THE QUIET WEEK
De Zerbi Has Quietly Bought The Quiet Week Back
The international break ended on Sunday, and for the first time in months nothing happened around Spurs. No row, no leaked lineup, no Djed Spence headline, no third-kit discourse, no VAR protest signed by anybody who actually plays. The silence, for once, was not the absence of a story. It was the headline. And I do not trust it for a second, which is why I am writing it down before somebody tries to make it into one.
The week that wasn't
There is a particular kind of Tottenham week that I have come to recognise the way a man recognises a particular creak in the stairs. You wake up on a Monday and the algorithm has already decided what you are angry about. By Tuesday, three different podcasts have named three different villains. By Wednesday, a former coach has said something, a current coach has not said something, and a journalist has helpfully connected the two into a narrative that exists only on the page. By Friday, the team sheet is a hostage situation, and by Sunday, we lose.
This week did not do that. I kept waiting for it to.
There was no Spence subplot, because Spence is away with England doing the thing that nobody can stop talking about, and yet nobody talked about it this week, which is itself a kind of talking about it. There was no De Zerbi outburst, because the man has been on Italian television and Italian radio and Italian podcasts, and apparently Italian journalists do not ask him to mime throwing a water bottle in slow motion. He has come back looking like a man who has slept on a bed that was not shaped like a press conference podium. I do not know what is in the water in Milan, and I do not want to know, but I want some of it.
There was also no Xavi Simons row, no João Pedro fitness leak, no poring over a third kit at the training ground like it were a Caravaggio. There was a quiet Tuesday, a quieter Wednesday, and a Thursday so quiet that I genuinely considered the possibility that the internet had been unplugged. The only thing that actually happened, in the entire seven days, is that Mohammed Kudus got his Ghana caps and looked extremely happy about it, and that Cristian Romero came back from Argentina with a yellow card and the air of a man who has not been booked in a friendly in some time and was treating it as a personal achievement.
That is the week. I have written it down so that you can see how little is in it.
Why the silence is suspicious
I am a Spurs fan, which means I am genetically incapable of treating a quiet week as a gift. The last time we had a quiet week, in any meaningful sense, was approximately 2006, and even then the quiet week was caused by a power cut in north London, and somebody tried to claim it was a sign.
So let me be honest about the shape of my suspicion. There are three things I am watching, and the quietness around them is the loudest part.
The first is De Zerbi himself. He went to Italy and did not have a meltdown. He gave an interview to Football Italia in which he was, by his standards, almost statesmanlike. He praised the league, praised his players by name, and - this is the bit I cannot get over - did not once mention the officials. I have watched every press conference of his at Spurs. I have them in a folder. I would like to say that for the public record. He has, in fourteen months, mentioned officials in every single one. The Italian interview has not got a single referee in it. He is either rested, or he has been told, or he has been promised. I do not know which of those I find most interesting.
The second is the squad shape. The international break did the thing that international breaks are supposed to do, which is break players. Our lot came back with one hamstring twinge, one dead leg, and a back spasm that Pedro Porro insists is nothing and the medical staff insist is something. The point is that the squad is a little thinner than it was, and yet we are somehow in the run of fixtures where every team we play has had a clean week. We play Aston Villa on Sunday, who have had their entire squad home since Wednesday. We play Atlético on the Wednesday after, in the Champions League, who have not had a single South American called up to anything, which is, when you think about it, an outrageous piece of luck and almost certainly engineered by a cartel. We play Brighton the Saturday after, who will be happy to see us, because they always are.
The third is the way the rest of the league has been talking. I will not dignify it with a full paragraph, because I do not want to give them my word count, but it has been the kind of week where Manchester City are described as "finding their rhythm," where Arsenal are described as "maturing," where Liverpool are described as "getting the best out of" a player who cost more than our entire academy. None of these things are true. All of them are being written. It is October, the second international break has finished, and the serious papers are doing the thing where they tell you the season is over for the teams they do not like. I do not believe them. I also do not trust my own belief, because I am a Spurs fan, and that is the job.
What De Zerbi actually did with the week
Here is the thing the algorithm will not let me say, because the algorithm wants me to be angry, and the truth is that I am not particularly angry, and that scares me more than anything.
De Zerbi used the international break correctly. That is it. That is the whole article. I am going to stretch it out because I owe you the word count, but that is the headline. He used the week the way a man who has been a manager since 2018 uses a week, which is to say: he rested the people who needed resting, he worked the people who stayed behind, and he did not, in front of a single camera, treat the next fixture as a referendum on his tenure.
The detail that got me, and I appreciate this is a granular detail for a fan blog, is the training-ground clip the club put out on Wednesday. It is a minute and a half, and there is no music on it, and there is no narration. It is just De Zerbi, standing at the edge of a six-a-side, watching Bissouma and Bentancur argue about who takes the free kick. He does not whistle. He does not call out. He lets them sort it. The man who, six months ago, would have run across the pitch to do the free kick himself - and I say this with love, the man loves a free kick - is now standing still, with his hands in his pockets, watching two senior professionals negotiate a five-yard set piece like it is a council planning meeting.
That is a manager buying a quiet week. That is what a quiet week looks like when somebody is buying it on purpose.
The Villa game is the test of whether he is allowed to keep it. Villa, under whoever is in charge of them at this exact moment in the cycle - I think it is the one with the baseball cap, I have stopped keeping up, they change managers the way other clubs change socks - will be exactly the kind of side that punishes a team that has had a quiet week. They press, they run, and they have a striker who is currently on a run of goals that I refuse to describe because I do not want to give him a paragraph in my own blog. I will describe him as a man who is having the time of his life at the expense of the entire league, and that is as far as I am willing to go.
If Spurs go to Villa Park and play the way they played in the second half at Frankfurt, the quiet week is a foundation. If they play the way they played in the first half of that game, the quiet week is a rumour. There is no in-between with this team. There has not been an in-between since the Brentford game in August, and I am including the Brentford game in that sentence to make the point that I am still angry about the Brentford game.
The thing I will not say out loud
I have been writing this blog for a while now, and I have learned that the things I am most certain about are the things I should write down. This is one of them.
De Zerbi is, at the time of writing, the best manager we have had since the man I am not going to name for contractual reasons. I realise that is a heavy thing to type, and I realise that the people who run the club site are under strict instructions not to print sentences of that shape, and I realise that the people who run the podcasts will turn it into a take. I am writing it because I want it on the record, in October, in a quiet week, that the man has done the one thing no Spurs manager in my lifetime has managed to do: he has made a week quiet on purpose. The quiet weeks used to be accidents. They were the ones between crises. They were the intermissions. This one was scheduled. He put it in the calendar. He walked into the building, told the press officer to hold the line for ten days, told the players to go and play for their countries, and then stood on the edge of a six-a-side in north London and let two of his midfielders have an argument about a free kick.
If you have ever been on a losing side that finally stopped losing, you know what that looks like. It does not look like a parade. It looks like a Tuesday. It looks like a Wednesday where nothing happens. It looks like a Thursday that is so quiet that the algorithm gives up on you and tries somebody else for content. I have had those Tuesdays. I have had those Thursdays. They are the foundation of every good run I have ever had, and they are the foundation of nothing if the manager does not protect them.
He protected this one. I am writing it down.
Sunday is the test. Villa away, an early kick-off, the kind of game where the crowd is already annoyed about something before the teams have come out. We will lose, or we will draw, or we will win. I have no view. I am writing this in the middle of a quiet week, and I do not want to spoil the quiet by predicting anything. I just want to say, on the record, on a Tuesday in October, in a week where nothing happened, that the manager bought it. He spent his own currency. He used the goodwill of the press, the patience of the board, the silence of the players, and the fact that nobody was watching, and he bought us a week that was, for once, ours.
Give me one of those a month. I do not need a trophy. I do not need a transfer. I do not need a hero. I need a manager who knows how to buy a quiet week, and then knows how to use it. This is the first one I have had since I started this blog, and I wanted to mark it before the next one comes along and ruins it.