There have been several recurring themes of criticism directed at manager Thomas Frank by Tottenham Hotspur fans. He plays too passively. He sets his teams up cowardly. He loses too many games. He does not support the fans. He throws young players under the bus. He trusts the same mediocre veterans in the starting lineup over more qualified, higher upside youngsters. He isn't ready to manage a big club.
But all the while, Frank is quietly making some positive adjustments and listening to both the feedback he hears from the fans and the obvious results of what is laid out before him on the pitch. For example, Archie Gray is getting more minutes in midfield, as is his young partner Lucas Bergvall.
On the flip side, Frank is phasing out veterans who are not producing, including those Spurs supporters were worried he is favoring. They have been asking for Rodrigo Bentancur to get fewer minutes than Gray going forward, and even though he started the season brilliantly, Tottenham fans have also been quietly turning on Joao Palhinha.
Thomas Frank is adjusting
And Frank has also quietly obliged. Palhinha did not start for Tottenham against Liverpool, and that now makes it four straight games without a start for the Portuguese midfielder. Even though Spurs are not getting the best results with loses to Forest and Liverpool, they did beat Brentford and Slavia Praha and genuinely look better in midfield with Gray and Bergvall than they did with Palhinha and Bentancur.
On the surface, Palhinha is a good player. He is an amazing defensive player in terms of winning the ball and breaking up play. But he is so bad on the ball. He cannot pass progressively, he cannot run or dribble with the ball, and he offers no threat going forward other than fluke goals. Palhinha defensively makes tackles but also disrupts the structure with his playing style.
Tottenham were initially loving the Palhinha move with how many tackles and defensive interventions he was racking up, but credit to Frank for slowly but surely adjusting and realizing that he is offering nothing anywhere else and those tackles are not amounting to real transitive ball possession and chances going the other way because he is so negative on the ball. It is a change that is probably lurking under the radar in the mainstream, but Palhinha is now way low on the depth chart after his hot start to the campaign.