Tottenham Need to Wait Out Eriksen’s Slump
By Ryan Wrenn
Amidst all the – justified – celebration in and around the Tottenham community of late, there’s been a worrying story developing: Christian Eriksen’s drop in form.
If it hasn’t been palpable exactly, it’s because most of the rest of the team is performing at or near peak levels. When Harry Kane and Dele Alli are as synced up as they have been in recent weeks, and Érik Lamela is hitting his stride, it’s easy to ignore one lackluster performance on the pitch even if it stretches on match after match.
Plus, it isn’t like Eriksen is losing games, he’s just not winning them at the rate it feels like he should be. Rather than being a liability, he’s so far proved unable to deliver that the unique advantage Tottenham have relied on so much over the last two seasons. His ability to stay in games until the very end – and often score the decisive goal – made him the club’s most valuable player last term outside of Kane.
What are we to make of this turn to the mediocre? It’s difficult to say. Eriksen’s dip in form isn’t really all that evident in the numbers. For the most part, his match-to-match performances are not dramatically different than his averages over his entire career at Tottenham. He’s still good for a couple shots a game. The number of passes he completes that result in shots hasn’t varied much. The only difference, of course, is that nothing is coming from all that effort.
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In his last seven games in all competitions – six of which he’s started – Eriksen has accumulated precisely no goals and one assist from a corner kick. Prior to that run his numbers weren’t dramatically better, with five additional assists and three goals, two of which were the free kicks he scored against Swansea. From a player who has scored twenty goals and notched twelve assists over his first two seasons with the club, this isn’t exactly an inspiring return so far.
Much like Kane’s slump in form, though, there’s no reason to panic here. Eriksen is still making all the same moves as he did before, they’re just not hitting the target as often as they have in the past. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of probability and the results will begin to even out, just as Kane’s good form eventually spawned the goals he’s regularly scoring today.
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Or perhaps what Eriksen needs is competition. Danny Rose and Kyle Walker have both seen their games improve upon the arrivals of Ben Davies and Kieran Trippier respectively. The advent of Dele Alli and the impending return of Alex Pritchard in the new year should mean that the club won’t have to turn to the transfer market to provide Eriksen some extra incentive.
In the end, what Eriksen likely needs most is time. This entire Tottenham side has improved so much over the last six months that it’s no wonder if it takes some veterans a while to adapt. Three months from now the idea of benching Eriksen again might seem as strange to us as benching Kane during his slump seems to us now.