Tottenham Hotspur are officially in the relegation zone. After watching West Ham United dust Wolves 4-0 on Friday night, Spurs responded to their London rivals by putting together another offensive disaster class against a stingy Sunderland defense, failing to take any advantage of Dan Ballard's injury in Roberto De Zerbi's managerial debut for a Premier League Big Six club.
De Zerbi obviously has a lot of work cut out for him, and he is not even one of the top five biggest problems, at least in a footballing sense, at Spurs right now. Spurs were terrible before De Zerbi, and they will, logically, most likely continue to stink for the remainder of the season.
But De Zerbi was hired for a lot of money immediately to help Spurs stink less - and at least mitigate the rotten stench of a decaying organization enough to survive relegation. He didn't help himself, though, with the decisions he made both during and before his first match as Tottenham manager against Premier League returnees Sunderland in this 1-0 loss.
Mathys Tel and Xavi Simons snubbed already
It was baffling to see Xavi Simons and Mathys Tel sitting on the bench, only coming on in the second half as substitutes. Roberto De Zerbi attempted to justify the Simons snub in the press conference after the loss, but all of his fumbling fell on unreceptive ears.
Spurs supporters had seen Thomas Frank embarrass himself by leaving off his most dynamic attacking players, as Tottenham are a much worse team without these two. De Zerbi snubbing Tel was particularly bizarre, considering he had just spent the pre game press conference time telling everyone that he liked the Frenchman enough to try to sign him for Marseille.
Alongside Archie Gray, Mathys Tel had been Tottenham's best player over the last few weeks and the only real source of attacking threat. With the only other true winger in the squad actually out injured for the rest of the season in Mohammed Kudus, you would have thought that De Zerbi would have written Tel's name in permanent marker as a starter.
Instead, he rolled with three strikers. And all of Richarlison, Randal Kolo Muani, and Dominic Solanke were predictably poor and even worse together. It was the sort of managerial blunder that you, again, would have thought that De Zerbi would have learned from by watching Frank's mistakes before him.
But maybe De Zerbi was not, in fact, watching. That would then explain why Xavi Simons also sat out while Spurs rolled with Conor Gallagher in midfield. And, well, no Spurs fan wants to hear more about how much of a disaster of a signing Gallagher has been since January.