It might be too early to push the panic button but Roberto De Zerbi faces a huge task if he is to turn Spurs around

Time for Tottenham to start panicking? This is, of course, a subtle trick question. Tottenham is one of those clubs that never actually stops panicking. They panic when they concede and they panic when they score. They panic when they have the ball and they panic when someone else does. They have a coach in Roberto De Zerbi whose face evokes a state of permanent alarm, the expression of a man perpetually having a toilet door opened on him. One year they even managed to panic their way to the Europa League. For the ever-rattled Spurs fan, this club is less a treasured devotion and more a lifelong haunting, broken up by occasional panic substitutions.

You could intuit that sense of encrusted resignation pretty much from the moment Anthony Elanga’s improvised shot kissed the post and trickled over the line to give Newcastle the lead. Since beating Aston Villa 4-1 in late 2024, Tottenham have gone behind 44 times in all competitions and come back to win precisely zero of them. There is something innate and endemic here, a chronic case of Long Tottenham for which – despite the new coach, the new leadership structure and more than a third of a billion pounds in transfer fees – there remains no proven cure. Yoane Wissa’s clincher was of zero surprise to anyone.

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