It would be tempting to talk of Tottenham at least being predictable in their unpredictability, of the way they cannot but follow up a great result with a disappointing one, of the inevitability of them, having beaten Manchester City 4-0 last weekend, failing to beat Fulham at home this. But actually the story on Sunday was far more about Fulham, how well they played and how mystifying it was that they didn’t take all three points having had much the better of the majority of the game.
What made their performance all the more impressive was that they did it without the midfielder Andreas Pereira. Marco Silva denied that he had been left out after giving an interview to Brazilian media in which he seemed to suggest he would quite fancy a move to Marseille to play under Roberto De Zerbi. “He’s going to be back to help the team like he’s been helping us every week,” Silva said. “I don’t make decisions around interviews. I don’t protect players because of social media. My decisions come from daily sessions with the players. He was not ready. It was a technical decision from myself.”
That Fulham were not ahead by the time Tom Cairney was sent off after 83 minutes was almost entirely down to the heroics of Tottenham’s backup goalkeeper Fraser Forster, who hadn’t played a league game for 18 months and whose obvious differences from the first-choice Guglielmo Vicario, absent with a fractured ankle, had been the source of much pre-match concern. Only 7% of Vicario’s passes had been played into the opponent’s half this season, by far the lowest figure in the league, and he’d maintained a 90.8% pass completion rate. Forster, who completed 77.8% of his passes and hit four out of his 14 long, is a more old-fashioned kind of goalkeeper.
But however justified the anxiety about his capacity to play out from the back, at 36 Forster’s reflexes remain sharp. After a brave early block from Raúl Jiménez, he made a fine save diving to his right to keep out a side-foot volley from the Mexican eight minutes before half-time. If anything, the fingertip he got on an Alex Iwobi effort to divert it on to the bar five minutes later was even better. “He was good,” said Ange Postecoglou. “When you lose your goalkeeper the key is to have somebody experienced who’s not going to be overawed by filling those shoes. What you saw out there we see every day in training. He still has a great work ethic.”
The red card, inevitably, checked Fulham’s momentum, and they reacted by going to five at the back to shut down the wide areas to Spurs. Sasa Lukic had earlier perhaps been fortunate not to collect a second yellow for an ugly lunge on Son Heung-min – he was substituted almost immediately – but Fulham were reduced to 10 as Cairney was dismissed following a VAR review for planting his studs into Dejan Kulusevski’s calf. Even Silva accepted it was the right decision.
And yet good as Fulham were, it was also true that Tottenham struggled to get going. The comparison with the City performance has clearly frustrated Postecoglou, who pointed out that at the Etihad he’d had Vicario in goal and had been able to bring Timo Werner and Brennan Johnson off the bench. “It seems with this club, whatever we do well is then used as a millstone to bring us down at every other opportunity,” he said. “It’s really important we don’t react to any of that. I’ve seen so much violin-playing over clubs with one centre-back out and we’ve got two out. We’re going to have to protect our players and at the moment we don’t have too many options and we’ve got to manage them as best we can.”
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Since the City game Tottenham have lost their goalkeeper, while Dominic Solanke was sent home with illness and the need was felt to give Kulusevski at least something of a rest by leaving him on the bench. That meant Son had to be shunted into the centre, which makes it harder for Spurs to retain possession. As a result, their threat was limited largely to transitions, although James Maddison hit a post with a clever free-kick under the wall just before the break.
Fulham were at their most dominant, Forster keeping out back-post efforts from Issa Diop and Iwobi when Tottenham took a 54th-minute lead, Johnson left weirdly unmarked to slam in his 10th of the season from Werner’s cross. Was this a rare instance of Spurs winning a game in which they had not been significantly on top? It was not. Iwobi cut the ball back and Cairney slammed in the equaliser from the edge of the box.
The draw keeps Spurs above Fulham in the table, but there was little doubt which was the better side on Sunday afternoon.
