Tottenham Hotspur have lost their last three Premier League games and are looking like a team lacking confidence and spark.
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Former Tottenham Hotspur boss Harry Redknapp has made a comment that it is “unfair” to blame only head coach Nuno Espirito Santos for Spurs’ recent struggles. He says that the squad is simply not good enough and lacks “leaders and characters”. Tottenham started the season under the new boss with an impressive 1-0 win over defending champions Manchester City, and then registered victories over Wolves and Watford with the same score-line, before suffering three back-to-back Premier League losses with the last one being a 3-1 humiliation against Arsenal.
Therefore supporters have been calling for Nuno’s sacking, but Redknapp who spent four seasons with Spurs had come out in the Portuguese coach’s defence and said that it was “too easy” to leave out the blame on Nuno. He opines that the players haven’t fought hard for their managers which saw Jose Mourinho and Mauricio Pochettino being sacked.
“Of course Spurs should be doing far better but pointing the finger at Nuno and plonking it all on the manager is unfair and too easy,” he told the Sun.
“It makes me laugh when people say how much these players – and the bulk of them are still there – loved playing under Mauricio Pochettino. Well, if they loved him that much, you’d have thought they might have tried a bit harder and he wouldn’t have got the sack in the first place. They weren’t exactly pulling up any trees in his last season. Jose is up there with the best managers around and I honestly felt they had a squad to challenge for the title, but he couldn’t unlock it either.”
“There are certain times at certain clubs when you just can’t do anything about it, no matter who is in charge. That’s Tottenham right now. You can talk about tactics but when the situation is like this you want leaders, you want players standing up and putting in the effort… and there’s something badly missing. Poch couldn’t get a tune out of them in the end, Jose couldn’t and Nuno is finding the same.”
After reaching the Champions League final in 2019, Tottenham’s performances have dipped. The sacking of Pochettino and Mourinho have made things worse. Pochettino was sacked after five years at the London club. The Argentine joined Spurs in 2014 and in 2017, he propelled them to a second-place finish in the Premier League.
However, after the impressive Champions League run to the final in 2019, Spurs suffered 18 defeats in all competitions which is the most by any Premier League club and their worst since 2008. That led to Pochettino’s sacking in November 2019. And then, during Mourinho’s tenure, he faced a handful of problems as players couldn’t respond to his style of management and the Argentine was sacked before the Carabao Cup final in April 2021.
To add to the misery, their star striker Harry Kane expressed his desire to leave but that never happened and since then the Englishman is not in the best frame of mind, failing to register even a single league goal this season, so far. Although he is training and trying hard, it seems like he lacks the same kind of confidence that helped him win the Premier League Golden Boot last season.
“The problems at Spurs have to go deeper than the manager,’ he added.
“For a start, the players obviously aren’t as good as we all thought. What Nuno must not do is start chopping and changing every week. He has to find a system he wants them to play, work on it and stick with it. He has to get the belief back into the players – and that isn’t easy. It’s also about getting the belief back into yourself because when you lose, you do ask questions. What you do need is great characters and great leaders – neither of which, Harry Kane apart, I see at Spurs,” continued Redknapp.
“Three or four years ago I looked at them and thought, “It’s only a matter of time before they win the league”. When they had Kyle Walker, Jan Vertonghen, Toby Alderweireld and Danny Rose, they had a really strong nucleus. Not any more. They’re not playing well and not getting results, but to dump it all on Nuno’s doorstep is really tough. It took them long enough to find a manager and looking for another one now certainly isn’t the answer.”
