If only there were a word for that sort of performance from Tottenham. At half-time, they were 2-0 up and seemed utterly in control, Dejan Kulusevski and Brennan Johnson ripping Brighton apart down the right.
They were so dominant that the instinct was to start recalling great Spurs collapses of the past – 3-0 up against Manchester United in 2001, 3-0 up against 10-man Manchester City in 2004, the leads lost in the two 5-2 defeats by Arsenal in 2012, 2-0 up against Chelsea in the Battle of the Bridge in 2016, 3-0 up after 82 minutes against West Ham in 2020 – if only because it seemed so unlikely something similar could happen again. But the Spursiness of Spurs is never to be underestimated.
This was the 10th time Spurs have lost a Premier League game having been two goals up. No other side have done it on more than seven occasions. As Giorgio Chiellini observed after Juventus had scored twice in three second-half minutes to transform a Champions League tie Spurs had seemed to be dominating in 2018, “this is the history of the Tottenham”.
Perhaps in retrospect, there were just a couple of warning signs in the first half, the sense that Brighton had the capacity to slice Spurs open. But the story at the break seemed to be of Brighton’s fragility, the remarkable vulnerability of their high line. There was the unusual sensation of watching a dogmatic approach being undone in a Spurs game and Ange Postecoglou being on the right side of it.
The tone was set within 16 seconds as Dominic Solanke released Timo Werner behind Joël Veltman; again and again the away side hit the space Chelsea had exploited last week. Fabian Hürzeler has insisted the issue is not the height of the line but a lack of pressure on the ball, but playing a line that high with players as slow on the turn as Lewis Dunk and Adam Webster means there is no failsafe such as, for instance, Spurs enjoy with the pace of Micky van de Ven. The loss of Webster to what appeared a hamstring injury after nine minutes only complicated matters further. Igor Julio came on, but Jan Paul van Hecke is badly missed.
Even allowing for the fact that Werner is not, it’s fair to say, as lethal as Cole Palmer, the surprise was that it took 23 minutes for Spurs to take the lead. The method, though, was entirely predictable, as Georginio Rutter was dispossessed and Solanke fed Johnson to score his sixth in six games. The second, similarly, resulted from a simple transition, Solanke holding off Igor to play in Werner, who teed up James Maddison.
Spurs could have got more before the break. As Postecoglou said, Spurs should have “put the game to bed”. He seemed almost shell-shocked afterwards, standing on the pitch for a lengthy period and then acknowledging that his side hadn’t done the basics, that they hadn’t competed after half-time. It wasn’t just that they were open in the second half, it was that the life went out of them. Had more than three of this side played away to Ferencvaros on Thursday, it might have been tempting to blame fatigue, but there were no obvious explanations and, from Postecoglou’s point of view, no excuses.
After a promising start to the season, Brighton had run into a slightly sticky spell, failing to win any of their previous four league games. There have now been 20 goals in their past four games in all competitions; that might not be sustainable, but it is fun. Pervis Estupiñán’s arrival for Ferdi Kalioglu at left-back helped shore up that side and, with a more solid platform, Kauro Mitoma suddenly was able to impose himself.
Still, though, for all that Brighton improved, for all that they became more compact, for all the determined running of Rutter and the aerial threat of Danny Welbeck, it was hard to avoid the feeling that Tottenham gave this up. The first Brighton goal came after an air shot by Van de Van and a miskick by Destiny Udogie. The second came after Mitoma was allowed a run and Udogie’s shove almost seemed to give Rutter the momentum to get past Van de Ven. And the third resulted from Rutter beating Udogie far too easily and Rodrigo Bentancur then being indecisive, allowing Rutter to cross.
Brighton deserve credit, of course, but this was about Spurs’ collapse. Postecoglou said he’d seen nothing like this from his side before, but there had been elements of similar wastefulness against Leicester and Newcastle, games in which Spurs were the better side for significant periods but failed to win. And that, perhaps, is the true curse of Spursiness, the sense that there are always three teams on the pitch: Spurs, their opponents, and the demons of their worse natures.
