From Jim's chair
Four league games. No goals. And somehow I'm about to spend the next few hundred words telling you why I feel better about Tottenham than I did a month ago. I know. I can hear some of you groaning from here – I do get lampooned for optimism.
But here's the thing. I was at the Everton game, and those first twenty minutes were the best football I've watched at our stadium in two years. Not "decent by recent standards" – genuinely good. Cohesive, brave in the build-up, solid behind the ball. We had 39 touches in their box. What we didn't do was shoot, and there's something almost comical about a team working that hard to arrive somewhere and then declining to knock on the door.
The panel, JJ and Enya have all circled the same conclusion from different angles this week: this isn't a finishing crisis, it's a recognition problem. Seeing the pass, the shot, the run half a second too late. That's fixable. It's being coached. And it's a very different illness from a squad that's downed tools – anyone who watched last season knows exactly what that looks like, and this isn't it.
JJ described the whole situation as a toothpaste tube: all the good work squeezed up to the top, waiting for the lid to come off. I'll spare you where that analogy went next.
Quick one before I go: The 82nd Percentile, our new weekly data deep-dive with JJ, Enya and DJ, is live on Patreon, and the founder rate – £5 a month, for life – is nearly gone. Link to watch here: https://www.patreon.com/82ndPercentile
Keep it Lilywhite #OhSo33,
– Jim