£22m Spurs flop is becoming their biggest disaster since Serge Aurier
Sometimes a press conference comes around and you just need to fly under the radar; that’s never been more apparent than at Tottenham Hotspur in the last six months.
As Spurs celebrated the Europa League, Ange Postecoglou triumphantly declared that season three is always better than season two. He was sacked just weeks later.
For Thomas Frank, he’s also found out that perhaps just staying quiet is the best form of approach in the media. Last week, he was asked about the club’s failed move for Eberechi Eze.
“Who’s Eze?” That was Frank’s reply, and although he said it with a wry smile and to make a joke, it’s come back to bite him.
He found out just who Eze is on Sunday as the boyhood Gooner scored a devastating hat-trick to seal a 4-1 win for Arsenal over their distraught neighbours.
Spurs came to frustrate but in doing so, failed to come up with any inventive attacking play. Their creativity was abysmal, and if it wasn’t for a brilliant yet flukey Richarlison strike, they’d have left the Emirates Stadium without a goal.
What went wrong for Spurs at the Emirates
On paper, Frank’s game plan in north London on Sunday made sense. They were the only team in the Premier League this season not to lose on the road. The Dane clearly knows what he’s doing when Spurs play away.
Yet, against Arsenal, if you’re putting all 11 men behind the ball, then it does rely on you frustrating your opponents for longer than the 36 minutes it took for Leandro Trossard to score the opener.
To Frank’s credit, Spurs had sucked the life out of the Emirates during the opening half an hour. Arsenal created openings, notably when Declan Rice was played in by Eze, but the visitors frustrated and made it difficult to play between the lines.
Yet, once the floodgates opened, there was no stopping Arsenal, particularly as Spurs had a total lack of creativity once again.
Despite scoring courtesy of Richarlison, they failed to create a single big chance, had just three shots and provoked only a solitary save from David Raya. Arsenal, by contrast, had 17 shots. Worryingly for Spurs, the home side simply wanted it more.
There were several folks in white to blame. In attack, Wilson Odobert and Mohammed Kudus were completely marked out of the game by Jurrien Timber and Riccardo Calafiori. Richarlison, for the most part, was bullied by William Saliba and Piero Hincapie. The Brazilian only completed five passes all evening and won just one of his five aerial duels.
In defence, Bukayo Saka regularly had the beating of Destiny Udogie down Arsenal’s right flank while Micky van de Ven and Cristian Romero were uncharacteristically poor. Van ve Ven notably completed just 71% of his passes and won only six of his 13 duels.
But, the biggest culprit of all was a man who, ironically, was sent off during the international break. He’s becoming something of a Serge Aurier to Frank.
Spurs' new Serge Aurier
Mention Aurier’s name around those at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and it’s likely to send a shiver down spines.
Signed for £23m in August of 2017, he arrived at White Hart Lane from PSG after a rough time in France, where he was handed a suspended prison sentence for assaulting a police officer.
“You will see the real me,” he declared upon arrival. Well, if the real Aurier was a gluttony of mistakes, we certainly did.
The Ivory Coast international had another tricky stint at Spurs, but this time it was all unravelling on the pitch, rather than off it.
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Where to even begin with the mistakes? The right-back committed a hat-trick of foul throws against Crystal Palace in 2018. While that may not have cost Spurs greatly, his clumsiness meant that he always had a moment of madness in him.
He notably gave away a penalty against Leicester City in December 2020 from which Jamie Vardy scored, but his most costly blunder came against Manchester City in the 2021 Carabao Cup final when he committed a needless foul on Raheem Sterling. The end result was a free-kick from which Pep Guardiola’s side scored the winner.
Speaking at full-time, Jamie Redknapp commented: “Aurier does well to start with – he follows the one-two and then just makes the most ridiculous and rash decision, which we see him do so often. Just stand up, don’t dive in, don’t give the foul away – elementary mistake.”
It wasn’t the first time the Ivorian had attracted criticism during his time in England. Two years prior to that moment, Rio Ferdinand stated: “As a defender I have never really rated Aurier. He’s rash and he’s let his team down far too often.”
Simply a giant liability in that Spurs team of back then, unfortunately, Frank has found another rash and unreliable figure in his team; Rodrigo Bentancur.
The Uruguayan was signed for £22m from Juventus in January 2022 and has featured 131 times for the Lilywhites since.
However, while he’s flirted with some impressive performances here and there, for the most part, he’s been a letdown.
He has become a symbol not only for Spurs’ lack of creativity but their lack of robustness and dynamism from the middle of the park. Despite that, he has started nine times of the 12 Premier League games Spurs have competed in this term.
The fact of the matter is that he shouldn’t be starting with that regularity.
Tottenham presenter Hollie Agombar called him “a lucky boy” after a studs-up challenge on Chelsea’s Reece James at the beginning of the month saw him avoid a red card. In the words of the Daily Mail’s Kieran Gill, it was a “terrible” challenge.
Things went from bad to worse when Spurs visited Arsenal on Sunday. The tone was set when he brought down Saka on the edge of the box in the first half and was brandished with a yellow card as a result.
While he was nowhere to be seen as Mikel Merino clipped a delightful ball into the box for Trossard’s opener, he was particularly poor for Eze’s first.
Minutes played
66
Touches
27
Accurate passes
16/17 (94%)
Key passes
0
Shots
0
Dribbles
0
Tackles won
0
Interceptions
2
Duels won
0
The attacking midfielder skipped beyond Bentancur all too easily as the Uruguay international went to ground inside the area.
He was handed a 3/10 match rating by The Standard as a consequence, with the publication writing he was ‘doing nothing to give Spurs some much-needed control’. The very fact that Guglielmo Vicario received 15 passes – six more than Palhinha and Bentancur combined (9) – in the first half said it all.
All that said, it’s perhaps no surprise that analyst Raj Chohan has described him as a “candidate for worst centre-midfielder at a big six club”.
Like Aurier, he’s a major underperformer. He’s a liability and a player that Frank cannot trust. He shouldn’t be starting regular games for Spurs any more.
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