MATCHDAY
La scintilla: Clive Allen found his spark against Villa, and we are one goal away from ours
Spurs play Aston Villa at 12:30 today still looking for a first league goal of the season. Forty years ago, a Tottenham striker coming back from a wrecked season opened his campaign against Villa, scored a hat-trick and did not stop until he had 49. His name was Clive Allen. One goal changes everything, and today's side is closer to it than anyone outside the club will admit.
Let me say the honest part first, because I always do. Four league games, no goals. Two points. Seventeenth. A cup exit at Anfield on Tuesday. If you had shown me that table in July I would have closed the laptop and gone for a long walk. I have made serious money in markets by refusing to lie to myself about the chart, and I am not going to start lying to myself about this one.
But anyone who has ever held a position through a bad quarter knows the difference between a chart that is broken and a chart that is coiled. A broken chart has nothing underneath it. A coiled one has volume building and a price that refuses to move, until one day it moves all at once. This morning I want to talk about why I think Tottenham are coiled, and why the man who knows most about what happens next is a striker who did it to Aston Villa forty years ago.
What does la scintilla mean?
It is Italian for the spark. According to the club's own write-up this week, Roberto De Zerbi used the phrase after the 3-1 defeat at Liverpool, where we out-shot them 17 to 12 and still lost. The idea is simple. A team that is creating chances and not taking them does not need a new system or a new manager. It needs one moment to catch, and then the confidence does the rest.
He said something close to it in English that night as well. "I think when we make the click," he said in his post-match verdict, "I think we are going to win many games and score many goals." The click. The spark. Call it what you like. The media called it excuses. I called it the most accurate reading of Anfield anyone produced that week, and I have not changed my mind.
Here is why I take it seriously. Football is not a steady drip. Goals come in clumps. A striker who has not scored in a month scores twice in a week. A side that cannot buy a goal suddenly scores four. Anyone who has watched this club for long enough has seen it happen, and the best example in our entire history started against the team we play today.
What happened at Villa Park on 23 August 1986?
The opening day of the 1986/87 First Division season. David Pleat's first season in charge. Tottenham go to Villa Park, and Clive Allen scores all three in a 3-0 win. Mitchell Thomas and Richard Gough make their debuts. Glenn Hoddle, Chris Waddle and Tony Galvin are in the side. The club's history of hat-tricks at Villa Park has the line-up if you want to feel old.
Allen remembers the first goal as barely a goal at all. A Galvin cross, and he told the club in a five-questions interview in April that he "just got the bottom of my boot to it" and it flew into the bottom corner. That is the spark. Not a thirty-yard screamer. A scruffy finish off his studs early in the opening game.
And look at what it set off. He went on to score 49 goals in all competitions that season. Nobody at this club has matched it since. Jimmy Greaves got 42 in 1962/63, 44 if you count the Charity Shield. Martin Chivers got 42 in 1971/72. Harry Kane, the greatest goalscorer this club has ever produced, got 41 in 2017/18. Clive Allen got 49, and it started with a goal he half fell into at Villa Park.
Why does the first goal matter so much?
Allen explained it himself this week, and it is the clearest thing anyone has said about our season so far. "For me, that Villa hat-trick was the perfect start to the season, and the confidence I had from there was unbelievable," he told the club. "I just wanted to play the next game straight away, the next and the next!"
Then he turned it on the present. "We created chances against Everton, created chances again against Liverpool in midweek," he said. "It's an obvious thing to say, but if we can just get ourselves in front, it could make all the difference."
The man who holds the club record for goals in a season is telling you the chances are there. The only thing missing is the first one going in.
He said the same in the club's legends' preview of today's game: "we need to get ourselves in front," and "when the chances come along, we have to be ruthless." Graham Roberts, who captained us to the UEFA Cup in 1984, went further about the last meeting. "We were the better team that day," he said of our 2-1 win at Villa Park in May. I wrote about that win and what it meant yesterday. Two legends of this club, both reading the same pattern I have been writing about for a fortnight.
There is something else in Allen's story that people skip. He had been badly injured the season before. He told the club he had played only the last 12 games of 1985/86 after a year of worrying whether he would play at all. He was not a man on a hot streak going into Villa Park. He was a man coming back from nothing. The spark did not arrive because everything was already going well. It arrived first, and then everything went well.
Are Spurs really creating enough to score?
This is where the honest part and the hopeful part meet. We have not scored in the league. That is a fact. But go back through the games. Brentford away on the opening day was bad and I have never pretended otherwise. After that, De Zerbi said we deserved to be winning the Newcastle game for an hour before we lost it 2-0. Then two goalless draws, in which we were not beaten. Then Anfield, where the club's match report says we had Liverpool on the ropes late on, and where De Zerbi counted "six, seven clear chances to score."
Seventeen shots at Anfield. Liverpool had twelve. I have written about the real reason we are not scoring and I stand by every word, but the Liverpool game was the first time this season the numbers matched the effort. And the goal that did go in came from Conor Gallagher's header, the same Gallagher who opened the scoring at Villa Park in May. Talking about how the side responded after Liverpool's second, De Zerbi said on Friday: "We show a great reaction and deserve another goal." That is what a spark looks like. It was there for twenty minutes on Tuesday night. It just came too late in the game to finish the job.
On Friday he went further than I have ever heard a manager go about this. "Sometimes when you are the coach of the team, without you knowing the reason, you are able to score," he said in the full transcript of his pre-match press conference. "And other times, another situation where I think you are playing well, not fantastic, but well enough to score, enough to win, and you don't win." That is not an excuse. That is a coach telling you, in plain words, that he knows football runs in streaks. Clive Allen would sign every word of it.
Who is available against Villa?
This is the part that has me properly excited. On Friday De Zerbi said: "Porro, Tonali, Maddison, all are available to play. Normally, we have to understand the situation in terms of physical condition, but all of them are ready." The club's team news confirms it. Pedro Porro missed Everton and Liverpool. Sandro Tonali missed the trip to Anfield with a knock. Both are back.
I have already made the case that Porro coming back is worth more than one line of team news. Width, delivery, dead balls. Last season we scored 19 league goals from set pieces, not counting penalties, and a side short of open-play goals does not need to reinvent itself. It needs its best crosser back on the pitch.
Then there is James Maddison, who came on for the last 15 minutes at Anfield. De Zerbi was careful on Friday. "James is working with the team in the last 10, 15 days, maybe less than 15 days," he said. "Even if he's a technical player, he needs to be fit." But listen to how he finished the thought. "When he arrives to the best condition, it's very important for us as a personality, as a characteristic, as a quality, as an experience. The quality of his passes are different than the others." I argued this week that Maddison is worth waiting for. The waiting is nearly over. A player whose passes are different from everyone else's is exactly the kind of player who produces the one moment a stuck side needs.
The club lists Xavi Simons, Dejan Kulusevski, Mykhailo Mudryk and Wilson Odobert as still out. Four attacking players. I will let the people who call this a crisis explain how any side in the league scores freely with four of its forwards unavailable. They will not, because it ruins the story.
What about Kulusevski?
He is not playing today, and I want to be clear about that. But he is back in training, and I want to talk about him, because nobody else seems to think it is news. Deki was forced off in the league defeat to Crystal Palace in May 2025. The club confirmed on 14 May that year that he had undergone surgery on his right patella, and Ange Postecoglou said it would put him out "at least for a few months." It turned into the whole of the next season. He has not played a competitive game for this club in more than sixteen months.
When De Zerbi was asked on Friday how he handles a player coming back from that, he refused the premise of the question. "No, he doesn't need my encouragement, because he's strong, he has a great character, and he's an example for everyone." I have read a lot of manager quotes in my life. That is one of the best.
And here is a detail from the club's archive I love. The last time a Tottenham player scored a hat-trick at Villa Park, in the 4-0 win in April 2022, it was Heung-Min Son. The second goal that day, the one that broke Villa, was Kulusevski curling one in. He has been part of a spark against this club before. When he comes back, he will be the closest thing to a new signing we could possibly get, and it will not cost a penny.
Is there a history of this against Villa?
There is, and it is extraordinary. The club says only four players have ever scored a hat-trick for us at Villa Park: Martin Chivers, Clive Allen, Gareth Bale and Son. Bale's came on Boxing Day 2012, a 4-0 win in which Jermain Defoe scored first and Bale added three in the second half. Son's came on 9 April 2022, another 4-0, in a run where we won 10 of our last 14 league games and overtook Arsenal for fourth. Allen's started a 49-goal season.
Look at the pattern. Every time a Tottenham forward has caught fire against Villa, it has been the start of something, not the end of it. Bale scored 21 league goals that season. Son shared the Golden Boot. Allen broke a record that has now stood for four decades. I am not saying that is destiny. I do not deal in destiny. I deal in patterns, and that one is on the record for anyone who cares to look.
Today is not at Villa Park, of course. It is at our place, and De Zerbi was generous to the opposition on Friday. "They have one of the best coaches in the world," he said of Unai Emery. "It's a tough game for us. I think it's a tough game also for them." That last sentence is the one the previews have ignored. Villa have one point from four league games. They are 19th. They played their cup tie a day after we played ours. If we are under pressure, so are they, and only one of the two sides had seventeen shots at Anfield this week.
So what do I want to see today?
One goal. That is all. Not a performance for the neutrals, not three points wrapped in a bow, though I will take both. One goal, from anyone, off anything. A header from a Porro corner. A scuffed finish off somebody's studs from a Galvin-style cross. A deflection. I genuinely do not care. Clive Allen did not care either when his went in off the bottom of his boot, and look where it took him.
De Zerbi said on Friday that the players "have my full confidence," and that the team would get better "day by day, but not by words, but by fact." I like that line because it is how I have always run a portfolio. Words are cheap. The ledger is the ledger. Today is a chance to write something new into it.
If the spark comes, remember where you read it first. If it does not, I will be back here tonight with the chances counted and the decisions checked, because somebody has to keep the record straight. But I have a feeling about this one. Forty years ago, against this opponent, one scruffy goal turned into 49. We only need the first.
Update, 24 September. The spark did arrive, twice, and far too late to matter: we lost 2-3 and went bottom. I have written up what actually happened against Villa, and why I still think the football is ahead of the table.