Tottenham Won’t Let You Play For the Draw

If there’s one lesson that the Premier League’s lesser teams can learn from Tottenham’s 4-1 demolition of Sunderland, it’s that you can’t play for a draw against this team.

Was that Sam Allardyce’s intent coming into this match? Unlikely. He did set his Sunderland up in such a way to be able to sit back and deny Tottenham the space they so often exploit just ahead of and inside the center of the penalty area. Yann M’Vila and Lee Cattermole sat deep for much of the first half and, indeed, helped successfully disrupt the usual pace and accuracy of Tottenham’s lethal attacking play.

Allardyce also named three nominal attacking players forward in Jeremain Lens, Danny Graham and Jermain Defoe. In practice, only the latter was acting as an outlet in attack for Sunderland, with the former two dropping back to keep Tottenham’s full-backs in check. Still, it was easy to see the intent here: have three players able to bring the ball forward when Sunderland reclaimed possession, however rarely that might have happened.

They were helped in this regard by their full-backs – Billy Jones and Patrick van Aanholt – both of which found room to get forward with Lens and Graham dropping deep. Sunderland’s first and only goal came from van Aanholt, after all, and it seemed – if only for a matter of seconds – that Sunderland might find a result in this game.

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Sunderland’s demise came after Eriksen’s equalizer for Tottenham. Instead of attempting to press on with the kind of tactics that led to van Aanholt’s goal – however fortunate it might have been – Allardyce elected to instead attempt to shut up shop.

His first substitution was understandable. Cattermole had been unable to stop Eriksen’s goal in the first half and had just earned a yellow; subbing Jack Rodwell on for him was probably the better move. Still, it robbed Sunderland of a chance to field a more positive player onto the pitch, one who could have at the very least attempted to keep Mousa Dembélé and Eric Dier from recycling play in Tottenham’s central midfield.

The decisive move came when Allardyce elected to take Graham off and put new signing Jan Kirchhoff on in his stead. The Black Cats switched to a three at the back system, allowing the full-backs to push further upfield and leaving Defoe as the only man who spent any substaintial time in Tottenham’s half for the remainder of the game.

Though not at fault for Dembélé’s goal that gave Tottenham a lead they would not surrender, it was Kirchhof who deflected Eriksen’s shot from distance into Sunderland’s net and then earned Tottenham the penalty that killed the match off once and for all.

There was an error here beyond Kirchhoff’s individual mistakes. In bringing a third centre-back on instead of another, better attacker than Graham – Fabio Borini and Duncan Watmore were both available – Allardyce unintentionally lost this game for Sunderland. While it makes sense intuitively to add more men to the backline that already did so well in the first half while also allowing you full-backs – i.e. the source of Sunderland’s only goal – to move forward into attack, it failed to address why Tottenham were able to take and never give back the lead.

Crowding men in front of goal is not good defending. Particularly against a team like Tottenham who can and does build up attacks from forty or fifty yards out from goal, an intelligent and effective defense involves pressing up and denying space in any part of your own third to the opposition. Both Newcastle and Leicester realized this fact and exploited it well enough to earn narrow wins against Tottenham over the last five weeks.

Next: When Spurs Lose, They Win Big in the Following Game

Dembélé in particular found all sorts of opportunities from Sunderland’s steadfast refusal to do anything about him. He might not be a direct threat from goal from the center of the pitch but his drive and simple but effective distribution make him an immense threat, particularly when he has weapons like Harry Kane, Dele Alli and Christian Eriksen in front of him. He might not earn assists or score all that often, but his tackles and dribbles and layoffs are intrinsically linked with Tottenham’s overall attack.

Allardyce’s failure to realize that aspect of Tottenham’s game was his biggest error on Saturday, and Sunderland paid for it.