REACTION
We finally scored, twice, and went bottom of the league on the same afternoon
Tottenham lost 2-3 to Aston Villa at home on Saturday and are now 20th in the Premier League with two points from five games. The goal drought that half of English football had turned into a running joke ended twice in the last five minutes. Nobody will remember that, because the story about this club was written before kickoff, the way it always is. So I am going to put the actual afternoon on the record while the international break gives me the time to do it.
Let me say the honest part first, because I always do. We are bottom of the Premier League. Played five, won none, drawn two, lost three, two scored, eight conceded. Two points. That is the league table, and I have never in my life lied to you about a number. I have made a lot of money by looking at a chart I hated and reading it anyway. Saturday was a chart I hated. But a table is a receipt, not a story. It records what was allowed to happen to us. It does not record who did the allowing, and that is the only part of Saturday anybody should still be talking about.
I waited five days to write this. That is unusual for me. Normally I am typing before the players are off the pitch. But I wanted the tape and I wanted the transcript, because they are counting on you arguing from memory. Memory has faded by Wednesday. That is the entire business model. A written record does not fade, which is precisely why this blog exists and precisely why nobody who covers this league for a living keeps one.
So here is the full thing. Not the version that fits in a graphic on a Saturday night highlights show.
What actually happened against Aston Villa?
The club's own match report has the whole sequence, and I would encourage anyone who only saw the highlights to read it. Antonin Kinsky in goal. Pedro Porro, Micky van de Ven as captain, Jan Paul van Hecke and Andy Robertson across the back. Sandro Tonali and Rodrigo Bentancur in midfield. Savio, Mateus Fernandes and Omar Marmoush behind Dominic Solanke. Sixty thousand nine hundred and twenty people in the building.
We started as the better side. On eleven minutes Zion Suzuki made a double save from Savio and then tipped one over the bar. Solanke got his head on one and Aaron Wan-Bissaka blocked it on the line. Archie Gray, on at nineteen minutes, forced another save. Later James Maddison hit a free-kick that Suzuki also kept out. That is a goalkeeper having one of those afternoons, and everybody who was there knows it.
Then the first goal. Four minutes into first-half stoppage time, Johan Manzambi scored from close range after a low shot from Boubacar Kamara. Micky van de Ven, our captain, was off the pitch at the time having taken a whack to the head and needed a long stoppage for it. We defended the most dangerous minute of the half with ten men because our centre-half was being checked for a head injury.
Nicolas Jackson made it two on 67. Emiliano Buendia made it three on 79 with what the club, being generous, calls a sumptuous finish into the top corner from 22 yards. Fine. It was a very good goal. Conor Gallagher pulled one back on 86 from an Omar Marmoush cutback, and Jan Paul van Hecke headed in an Andy Robertson free-kick eight minutes into stoppage time at the end.
And in between, on about the hour, Mohammed Kudus put the ball in the net to make it 1-1 and it was disallowed, because VAR found Andy Robertson offside earlier in the move.
Was the Kudus goal the moment the game turned?
Yes. And I am not going to do the reasonable-man routine about it, because the reasonable-man routine is exactly how they keep getting away with it.
Look at the state of us at that moment. The better team for an hour. Denied four or five times by a goalkeeper in the form of his life. A goal conceded in the single minute our captain was off the pitch having his head checked. Then we finally put the ball in the net to make it 1-1, and a room somewhere went back three or four touches, found a shoulder, and took it away.
Update, 28 September 2026: eight days later, against the same club, our women had a shot that the club says appeared to cross the line, and nobody gave that one either.
Here is the question I keep asking and nobody will answer. Where are the frames? A goal was disallowed in a Premier League match five days ago and I cannot show you the lines. I cannot show you the crosshair, the frozen moment, the piece of geometry that decided our season. Neither can you. When a call goes the way of one of the clubs this league is actually built around, the graphic is on television inside forty seconds and on every timeline by full time. When it goes against us it is one sentence in a match report and everybody moves along to the next fixture. I do not believe that is an accident. I have never believed it is an accident.
I have written before about how the screen never seems to work in our favour, and every week that passes makes that piece read as far too generous. Luck is random. This is not random. It has a shape, and anyone who has followed Tottenham Hotspur for more than a season can draw it from memory: we get the tight one against us, we get the long check, we get the shoulder, and then we get told we are paranoid by men whose salaries are paid by the same broadcasters who could not find eight seconds for our disallowed goal but will run a nine-minute studio inquest when a decision goes against one of the clubs their ratings depend on.
Eighteen minutes after that goal came off the board we were 3-0 down. Anyone who has watched a side that had not scored a league goal in a month will tell you exactly what happens to eleven heads when the one thing they have chased for a month is given and then removed. That is not a complaint about the offside law. That is a description of what was done to us, and of what it did next.
We were the better team for an hour, we had a goal taken off us, and we lost by two. All three are true. You were only ever going to be told about one.
How did we concede three?
Roberto De Zerbi did not hide from this, which is more than the people calling for his head have managed. "It's tough to accept," he said in his verdict. "It's tough to understand. It's tough to explain."
Then he told us exactly what he was looking at. "My focus is why we concede the first goal with 10 players just for one minute," he said in the full post-match press conference. "In that situation, we can stay stronger, we can communicate more and more and more." He also said, plainly, "We can't lose this game in this way, absolutely. We can't concede the second goal."
That is a manager taking the blame for a minute of organisation. Not the officials. Not the head injury. Not the fixture list. Not one syllable about the goal that was taken away from his team an hour earlier. He had more right to all four of those than any manager in the division on Saturday, and he used none of them.
And I am still told, in print, every Sunday, by men who have never once had to organise a back four, that he is out of his depth. Ask who benefits from that line being repeated in a manager's first autumn. It is not us. It is never us. There is a version of this club that the rest of football is comfortable with: the one that sacks a coach every eighteen months, sells its best player every August and finishes eighth without frightening anybody. Every column nudging him towards the door is a small deposit towards that version. Read the quote again and tell me it is the language of a man who does not know what went wrong.
He was also honest about how Villa played us. "We knew before the game that Suzuki, the goalkeeper, is very good in the long ball," he said. "We knew Aston Villa changed their style of play this season with the long ball." Their third goal came straight from a goal kick. They had one route into our half, they used it, and it worked three times. That is Unai Emery doing what Unai Emery does, and I said before the game that De Zerbi calling him one of the best coaches in the world was not flattery. It was a warning.
Is Pedro Porro injured again?
He came off after nineteen minutes and Archie Gray went on. This is the part of Saturday that worries me more than the scoreline.
Two days before the game I wrote that Porro being fit again was the best news of the week, and I meant it. He had missed Everton and the cup tie at Anfield with a muscular problem. He came back, played nineteen minutes and went off holding his leg.
De Zerbi's assessment afterwards was blunt and, I think, important. "Listen, Pedro, I said after the World Cup, I said the management of Pedro should be different, because after the World Cup, many games," he said. "I don't know what the problem is. It's a hamstring, I think. Hopefully, it's not a big problem."
Read what he is telling you there. He flagged Porro's workload after a World Cup summer before any of this happened. He said the management of that player should be different. Then the player broke down. If a manager tells you in advance that a specific body is going to need protecting and it then does not get protected, that is a squad-depth problem, not a coaching problem. And we can talk about squad depth, because I have been counting the absentees all month.
How many attacking players were missing?
Before Saturday the club had Xavi Simons, Dejan Kulusevski, Mykhailo Mudryk and Wilson Odobert unavailable. Then Porro went off on nineteen minutes. Mathys Tel was in the stand as a selection call, and De Zerbi explained why without ducking it: "The technical decision (he) was in the stand, because I think during the game, Maddison and Kudus, they had more chance to change the game."
Dominic Solanke came off on 66 minutes for Maddison after another afternoon of running into bodies, and his manager did not throw him under a bus for it either. "He's one of my players," De Zerbi said. "I like Domi as a player and I stay with him until the end." You can dislike the selection. You cannot fault the spine.
I have laid out the real reason we are not scoring already and I have not changed one word of it. A forward line missing four of its options does not fix itself with a rousing team talk. It fixes itself when bodies come back.
What do the two late goals actually mean?
Here is the bit nobody wants. We had gone four league games without scoring. The joke had written itself. Then in the last five minutes we scored twice, and both were the kind of goal a stuck team scores when the handbrake comes off.
Gallagher again. The same Conor Gallagher who broke the drought at Anfield in the cup and the same one who opened the scoring at Villa Park in May. He has now scored our last two goals in any competition. When somebody is the only one finding the net, that is either an accident or it is a player worth building around, and three goals in three weeks is beginning to look less like an accident.
Then van Hecke, one of this summer's signings and a centre-half by trade, heading in a Robertson free-kick in the eighth minute of stoppage time when the game was long gone. I would like to make a slightly unfashionable point about that. Most sides 3-0 down at home, on the floor, being booed, do not put a centre-half in the box in the ninety-eighth minute and score. That is a group that had not given up in front of sixty thousand people who largely had. I will take that over a polite 3-0. It also means a centre-half now has half of our league goals, which tells you where the real problem is, and it is not the defence.
Saturday morning I wrote that we needed one goal to change everything, that Clive Allen's 49-goal season began with a scruffy finish at Villa Park in 1986. We got two. They arrived in the wrong order and far too late, but the drought is over and the ball has gone in from a cutback and from a set piece. Those are the two routes I said we would score from. I was right about how. I was completely wrong about when.
Where does that leave the table?
Bottom. Two points, minus six on goal difference. Aston Villa, who arrived on one point from four and were being described by the same journalists as a club in freefall, left 16th with four. Manchester United, who we visit next, are 12th on five.
I promised at the start of this blog that I would never lie to you about a number, so there it is. Twenty of twenty. What I am not going to do is pretend the number carries information it does not carry. Five games is five games. This is a squad rebuilt over a summer, with a long list of new faces to bed in, still waiting on four forwards. We have played Brentford away, Newcastle, Forest, Everton and Villa, and the two we drew we did not lose.
And I know exactly what bottom of the table is worth to them, because it is not a position. It is permission. Permission for the phone-ins. Permission for the pundits who still cannot say the name of our stadium without a smirk. Permission for rival supporters who have spent seven years pretending that a ground good enough for the NFL is a shopping centre. Permission, most of all, for the people who actually run this sport to carry on treating Tottenham Hotspur as the club that can absorb anything: the awkward slot, the short turnaround, the tight call, the long check. I have been counting our kickoff times, and I will keep counting, and one day somebody at the Premier League will be asked to explain the count instead of laughing at the man who kept it.
And the one thing I would put in front of anyone who wants to tell me this is a broken side. In our last two matches we have played Liverpool at Anfield and Villa at home, and in both we were the team creating. Against Liverpool we lost to a long ball and a piece of individual skill. Against Villa we lost to a goalkeeper, a minute with ten men, and a goal kick. I wrote at the time that De Zerbi came out of Anfield with credit. He comes out of Saturday with less, and he knows it, but the football underneath it is not the football of a team sitting twentieth.
So what now?
Three weeks. That is the gift hidden inside this fixture list, and it is the one thing on Saturday that went our way. The league does not come back until Manchester United away on 10 October, and the manager gets his injured and underloaded players on a training pitch for longer than he has had them all season.
De Zerbi has already said what he thinks of the physical condition of this group, and he said it about Saturday specifically. That is the work. Not a new system, not a new manager, not a January panic. Work.
I will write about the break properly, because it matters more than anything that happens on a Nations League Thursday. For now I am leaving this here. We were bottom on Saturday night. We scored twice on Saturday night. We had a third taken off us on Saturday night. Every version of this weekend you have been handed since has kept exactly one of those three facts and quietly buried the other two. I am keeping all three, because that is the job, and because I promised on day one that somebody would write this club down honestly when it was obvious nobody else ever would.
Five days later I still think the football is closer than the table, and I think a great many people with microphones are quietly relieved that it is not showing up in the results yet. Ask me again on the tenth of October. I will have the receipts, the same as always.