In Tottenham’s goalless draw with Everton, Andy Robertson sent several crosses into the box. Roberto De Zerbi later pointed out that Mateus Fernandes had failed to make the run from the other side. The missed movement helped explain why Spurs were creating openings without scoring. After four Premier League games without a goal, Tottenham had also left last season’s 11-goal league scorer, Richarlison, out of their registered squad. De Zerbi then ruled him out of the Liverpool

There are bad starts to the season, and then there's 1912/13. Tottenham Hotspur hobbled out of the traps with 4 consecutive losses (including a 6-1 drubbing at Ewood Park). The first victory of a wretched campaign stubbornly refused to arrive until late November, the team's 13th (THIRTEENTH!) fixture of the season. (It was actually their 14th league game, but the home match with Notts County a month earlier had been abandoned with only 10 minutes remaining due to fog.

My recent paper, Time to Automaticity in Team Performance Systems, looks at the delay between learning a team system and playing it with stable group timing. Early results can contain learning noise while players build shared habits. Research on team thinking also shows that teammates learn common patterns through repeated work. Those patterns help them predict what a teammate will do next.

There’s understandably a lot of frustration at the moment. Four league games, no win, no goals, and after spending serious money in the summer nobody wants to hear excuses. But I think there’s an important difference between making excuses and understanding what is actually being built.

Ah, the hubris of summer. Cast your mind back 12 months, as we basked in the afterglow of Bilbao. Who among us didn't assert that seventeenth had been an aberration, never to be repeated? Things could only get better, couldn't they? The trauma of what followed thereafter - a cataclysm averted by a paper-thin margin - should perhaps lead to a tempering of expectations this time around. But this is Tottenham Hotspur, and we'll have none of that drab sobriety around here.

Because the truth is simple: preseason isn’t for us - and in all honesty, it shouldn’t be. It should be for coaches. For fitness. For rhythm. For preparation. Not for fans. Not for content producers. Not for the machine.

We must currently have the worst forward line ever to don our beloved colours!

Another week, another dreadful refereeing performance. This time from Jarred Gillett. Bloody Aussie. Strewth!

This coming weekend us Spurs fans have our very own dystopian dilemma when Arsenal travel to West Ham on Sunday. A win for West Ham significantly changes the dynamic at the bottom of the table and suddenly makes our position perilous.

The legend that is Steve Perryman is our record appearance holder. He played an astonishing 866 times for us between 1969 and 1986. Perryman was indispensible to both our successful 1970’s and1980’s teams, each of which brought home three major trophies.

Early impressions of Xavi Simons as he settles into the Premier League.