Tottenham Falls Flat versus Liverpool

Spurs in Midfield

One surefire way to ensure the Eric Dier – Moussa Dembele double pivot is not the problem in a slow-moving ball is to make it a triple pivot by adding in Harry Winks. As Winks was substituted the NBCSports announcer said something about the Winks experiment not working. I completely disagree, it wasn’t the Winks experiment, that was Winks solo as the holding midfielder against Real Madrid in the Champions League last year and it seemed to work out okay.

Today, what we saw were three redundant players standing in each other’s way, thus not enough off the ball movement. Harry Winks with either Dier or Dembele can work, as can Winks alone in front of the back line, but Winks, Dier, AND Dembele, well that was destined for disaster from the off.

With three in the midfield holding position and four in the back line that left Tottenham with only 3 attacking players for the first hour of the game. Compounding the lack of manpower up front, was the fact that the hydra-of-holding-midfield-hell couldn’t get the ball forward. Thus, Eriksen ended up dropping much deeper for parts of the game leaving only TWO players to attack for Spurs.

With Eriksen dropping deep, three more holding midfielders clogging the middle, Spurs played a lot of balls over the top from the half-line which were cut off by Allison every time. Vertongen may have had the right idea with his misplaced shot from distance at 36 minutes. Tottenham needed to do something to slow Allison coming off his line. This midfield was never going to string enough passes together or create enough space to leave many other options for Spurs.