da cassino online： With only two defeats all season, Spurs have been one of the more consistent Premier League sides.
da bet nacional： After a turgid start to the season, Harry Kane started to remember how to score goals, but there have been other plusses too. Dele Alli and Eric Dier have been reliable performers this season – definitely a good sign in stars so young – and Erik Lamela has started to remind people why he was so highly thought of at Roma.
But if Spurs have ambitions of winning the league they’ll need to do more than simply have a consistent season with some plus points. They’ll need to start winning football matches.
All the teams above them have won more games. That might sound like an obvious statement, but when you consider that Spurs’ consistency has come from their draws then it might start to make more sense. The teams directly below, Crystal Palace and Watford, have both managed to win more games than Spurs so far this season, too.
We’re nearly halfway through the campaign and half of Tottenham’s league games so far have ended level. Only Everton – in 10th – can match Spurs’ rate of stalemates. So it’s easy to see why they’re thought of as consistent, but also easy to see why, after only two defeats all season, they’re not exactly putting pressure on dear leaders Leicester.
Every season we look at Spurs as a team who can break the top four and get themselves a first crack at Champions League football since Gareth Bale stunned the San Siro in 2010/11. Yet every time we see Spurs finish in the Europa League places, pretty much exactly where they sit right now.
But this season there looks to be progress. No, really.
Last season Spurs conceded 53 goals in the league. They conceded more goals than Hull City who ended up relegated, and exactly the same amount as Burnley, who also find themselves in the Championship this season.
This season it’s much more respectable: only Manchester United and Arsenal have conceded fewer goals.
Such a turnaround is presumably indicative of Mauricio Pochettino’s priorities. Presumably the training ground work has been centred on the defence, making the side more solid and making sure that they are harder to break down. It’s an astonishing statistical flip, Spurs could go from conceding the highest amount of goals in the top half to conceding one of the fewest tallies. They could conceivably halve their goals against column in only a year.
It’s a testament to Pochettino’s coaching prowess that he can change his side seemingly overnight. The addition of Toby Alderweireld has clearly helped, but it’s the organisation rather than the personnel that’s done the trick. The coach is a monument to the merits of actual coaching, not sifting through the transfer market to find a solution that works through trial and error.
Yet this is surely what explains the draws. When you look at the stats, it’s true that the teams at the top, in general, score more goals. But when you get past the top four, that trend gets less clear cut. 18th placed Norwich City have scored the same number of goals as seventh placed Watford. Aston Villa, unsurprisingly, have the worst goals tally in the league, but they’re only joint-worst: Stoke City have managed exactly the same number of goals.
What separates the bottom teams from those above them seems to be the goals against column rather than the goals for column. After all, most Premier League games tend to be decided by the odd goal – 1-0 and 2-1 are pretty common scorelines.
So after having built a much more solid defence, the task now is to get the side outscoring the opposition again, to start winning more games and not just drawing them.
The transformation from a poor defence saved by a striker with the deadly touch into one of the meanest defences in the league is the reason why Spurs are so consistent. But in a league where no team is as consistent as Spurs, if they can manage to turn half of those draws into wins in the second half of the season they could move up the table and into striking distance. It’s the solid defence that could be the basis for a title charge from another side of north London.
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