Spurs must stop these wild swings in mood and form but this may be the hardest time to do it

The good vibes at Tottenham lasted for 48 hours.

The story of Spurs’ 2024-25 season, in fact of Ange Postecoglou’s 16 months as their head coach, has been one of dizzying shifts between joyous optimism and despairing negativity.

This is a team with a bigger gap between their gloriously high ceiling and their painfully low floor than any other in the league in recent years. When Spurs are good, nobody in the country can live with them. When Spurs are bad, it feels as if anyone can beat them.

These are not just the peaks and troughs of an undulating landscape. What makes Tottenham so compelling right now is that they can go from their best to their worst (or vice versa) from one game to the next. The experience of watching them is like being on a rollercoaster in the dark. You never know when the next dip or climb is going to come.

Never has this been more pronounced than in the past few weeks.

The 1-0 defeat away to Crystal Palace on October 27 was one of those deflating experiences where all the momentum and confidence appear to flow out of the club. But they followed that up with a 2-1 win against Manchester City — arguably their best performance under Postecoglou, to that point — in the Carabao Cup and then a 4-1 thumping of Aston Villa. Then, just when it felt like Spurs had finally cracked it, that they had hit that level they had been searching for, they lost at home to an Ipswich Town side who hadn’t won all season.

That Ipswich defeat came at the worst possible time. Like the Brighton defeat on October 6 (when Spurs lost 3-2 having been in total control and two goals up at half-time), it was the last game before an international break, so gave everyone connected with Tottenham two weeks to stew in the frustration and misery of such a painful, needless defeat. Those two weeks felt like years, as people fretted about whether Spurs were really going anywhere, whether they had already thrown too many points away, whether the whole Postecoglou project would ever truly get off the ground.

And if they had been beaten by City at the Etihad Stadium on Saturday in their first game back, as many would have expected, those questions would have intensified. Not least because they would have started this week in the bottom half of the Premier League table. But instead, in classic Spurs style, they responded to their lowest moment with an even more dramatic overcorrection.

There have been plenty of big wins over City in the past 10 years but this 4-0 away from home, against the winners of the past four Premier League titles, is without precedent.

Saturday’s triumph is more than just one win. It is a game that vanquishes memories of Ipswich, and may even start to fumigate away all of the negative energy that had been swirling around for the previous two weeks. It is a win that may even start to change some of the bigger questions about this Tottenham team: Can they do it in the hardest games? Can they do it away from home? Can they do it when key players aren’t available?

The vibes at Spurs are good again after the 4-0 win at Man City (Paul Ellis/Getty Images)

But the real question was whether this could be a staging post before the vibes rollercoaster plunged downwards yet again. The news on Monday evening that Guglielmo Vicario, so good against City, is facing an extended lay-off after ankle surgery felt like it a sharp change in mood. It means Fraser Forster, who has only started three games this season and just four since Postecoglou took over, will have his longest run in the side since the end of Antonio Conte. It will impact Spurs defensively and in their build-up. Who knows what it will mean for the next few months. It will be a huge test for Forster and Tottenham.

Spurs fans are at least used to bad news following good, although it usually comes in the form of performances themselves. Remember the 4-0 away to Aston Villa in March, the best win of last season? It felt like a transformative moment. But then Spurs lost their next game at Fulham, 3-0, and never regained their balance in the chase for fourth place. Or earlier this season, the 3-0 win at Old Trafford — an omen of sorts for what happened on Saturday — which was then followed by that mood-shattering collapse in Brighton, and another miserable international fortnight.

The good news is that there are still objective reasons to be optimistic.

This team are trending upwards, more steadily than it probably feels at the moment. A quick look at their numbers tells us that. Tottenham are top for goals scored, second for expected goals (but first in non-penalty xG) and also second for shots taken. Defensively, they have conceded the joint-fourth fewest goals, seventh-least xG and third-fewest shots. (Of course it was Vicario, not Forster, in goal for these league games.) All of their recent wins have been by big margins. The defeats, as painful as they are, are all by narrow ones.

These are not the numbers of a team caught between good and bad, with the average splitting down the middle. These are the numbers of a good team with a few problems to iron out.

And while the narrative around Spurs has resembled a seismograph this season, Postecoglou has done a good job of keeping the external noise out. The players are still very much behind him and the mood at the training ground has been good, even after the bad days. The way the players worked so hard at the Etihad to implement his instructions — including James Maddison, who had not started in the Premier League for a month — is testament to that.

The challenge for the players — because it is their responsibility too — is to keep performing at the right level, twice a week every week.

We know that when they are on their game they are very difficult to stop. But we also know they have a habit of taking their eyes off the ball, especially going into games (Palace or Ipswich), or within matches (half-time against Brighton), when they are favourites.

If the players can get that out of their system — easy to write on the internet, maybe harder to do in practice — there is no reason they cannot go on a run.

Tottenham are now going into the most intense phase of their season. They play Thursday-Sunday for five straight weeks between now and the end of the calendar year. There are some huge games in there: Chelsea and Liverpool at home in the league, Manchester United visiting in the quarter-finals of the Carabao Cup. There are plenty of fixtures, too, of the sort Spurs have messed up this season: Bournemouth, Fulham, Southampton, Nottingham Forest and Wolves.

And they will have get through all of this busy schedule without their first-choice goalkeeper, who has started to look back to his best in recent months. This run of games looks harder now we know Vicario will not be there for them. Maybe expectations will have to be recalibrated downwards a bit. Maybe this means more Ipswiches along the way. Or maybe Forster will come in, make some big saves, and Spurs will find a way through. It would certainly help to have Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven back fit as soon as possible, as well as Radu Dragusin and Ben Davies did on Saturday.

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Maybe it’s impossible anyway to be consistently at their very best through a run as testing as that. Maybe even more injuries will blow them off course. It feels inevitable that the vibes rollercoaster will go through a few dips in the next few weeks.

But maybe, if Spurs play as well as they can, and if defeats are not all seen as crises, the end of this year may take on a calmer feel.

(Top photo: PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images)