How Spurs Lost: Home vs Leicester

It’s difficult to not be accused of flip-flopping – or homerism for that matter – after Spurs’ 1-0 loss to Leicester City at home on Wednesday.

After days of building the match up as some pivot point for Spurs’ season, wherein the club’s season will be made or broken, is it really possible to come back now and downplay its significance?

Yes, yes it is. But not without a few qualifiers.

Leicester were a bit more willing to come out of their shell throughout the match. Possession was closer to being even than heavily lopsided in Spurs’ favor, as many expected. Shinji Okazaki and Jamie Vardy were both dangerous in bringing down those long balls Leicester prefer. And Danny Drinkwater and N’Golo Kanté had great games going both ways from central midfield.

In the end, though, they only managed the win through a poorly defended set piece. Tottenham’s defense otherwise kept Riyad Mahrez quiet and dealt with just about everything the striker pair could muster. Outside of Robert Huth’s winner in the 82nd minute, Leicester only managed one other shot on goal.

Leicester City shots against Tottenham /

Thus far, this is not a case being made for a Spurs win. Rather, this match had all the makings of a 0-0 draw. Spurs didn’t do enough for themselves going forward to justify an outright win.

Harry Kane was not at his best and he appeared to know it as the match wore on. He increasing took unwise shots and committed brash fouls from areas well outside his purview. There’s a case to be made that he should have been brought off in favor of Heung-min Son early in the second half, but there’s no faulting Pochettino for keeping a player as capable of late-game dramatics as Kane on the pitch as long as possible.

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That wasn’t the only issue in Spurs’ attack however. It didn’t lack for intensity. Spurs managed 21 shots in total, after all. What it needed was focus.

While there flashes of it – Érik Lamela had six passes converted into shots, for instance – but overall Spurs’ attack didn’t seem like it was finding the best areas of the pitch in which to express itself. All but three of those shots Spurs mustered came from outside Leicester’s penalty area, and the best chances came from set pieces. This just wasn’t the clinical, incisive attack Spurs have managed so many other times this season.

Tottenham shots against Leicester /

Why was that? Was it just Kane having a bad game? Not quite.

Leicester had a clear goal in central midfield: isolate and contain Eric Dier. Claudio Ranieri realized that beyond being cover in deep midfield, Dier is also one of Spurs’ primary distributors of the ball. He’s not exactly a playmaker in a traditional sense. His passes are rarely ambitious, though they are frequently accurate and always plentiful. That might seem a simple job, but it’s vital for both Spurs’ efforts to create a firm base upon which the attack is built and to recycle possession forward when attacks break down.

Take a look at Dier’s influence on Wednesday on the left compared to his influence against Everton on the right.

Eric Dier’s influence against Leicester (left) and Everton (right) /

Dier was marked well enough by Leicester’s midfield to effectively neuter that part of his game, along with a good portion of his range in defense. The alone wouldn’t be enough ruin Spurs’ game. What it did do, though, was pull the front six out of alignment. While Christian Eriksen would always have played a bit deeper in Spurs’ revamped from three/four, here he was obliged to come into central midfield to make up for Dier’s inability to act as distributor from the center circle.

That created something of a domino effect where in Dele Alli had to play deeper, thereby forcing Kane to drop back as well. Indeed, by the end of the game, Lamela was the Spurs player with the highest average position up the pitch as he ran into the space usually occupied by both Alli and Kane.

Dier’s lack of influence on the game would have mattered less if it was Mousa Dembélé alongside him instead of Tom Carroll. While the young Englishman was still impressive in this game – his passes and positioning were partly responsible for Ben Davies and Lamela’s fine games – his influence wasn’t as complete as Dembélé’s tends to be. The Belgian could have conceivably eased the pressure on Dier by himself closing down Leicester’s midfielders on and off the ball, thereby creating some balance with which Dier could have better worked.

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In all, though, this was a good game of football, and while the result stings Spurs a bit there’s no indication that it should have any lasting effect on the season. If they can turn in performances this good for their remaining games, they’ll still win or draw more often than not.