Is There Still a Place at Spurs for Mason and Bentaleb?

No other top team in the Premier League has experienced the overhaul in midfield Spurs have this season.

It wasn’t just that Mauricio Pochettino and Daniel Levy oversaw the departures of Étienne Capoue, Benjamin Stambouli, Paulinho and Lewis Holtby last summer. Those players were, at best, benchwarmers.

The bigger change has been the the descent of Ryan Mason and Nabil Bentaleb to the bench – and lower.

Those two players were Pochettino’s first choice options in the center of the park last term. Mason made 34 starts in all competitions, and Bentaleb wasn’t far behind with 29.

It was both players first season with Spurs in which they established themselves as presumptive starters. Mason had been out on loan with Doncaster, Millwall and FC Lorient before earning a call up to Spurs’ first team, while Bentaleb was coming off his first taste of the top flight after being promoted from the academy by Tim Sherwood late into the season prior.

On paper, it was a partnership that should have worked. Bentaleb was a deep-lying playmaker type with the ability to get forward, while Mason was an attack-minded midfielder with the ability to stay deep. In theory they were the perfect ingredients for a double pivot. One player would get forward when available while the other player sat deep.

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In practice, it didn’t work out quite so well. Mason lacked the defensive discipline to actually do much even when he played deeper, and Bentaleb had his fair share of miscues. The result was a porous midfield, one that allowed oppositions far too much space and time to take shots at Hugo Lloris’ goal or create chances otherwise. It was thus another season of defensive woes for Spurs.

Even if that partnership could be characterized as a failed experiment, it appeared as if Pochettino was willing to press on with it. Were it not for Mason recovering from injury for Spurs’ first match of the season against Manchester United, he might have started alongside Bentaleb in central midfield. Instead it was Eric Dier who started there, and we all know how that story went.

Bentaleb made a series of mistakes in that game, enough to essentially remove him from consideration thereafter. He’s made one other start this season, though admittedly injuries have complicated matters.

By comparison, Mason has fared much better. After recovering from that early injury he went on to return to his regular starter status, again alongside Dier. He looked to have upped his defensive and passing games, and even scored the winning goal against Sunderland in September.

Were it not the injury he suffered in scoring that goal, it’s easy to imagine Pochettino pressing on with Mason in a central midfield role. The England midfielder’s game wasn’t exactly multi-faceted, but it had a directness to it that fell in line with Pochettino’s vision for Spurs.

While each player has been given their own chance to audition for a role at starter this season, they have not been able to do so together. This began more as a matter of circumstance than anything else, but by this point in the season it’s hard to imagine Pochettino ever wanting to give the duo a second shot.

Those injuries to both players early in the season allowed Pochettino to do some pretty aggressive experimentation with Spurs’ central midfield.  Dier was the first benefactor of this, but arguably the player to grow most in stature as a result was Dele Alli. The 19-year-old was already in the running to become a first team regular, but Mason’s injury accelerated the timeline. He began working in central midfield and eventually found his calling higher up the pitch, with Mousa Dembélé eventually becoming Dier’s central midfield partner when available.

It’s tempting to say that Mason and Bentaleb find themselves on the outside looking in at Spurs purely by an accident of fate, but that’s not the entire story. Yes, injuries and dips in form have hurt, but in a much more important way Pochettino’s idea for this team has evolved. No longer can this team base its game on the concept of a double pivot. A player like Dier is a much firmer base on which to build the pressing game.

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And it’s that pressing game which has ultimately doomed Mason and Bentaleb. While it’s always been a part of Pochettino’s philosophy at Spurs, this season it’s been refined and sharpened considerably. He needs players from midfield who are not only capable of being incisive, but also of aggressively recovering the ball. Alli and Dembélé are each at least equals to Mason in terms of getting the ball forward, but also add a willingness and ability to close down opponents with a precision the Englishman lacks.

Both Mason and Bentaleb have a shot at making rare appearances for Spurs over the next week of Europa League and FA Cup games. If they do play, they will be doing so not as the players they were last season, but rather as imitations of the players that have come into replace them this season.