frank era, and I will not go back to it.
What I want to see in the next ten days, while the internationals are away and we get a moment to breathe, is two things. First, I want the club to be very, very clear, in the language it uses, that the Anfield performance is the template and not the exception. That this is how we are going to play, that this is the level, that this is what a rotated Spurs side looks like when it is properly coached and properly trusted. Second, I want the same voices who questioned the rotation on Sunday night, and they know who they are, because they are the same voices who questioned every other decision this club has made in my lifetime, to have the basic decency to acknowledge, on Wednesday morning, that the point at Anfield is exactly the kind of result that the teams above us in the table go and get. That is the standard. We are holding ourselves to it. We are not asking anyone else to hold us to it. We just want them to stop pretending it does not exist.