When Thomas Frank took over at Tottenham Hotspur, you could smell the wave of change. As a neutral, given Frank’s success at Brentford, you just felt bigger club, better players, he will cook.
From the start, it looked that way and I still believe he will cook but given their current form, you can’t help but ask, are they reverting to default settings? Are we about to see the Tottenham we’ve always known? Well, I hope not.
How Has Thomas Frank Fared at Tottenham?
We are 12 games into the Thomas Frank era and so far, it has been a rollercoaster. For Spurs fans, they are having a better start to the season then when they were under Ange Postecoglou.
In Frank’s first five league games at Tottenham, the 51-year-old head coach picked up impressive wins over Burnley, Manchester City and West Ham. In that same period, Frank won more points per game and enjoyed a far better win percentage of 60% compared to Postecoglou 41%. That, to no great surprise, is in no small part due to Frank’s team already showcasing far more control in their league encounters.
Tottenham averaged 2.0 goals scored per league game while conceding on average just 0.6 per game in their first five games.
If you go a bit behind to the game against PSG, Spurs were brilliant. Even though they lost eventually to the super PSG, it colludes with the fact they had a good start to the season but it seems like the intensity has dropped. Since the draw against Brighton, Tottenham have not that same fire that they started with and it begs the question:
Are Tottenham Becoming Spursy Again?
Since the draw against Brighton, they have played five games and their only wins are against Doncaster and Leeds. They drew toothless Wolves, fought to snatch a pont against Bodo/Glimt who they beat en route to the Europa League last season and now, they lost to Aston Villa.
While this doesn’t look bad on the surface, a deeper look at the how Spurs have performed tells another story. If the draw against Brighton was a glitch, the performance against Wolves showed that something wasn’t right.
The next trip to Bodo/Glimt sure had Spurs fans crying to whatever God they served. They were almost swept away by the ice cold performance of the Norwegian team. Fighting back to win showed that this team has a fighting spirit and there’s truth to that but when you have to crawl your way back into three consecutive fixtures especially when you should be easily winning, you know there’s fire on the mountain.
The loss to Aston Villa last weekend will have Frank looking at this tactics and wondering where it has gone wrong. He needs to get the squad up and running again because in the Premier League, there is no place for continuous errors. I still believe that Thomas Frank will do well at Tottenham but it does seem like we are getting the Tottenham we used to know and if things don’t turn around quickly, he will have questions to answer.
