REAL TALK
Djed Spence Earned the Start, Not the Sympathy
We have spent two years talking about Spence like a cautionary tale. Twenty six minutes at St James' Park was enough to remind everyone in the ground, and apparently nobody in the studio, that the cautionary tale was never actually about him. De Zerbi has a left side decision to make for the weekend, and the easy thing would be to do what we always do. The brave thing, the one that actually fits the manager we said we wanted, is to give the lad the start he has earned in a way that has nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with what we just watched.
What we actually saw on Saturday
It is worth saying out loud, because the narrative machine will not: twenty six minutes is not a sample size. It is also not nothing. Spence came on at left wing back with the game still in a place where one mistake would have ended the afternoon, and he did not make one. He made three or four that changed the temperature of the stadium. The first time he took a player on, the away end woke up in a way it had not all half. The second time, he won a free kick in a position that ought to have produced a goal and did not, because the set piece delivery is a separate column for a separate day. The third time, he carried the ball thirty yards up the line and slid a pass into the corridor that Bissouma has been begging someone to find for two months. None of that is on the stat sheet. All of it is on the watch.
There is a particular kind of fan, and we have all been that fan at three in the morning, who thinks twenty six minutes against a tiring Newcastle side is a small thing. They will tell you the opposition had stopped. They will tell you the game was done. They will tell you the manager only put him on because the result was safe. They are not lying, exactly. They are also not watching the same match the rest of us watched. Spence did not look like a man easing his way back into a squad. He looked like a man who had been sat in a dressing room for months listening to people decide what he was, and who had decided, quietly and without an interview, to show them.
I keep coming back to the body language. The first touch was crisp. The second touch was braver. By the fourth minute he was asking for the ball the way Porro asks for the ball, and Porro did not make the trip on Saturday. That is not a coincidence, and it is not a conspiracy either. It is a manager watching a player train the way he has obviously been training, and saying, fine, show me. Spence showed him.
The case that has been building in plain sight
Anyone who has been near the training ground reports, and I am including the ones we are not supposed to read, has been saying for a fortnight that Spence was the best trainer in the squad. Not the best trainer for a player in his situation. The best trainer, full stop. De Zerbi is the kind of manager who means it when he says things like that, because he is the kind of manager who gets angry when a player is not. We saw it at Brighton for three years. He will sit a senior international for a fortnight if the senior international has been a yard off the pace in a Tuesday session. He will also pick a twenty two year old out of the cold if the twenty two year old has been the best trainer in the squad, and the column inches about the senior international are not his problem.
That is the frame. It is not about Spence the story. It is not about Spence the redemption arc. It is about Spence the footballer, who is, on current evidence, in the best form of his career and has been for long enough that the staff have noticed and the staff do not get fooled. The Premier League is full of players who had a good week in training. It is not full of players who had a good week in training and then went and did exactly the same thing in a stadium, against a team that still had something to play for, with the cameras on. Spence did that on Saturday. The question is not whether he is ready. The question is what we were all watching between January and now.
And let us be honest about why we did not see it. Because the story was already written. Spence arrived as a fee that did not make sense to half the fanbase, on the back of a loan at Rennes that half the fanbase had not watched, and the first six months gave everyone the excuse they wanted. He got injured. He got sent out. He got namechecked in articles about young English full backs who had not made it. By the time he came back into the picture, the labels were dry and the boxes were ticked and the easy thing, the comfortable thing, the thing that costs nobody anything, was to keep him in the same box. Twenty six minutes on Saturday is a small but important inconvenience to that box. He has kicked the lid off it and it is not going to close again.
Why this weekend, against this opponent, with this shape
De Zerbi's system, the one he has been slowly turning into Spurs over the last three months, asks the left wing back to do three things. Invert into midfield when the ball is on the far side. Get to the byline when the ball is on the near side. And, the bit that is easy to miss, be the second runner in the box on a cross from the right. Porro does the first two of those as well as anyone in the country. He is also, in my view and I will defend this view in the pub, the third-best crosser of a ball in this squad. Spence did all three of those jobs in twenty six minutes on Saturday. He is not better than Porro. That is not the argument. The argument is that there is a way to get both of them on the pitch at the same time, and the manager has been hinting at it without saying it out loud, and this weekend is the fixture to actually do it.
Because the opponent is one we have a particular kind of result against, and I am not going to dress it up. We have lost more than we have won against this lot in the last five years, and the defeats have a habit of being the ones that linger. We do not need to be reminded. The point is that the way they press, high and narrow and slightly naive in behind, is exactly the way a left footed wing back who can carry the ball gets to do his best work. Newcastle sat off after the first goal and Spence looked better. A team that comes to press us is going to find out what we have just found out, which is that there is now a Spurs player on the left who is comfortable being the spare man in a three versus two at the back and comfortable being the runner in behind in a two versus one at the other end. That is a different animal. That is the animal we have not had since the start of the season.
And let us not pretend this is only about football. There is a young man in our squad who has been the subject of about nine hundred column inches in the last eighteen months, almost none of which had anything to do with how he plays. Picking him this weekend, in the XI, not as a substitution, with the badge on the front and the number on the back, is a small act of footballing justice. It is also, and I will say this even though it makes me sound like one of those people, the right thing to do. We ask players to play for the shirt. Every so often the club should mean it when it puts the shirt on them.
The bench that makes the call easier
There is a counter argument, and I want to deal with it because the counter argument is the one that is going to get a run on Sky on Friday lunchtime. The counter argument is that twenty six minutes is twenty six minutes, and there is a championship winning right back sitting on the bench, and you do not drop a championship winning right back on the back of a cameo. Fair. But nobody is being dropped. Porro is not a left wing back by trade, and he has been doing a job there for weeks, and doing it well, and will go back to his proper side when the shape calls for it. What we are talking about is selection, not punishment. What we are talking about is the manager picking the player in the best form for the role, and trusting him with ninety minutes instead of the last twenty.
There is also a squad to think about. We are not in a position to treat Spence like a luxury we can keep wrapped in cotton wool for the run that is coming. The run is November and December and it is brutal. We need a left wing back who can play three games in a week without the form falling off a cliff. We need a left wing back who can play at Anfield and at the Etihad and at home to a top four side and not look like a man who has been told to enjoy the occasion. Spence has done one of those. He is not yet a known quantity at the others. He is, however, a known quantity at St James' Park in a high intensity road game with something on the line, and the people who actually do this job for a living have been saying for a fortnight that the ceiling is high. The floor used to be the worry. It is not the worry any more.
And the bench, the actual bench, still has a fit Porro on it. That is the safety net. That is the difference between this and the old days when we would blood a kid and the kid would know, and we would know, and the opposition would know, that the kid was one mistake from being hooked. Spence is not one mistake from being hooked. He is the start. Porro is the back nine, the change of shape, the answer to whatever the other manager tries in the second half. That is not a gamble. That is depth. We have been begging for depth for five transfer windows. We have it now. We might as well use it like we mean it.
What De Zerbi has already told us without telling us
Listen to the press conferences. Not the headlines, the press conferences. The manager talked after the Newcastle game about wanting his full backs to invert with personality. He used the word personality, which is the word he uses when he means something specific, which is that he does not want a player to do the safe thing, he wants a player to do the brave thing, and he wants a player to do the brave thing often enough that the opposition has to change the plan. Porro does the brave thing about twice a game. Spence did it three times in twenty six minutes. The manager did not say Spence's name. He also did not need to. He described the player he wanted and then, when pressed on the shape for the weekend, said the interesting thing. He said, and I am quoting from the press conference because the clip is up on the club site, that he is looking for solutions that respect the opponent and reward the form. Reward the form. That is the line. That is the line Spence has been training for.
It would be easy, and we have been here before, for the manager to do the politically correct thing. He could rotate. He could give Spence another twenty minutes. He could keep the shape that won on Saturday and call it evolution. That is the path that gets the manager a quiet week and a settled squad and no column inches. It is also the path that tells Spence, and tells the rest of the squad, that the training ground comments were nice words and nothing more. De Zerbi did not come to this club to be nice. He came to this club to be right, and on current evidence he is right, and the weekend is the right time to show the squad that the right thing gets rewarded, even when the right thing is a player that half the country has already written off.
There is a line from Pep that has done the rounds this week, and I am not going to pretend I am above using it. About how the best thing a manager can do for a young player is tell him the truth, and the second best thing is to play him. De Zerbi has done the first. Twenty six minutes on Saturday was the start of the second. The full version of the second, with the whistle and the badge and the ninety minutes on a Saturday afternoon with the cameras on, is the version that actually counts. It is the version Spence has earned. It is the version we should be talking about by tea time on Sunday, win or lose, because win or lose the conversation afterwards will be the conversation we have been waiting to have for two years. About a player, not a story. About a footballer, not a headline. About a left side that finally, finally, has two options that the rest of the league has to think about.