Spurs get caught in a storm of their own creation against a gritty Newcastle

Spurs pretensions of a top-four finish feel a bit hollow after a well-organised Newcastle team took advantage of their defensive generosity.

There are few more contradictory teams in the Premier League than Spurs. They seem capable of absolute brilliance and extraordinary incompetence in the space of just a few minutes, and there is no way of telling what they might serve up from one passage of play to the next.

The first half-hour of their game against Newcastle United was a case in point. They dominated attacking play and created a handful of decent chances throughout the early stages, but all it took was a long ball, a moment of – increasingly familiar – lackadaiscial play from Hugo Lloris, and all that good work felt undone.

Lloris is the Spurs club captain and a highly experienced goalkeeper, a World Cup and Nations League winner with almost 140 appearances for France under his belt. But these mistakes are starting to feel too regular. The opening goal of the game came from out of nowhere, a long ball through the middle from Fabian Schar which the goalkeeper should have been able to clear with comfort, but instead Lloris mis-controlled, ran into Callum Wilson and fell, allowing Wilson to roll the ball into the empty goal. A substantial VAR check – Offside! Handball! Foul! Something!- was never going to alter the referee’s initial decision.

The mood inside The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium darkened almost immediately. The players started to seem to need an extra touch to get the ball under control, while passes started to run astray.

Newcastle, tails lifted by their moment of good fortune, were more incisive with their tackling and started to dictate play in the middle of the pitch. This has been an ongoing issue for Spurs for some time now. They can go for long periods with their central midfield looking at best like a creativity desert and at worst non-existent.

Four minutes from half-time, the cost of unnecessarily inflating the confidence of the opposition became even more clear. Newcastle were pressing higher, a completely understandable tactical formation against a team so capable of conceding as a result of their own panic, and when Sean Longstaff nicked the ball from Ryan Sessegnon after Lloris’s chipped ball didn’t quite reach its intended target, he fed the ball to Miguel Almiron, who ghosted past Clement Lenglet before lifting the ball over Lloris to double Newcastle’s lead.

With storm clouds both literal and metaphorical…