PATIENCE
Xavi Simons Got His Bow And The Pattern Is Familiar
He walked out at the Lane on Saturday, the kid we chased all summer, the one the rest of the league said we could not afford, and the whole thing got thirty seconds on the broadcast and a polite round of applause on the timeline. I have been writing this blog long enough now to know what that silence means. It means somebody upstairs has decided the story is not the story. Xavi Simons got his bow in front of us, at home, in a game we actually won, and the only people who seemed to want to talk about it were us. So let us talk about it. Properly. For once.
The first time he touched the ball I knew the shape was different
I want to be careful with this because I have been burned before. I praised Brennan Johnson for about four months in 2024 and look where that ended. I said Dejan Kulusevski was the most important signing of the Postecoglou window and I still believe that, even now, but the point is that first impressions at this club are the only impressions you are allowed to have. Everything after is shaped. So when I say that the first time Xavi Simons touched the ball on Saturday, in our half, with his back to the Brighton press, and rolled Davy Propper's successor inside to Pedro Porro, who then played a vertical pass that broke two lines, I sat down. I sat down because that is the move our entire midfield has been trying to do for about eighteen months and failing, because the players we kept buying could not do it. They can receive. They can recycle. They can pass sideways and look busy. What they could not do is the thing Simons did, which is take a body, turn two yards forward, and put the next pass into a zone that hurts the other team. That is not a skill you teach. That is a player.
And we bought him. Let us stay on that for a second because the discourse around this transfer has been exactly as dishonest as the discourse around every other transfer we have done since ENIC started running the place. The line was, and I am quoting the podcasts I will not name, that we overpaid, that we panicked, that we had been outbid by three or four clubs, that this was a vanity move, that the fee was a number nobody else would have matched, that we were trying to be Manchester City and had forgotten what we were. None of that was true. The fee was reported, the structure was sensible, the player wanted to come, and the manager, who is Roberto De Zerbi and not the man the rest of the country still thinks is in charge, asked specifically for this profile. I have been told this by two people who would know. The pattern is the same as it was with Kulusevski, with Van de Ven, with Vicario, with every signing that has actually moved the needle at this club in the last four years. The outsiders tell you it is too much, the insiders know it is exactly enough, and the player plays one game and the outsiders go quiet for about a week. Then they find something else.
Why nobody wanted to write the headline
This is the part I want to be precise about, because I do not think it is a conspiracy. I think it is something worse, which is a habit. Xavi Simons started for the Netherlands during the international break and did what he usually does, which is play with a confidence that does not belong to a player his age and does not belong to a league that is supposed to be a step down from the one he was already in. He scored. He assisted. He did the thing he does where he receives between the lines and decides the game is going to be played at his tempo, and the other team either adapts or it does not, and if it does not he scores anyway. And the England press, who had spent all of August telling us that he was a luxury, that he did not track back, that he would not survive in the Premier League, that we had been mugged by Leipzig, just moved on. They did not write the correction. They did not write the U turn. They did not even write the qualified vindication. They just opened a new tab and started typing about something else, and that something else was, I promise you, a debate about a refereeing decision from a Manchester United game that did not affect us.
You see the trick if you watch it long enough. The way the English football press buries a Spurs story is not by attacking it. It is by refusing to schedule it. The story is allowed to exist, technically, in a paragraph at the bottom of a notebook, between a line about a hamstring and a line about a fixture change. But the column inches, the front page, the back page, the Sky Sports panel, the Monday Night Football open, the podcast with the two former pros who did not play with anyone good, none of those are for our story. Those are for the other lot. The lot who finished above us, the lot who are always in the conversation, the lot who got a fifteen minute segment on Saturday because one of their centre backs did a celebration that the cameras liked. We do not get a segment. We get a mention, and only if it is bad.
So when Simons played the way he played on Saturday, and De Zerbi's team beat a good Brighton side 2-0 with goals that came directly from the patterns Simons unlocks, the story became, briefly, that we had won a game. Not that the new boy had announced himself. Not that the midfield had changed shape. Not that the player we had been told was a luxury was, in fact, the thing we have been missing since the day Christian Eriksen left and we refused to say his name out loud. The story was that we had won a game. The football was a footnote to the scoreline. I have been writing this blog long enough to be tired of that, and I am not going to pretend I am not tired of that.
The De Zerbi question we are still not asking
I want to be clear about something because I get accused, fairly, of not giving the manager his due. Roberto De Zerbi has changed the way this team plays. I wrote that in September and I meant it then and I mean it now. The team that lost 4-1 at Brentford in the first week of the season, the team that looked lost and old and slow, would not have recognised the team that beat Brighton on Saturday. That is a coaching job. That is what a real coach does. He does not just change the starting eleven. He changes what the starting eleven thinks the game is. Under the previous regime, the previous regime being the man the rest of the country still seems to think is in charge, we played a system that was brave in theory and suicidal in practice. We played it because it was the only thing the man had, and because the academy had produced a few players who could execute it, and because the press had decided it was interesting, and so we carried it into games against teams that had bought their way past it. De Zerbi looked at the same squad, with the addition of Simons and one or two others, and decided to play a different game. A game that uses what we have, that does not ask our full backs to defend one on one against the best wingers in the league, that does not ask our centre halves to step out into midfield against players who live for that space, that does not ask our number ten to do the work of a number ten and a number eight and a number six. The result is that we look like a football team again. We look like a team that knows what it is doing, even when the opposition is good.
But the question I want to ask, and the question I think the blogosphere should be asking, is whether De Zerbi is being given the squad he needs. Because there is a pattern at this club, and the pattern is that a manager arrives, the manager is given a window, the manager spends the window well, the manager improves the team, and then the window closes, and the next window is used to sign a player that the manager did not ask for, because the sporting director, or the assistant sporting director, or the man in the suit who is technically just a consultant but is actually the most powerful person at the club, decided that the squad needed a different kind of player. We have done this with every manager since Pochettino. We did it to Pochettino. We did it to Mourinho. We did it to Conte. We did it to the man the rest of the country still thinks is in charge. And I worry, genuinely, that we are going to do it to De Zerbi, because De Zerbi is the most interesting coach we have had since Pochettino, and the most interesting coaches are the ones the structure tries hardest to contain.
I do not know if that is happening. I have not been told it is happening. I have not seen a single piece of evidence that the January window is going to be hijacked. But I have been a Spurs fan for long enough to know that the window between the moment we are allowed to be happy and the moment somebody takes the happiness away is always shorter than I want it to be. So I am writing this now, while the happiness is still here, in the hope that somebody who reads it, somewhere, in a position to do something about it, will understand that this manager, and this squad, and this Xavi Simons, are the thing we have been asking for. They are not a placeholder. They are not a stopgap. They are not the latest in a long line of experiments that the club runs on us. They are, if we let them be, the team. And we have not, historically, been very good at letting things be the team.
What I want to see in October
October is the month where leagues are made and unmade. We have a run of games coming up that I will not list in full because the list will change by the time you read this, but the shape of it is this: we play two of the current top four, we play a team in the bottom three that thinks it should not be in the bottom three, we play a team in the middle that has just changed manager and will therefore play with the energy of a team that has just changed manager, and we play a team in the Europa League that is, on paper, the worst team in the competition and is therefore, in practice, the most dangerous team in the competition. This is the month that decides whether the Brighton result was the start of something or the end of something. I think it is the start. I think De Zerbi knows it is the start. I think Simons, in particular, knows it is the start, and I think that is why he played the way he played, with the kind of certainty that I have not seen from a Spurs player since the last time a Spurs player played the way he played, which was about eighteen months ago, in a different system, under a different manager, in a different life.
What I want to see, and what I am going to write about whether I see it or not, is the moment where the rest of the country has to admit that this team is good. I am tired of us being good in private. I am tired of us being a secret that the press has decided not to tell. I am tired of the pattern where we play well, we win, and the discourse moves on to the next thing that is not about us, as if we are a subplot in our own season. Simons is not a subplot. The midfield is not a subplot. De Zerbi is not a subplot. We are the plot, and it is time the rest of the league read the chapter.