Tottenham Hotspur are back to being the laughingstock of the league for a week, as their tepid performance against Chelsea was a reminder that, yes, this team more than deserved to finish 17th in the Premier League, even wores than a Manchester United side they barely scraped past in the Europa League Final.
Spurs supporters fed into Ange Postecoglou's narrative too hard, and now Thomas Frank has to be the scapegoat when he's trying to do the best he can with a team that is legitimately less talented offensively than the mid-table Brentford side he previously coached.
Honestly, there are quite a few players on Tottenham who deserve far more criticism than they are getting or are overpraised, but no player stands out more for being mediocre to subpar yet praised to the moon by a certain subsection of fans than left back Djed Spence.
Quite frankly, Spence's disrespectful snub of Frank and his blatant insubordination is alarming for a player who has been horrible this season. As much as people buy into his silly memes of locking down attacking players in his supposed penitentiery, Spence has been a fairly average defender statistically with 1.1 tackles, a meager 0.2 interceptions, and 0.6 dribbles completed per game.
Tottenham need to cut him loose
And offensively, Spence is borderline untenable and one of the worst fullbacks in the entire Premier League on the ball. He averages just 0.2 key passes per game, 0.7 dribbles per game, and 0.3 fouls drawn per game with more than two direct turnovers given up per match. Spence is atrocious offensively, creating almost literally nothing while failing to progress the ball meaningfully, and when he has to start over Destiny Udogie, the entire team crumbles.
The record of Tottenham on the pitch with and without Spence is stark, and yet there are Tottenham fans who praise him for being a great, scrappy defender. In reality, when he starts, he is one of the worst starters on the pitch, and he is regularly one of the least impressive players for Spurs, never meaningfully impacting the game.
Tottenham struggle to push forward and create so often, especially on that left flank, when Spence is in there, and that's no coincidence. Now, that doesn't mean Spurs are all that great without him, but Spence is an albatross to this team.
By snubbing Frank, Spence has attracted the wrong kind of attention to himself, and for as long as Udogie is out or whenever Spence does get chances at left or right back, Spurs supporters are going to increasingly see that Spence is a liability and simply not good enough for this team. Spurs need to beef up their fullback room in the near future and cut Spence loose, because he's playing too many important minutes for a player who is miles behind his peers in terms of attacking production.