Imagine a world in which Djed Spence had run onto Dejan Kulusevski’s pass and shot straight at Coventry goalkeeper Ben Wilson.
Tottenham would only have had two minutes of normal time left to find an equaliser. The home crowd would have been ferocious. Spurs would have had to leave even more space for Coventry to counter into. The home team had missed enough chances to kill the game after Brandon Thomas-Asante put them 1-0 up. They could easily have made it 2-0 or more.
Imagine the mood in the away end if Spurs had lost. They had been on edge all evening, booing at half-time, after watching yet another half with plenty of possession but no goal threat. They had booed again when Ange Postecoglou took off Lucas Bergvall for James Maddison, just before Coventry’s goal. If Spurs had lost — and lost playing this poorly — they would have been apoplectic.
That anger would have been about this performance, which up until Spence’s goal was one of the worst of the Postecoglou era. The first half was toothless possession, Spurs passing but going nowhere. The players looked awkward in the build-up, unable to move the ball forward, not even getting into the places to create chances. But the second half was even worse: Spurs were sloppy in possession, and every turnover looked like it might lead to a Coventry goal.
Postecoglou defended the performance afterwards, saying that it was “a bit harsh” to call it “flat”. Spurs fans — especially if it had stayed 1-0 — would have said the opposite. To many eyes it was the worst under Postecoglou, and in fact the worst for years. At times it felt like the bad old days of Antonio Conte, Nuno Espirito Santo or Jose Mourinho, the players looking frozen on the ball, unwilling to take a risk or make a run. Postecoglou was meant to leave those kind of performances in the past.
The fans’ anger would not just have been about Wednesday night then, but about the sense that this team had lost its momentum. You may disagree about exactly when this happened: the Chelsea game last November? The 4-0 win at Aston Villa in March? But at some point something has been lost that has not been re-discovered. The difference in mood between now and this time last year is palpable. The fierce unity of the fanbase behind the manager has eroded. There are believers, there are sceptics, and plenty in between. Had Spurs lost it would only have got worse.
But above all, had Spurs lost, there would have been fury at Postecoglou’s selections. Last season in their first League Cup game he made nine changes for a trip to Fulham, and Spurs lost on penalties. Here in Coventry Postecoglou made eight changes. And while some of those were necessary — giving first starts to Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall — some were not. What new information could he hope to learn about Fraser Forster or Timo Werner or even Ben Davies? Spurs’ struggles suggested they had not started with a strong enough team to win the game. It was the big-name substitutes — Kulusevski, James Maddison and Brennan Johnson — who turned the tide.
Postecoglou is not the first Tottenham manager to try to rotate his way through the cups, but this never ended well for his predecessors either. Eighteen months ago Conte picked a weakened team at Sheffield United in the FA Cup fifth round. Spurs lost 1-0 and Conte’s standing with the fans never recovered. Another cup exit from a weakened Spurs team would have damaged Postecoglou’s own standing.
Imagine the scorn that Postecoglou would have faced in light of his comments on Sunday about winning a trophy in his second season. “I’m happy to be judged against that standard because that’s my standard,” he said again on Tuesday. “I have no problems with people using that as a yardstick.” But if Spurs had gone out here then people would have said that he was already down to two realistic chances of a trophy this season, the FA Cup and Europa League. This is not how you want your prospects to be framed when it is still mid-September. The pressure on those two competitions would have been immense.
Now, it does not take much of a leap to imagine any of these complaints or discussions if Spurs had gone out. They very nearly lost the game. They arguably deserved to lose it. From the moment Thomas-Asante scored, if not before, all of this was on everyone’s lips.
But of course in the real world, Spurs did not lose. Spence’s shot went in, then so did Brennan Johnson’s. Five minutes after being 1-0 down, Spurs were 2-1 up. And the mood at the end was very different from the above: a mixture of relief, glee and amazement that Tottenham had rescued everything after playing so badly. They are safely in the fourth round of the League Cup, meaning they can focus on the league and Europa League for the next few weeks. The players were warmly received by the away end and Postecoglou walked over to applaud them too. And when Postecoglou spoke of the “relentlessness” his team had shown in rescuing the result, something they had lacked so far this season, you could see what he meant.
The next question for Tottenham is which of these narratives will win out. Is it the struggles of the first 87 minutes, the problems in possession, the obvious lack of confidence through the team? If so, and if Brentford pose Spurs problems on Saturday that they cannot solve, then the grumbles of the fans that were silenced at the end here will come back.
But if Spurs can bottle some of that character shown in the final minutes, the magic of Kulusevski, the bravery of Spence, maybe even a reinvigorated Brennan Johnson, and take it into all four competitions, then perhaps this could be a turning point after all.
(Top photo: David Rogers/Getty Images)
