Tottenham Steeling Itself for Suspensions

Kyle Walker and Jan Vertonghen each picked up their fourth yellow card of the season in Tottenham’s 0-0 draw against Chelsea on Sunday, leaving them both one booking away from suspension.

Both players have played nearly every minute of each and every Premier League game so far this season for Tottenham, meaning that they’re accumulating yellow cards at a rate of one every 3.5 games in the Premier League.

Should either or both of them earn that fifth yellow before the new year, they’d join Eric Dier, Dele Alli and Érik Lamela on the list of players that were compelled to miss a game for disciplinary reasons in the first half of the season.

In part, this is an understandable development. Somehow Tottenham have transformed from the perpetrators of the ninth most fouls in the Premier League last term to the worst offenders this season. That increase is a natural result of the crystallization of Mauricio Pochettino’s pressing game, and it likely won’t go down any time soon.

The number of yellow cards Tottenham that have added up is something that can be checked and corrected however. Cautions will come with increased fouls, but there can be a way to manage them. The yellows picked up by Walker and Vertonghen on Sunday, as well as those earned by brash challenges from both Danny Rose and Harry Kane, all seemed completely avoidable. They weren’t cynical or unsportsmanlike necessarily, merely evidence that in certain situations some Tottenham players don’t know when a foul is appropriate, or how to time it when they deem that it is so.

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The biggest culprit of this kind of offense currently on the team is undoubtedly Lamela. His willingness and effort in tracking back from his customary attacking role is precisely what Pochettino needs from him, though he’d likely prefer it if it didn’t come with a series of absurd cautions that quickly add up.

To a certain extent, there is enough depth in this Tottenham squad to make up for this aggressive style. Dier, Alli and Lamela have all been adequately replaced in the starting XI for the games they missed, of which Tottenham drew two (Liverpool and Chelsea) and won the other (West Ham).

There are some players and positions where such a suspension means little to the overall makeup of the squad. Alli and Lamela, for all their talents, aren’t exactly fulcrums on which the team balances. Dier, of course, was another matter. Prior to his absence against Liverpool, the mild panic over who could replace Tottenham’s indomitable defensive midfielder was very real. Mousa Dembélé ended up turning in a quality performance, but it was a big risk.

Vertonghen and Walker are similarly pivotal players. Together they are half of the most improved, most dependable unit on the entire team: the defense. If one or, God forbid, both end up suspended, that could become a real liability. Kieran Tripper has yet to prove himself in the right-back role, and Vertonghen’s presumptive understudy, Kevin Wimmer, has only featured in one competitive match for Tottenham so far. They are not simply plug-and-play options in those positions.

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Perhaps the two of them could take a crash course on caution evasion from Dier himself. He was the first Tottenham player to be suspended for accumulated yellows back in early October, though in his five Premier League games since his game out he’s picked up precisely no additional bookings. This minor feat has been accomplished by subtly changing his game to not include as much of the robust, last-ditch tackles that characterized his early season games. Instead, he’s favored better positioning as well as tighter marking, changes that might actually have improved his game overall.

Riding on four yellows for the rest of the reason is a nearly impossible task for players so involved in the physical aspect of the English game. One or both will be suspended at some point. They can mitigate that risk – as well as the risk of picking up a straight red – by learning from how Dier evolved his game to not be so risky, as can Tottenham as a whole.