Spurs might not even have hit rock bottom yet despite historic humiliation at Newcastle

The usual gallows-humour response to a defeat like Spurs’ 6-1 astonishment at Newcastle would be to observe that at least things can’t get worse. But watching this Spurs team and looking at a fixture list that contains Manchester United and Liverpool in the next seven days, we’re not so sure…

We’ve seen Spurs do some seriously Spurs sh*t over the decades, but turning up for their biggest game of the season so far and going 5-0 down inside 21 minutes and seeking to address that by bringing on the defender who was booed into oblivion a week earlier in deserved defeat to a team simultaneously en route to a 4-0 home defeat against West Ham is going to take an awful lot of beating.

That said, they’ve got Manchester United on Thursday night and Liverpool away next week; we’re not at all confident that this Spurs team has definitely hit rock bottom just yet. What a team, what a club.

Newcastle fans are going to have to forgive us here. This is going to be mostly about Spurs. Yes, Newcastle were absolutely excellent but this was Spurs’ day. No team against a supposed rival can play well enough to be 5-0 up after 20 minutes. Yes, Joe Willock’s pass to create the third goal for Alexander Isak (or was it the fourth? Genuinely hard to keep track) was astonishingly good. Yes, the speed and verve of the attacking play was astonishing to watch.

But still. The achievement here lies in being 5-0 down, not 5-0 up. You have to be cartoonishly bad for that to happen. And Spurs were certainly that. Plus it’s much more fun to talk about incompetence than excellence.

We could go through the list of those to blame for this catastrophic embarrassment. So let’s do that. Hugo Lloris and the four (important number to note, that) defenders in front of him are all on the list. However much they may have been shafted, they technically remain professional Premier League footballers and didn’t have to highlight the many other errors that have led Spurs to this point quite so atrociously.

The most conspicuous element of that wrong-looking back four was in the wide positions, and it sums up the current mess. In Pedro Porro and Ivan Perisic, Spurs had two full-backs who are specialist wing-backs signed specifically and directly at Antonio Conte’s direction.

With Perisic last summer, that seemed fair enough. He was a free transfer, for one thing, had enjoyed previous success with Conte as a left wing-back and brought needed experience of big occasions and most…