The tactics Tottenham Hotspur attack is missing this season

Tottenham Hotspur is a conundrum this season in the Premier League. On the one hand, you have the team that has scored the 4th most goals, conceded the 4th fewest, and has the 3rd best goal difference. On the other hand, you have a team that has dropped an astounding 15 points from winning positions and has lost nine matches, tied for sixth in the table.

So on the one hand you have a team statistically sound and on the other, that sound team cannot close the deal and finish what they start. Clearly, something is missing and we at HotspurHQ went digging for it.

Defense or offense, chicken or egg

Look with 15 dropped points there is no doubt Tottenham Hotspur should be in a better position in the league. Keeping less than half those points, 7, would have the Spurs tied with Leicester City on 56 points for third. Given Tottenham ARE tied with Leicester on goal difference at +19, it is safe to assume that the Lilywhites would be ahead on that tiebreaker, simply holding onto less than half those points.

However, the ball bounced differently for Tottenham thus far this season and those leads turned into ties and some of those ties even became losses. Add in a couple of clunkers every team has – City did lose 2-5 to Leicester – and suddenly you get to where Tottenham is this year with nine losses.

At this point, those 15 points cannot be re-won, so it is about avoiding any more dropped points moving forward. Defensively, it is hard to say what the team can do. Early in the season, it was bad luck, then it was bad fouls, more recently it has been bad play. Having played for more than a decade and been on teams good and bad, that psyche at the end of matches can be hard to overcome once it hits.

Given the limitations in changing the defense, the conventional wisdom for most is that Tottenham simply needs to have a more potent or maybe more consistent and fluid attack. If the Spurs can simply score more goals and finish more of the chances they create, they can put teams away. Given the team has more talent in attack, trying to tinker with the offense to create something more is probably the best bet to change the momentum through these last eight matches and score enough to finish the games.

Tottenham create chances under José Mourinho

Clearly, Tottenham has been scoring this season as evidenced by 51 goals in the league and over 100 across all competitions. To get those 51 league goals, the Spurs have been creating a lot of chances. In fact, this team has created 56 big chances through 30 matches.

Those 56 big chances are more than last season when the Spurs had 48 big chances in 38 matches. Further, those 56 chances are more than the 53 created in 38 games during Spurs’ best ever 2016-17 season where the team scored 86 goals and earned 86 points.

At 1.68 big chances created per match, only the 2017-18 Spurs which created 2 per game generated more in the last seven seasons. Given this team creates chances and does score a decent amount but not enough to finish off teams they should, clearly something is missing.