LONDON // For Tottenham Hotspur, this feels like a last stand. Going in to the north London derby, they are six points adrift of Arsenal having played a game more and, if they fail to beat their neighbours at White Hart Lane, it is hard to see how that gap could be reeled in over their final eight games of the season.
There is danger lurking behind as well, with Manchester United only five points away and with a game in hand. As Tim Sherwood said amid his astonishing attack on his team last week, at the moment anybody thinking Spurs will take fourth and the final Champions League qualifying slot is “dreaming”.
For Sherwood, too, this is probably a final chance to cling to his job. There was plenty of sympathy for him after last Saturday's 4-0 defeat at Chelsea, when a tactical plan that was working was undermined by a string of individual errors, but the performance in losing 3-1 to Benfica in the Europa League on Thursday was dismal.
As well as individual mistakes, there was a general flatness: it was hard not to wonder that maybe Sherwood’s complaint about how his team kept on capitulating had led to a general shrugging of shoulders.
When Spurs collapsed against Manchester City and Liverpool under Andre Villas-Boas, the conclusion was that the dressing-room had lost faith in its manager; if it has lost faith in Sherwood as well, it is fair to turn the question back on the players: is this simply a squad lacking in backbone, a squad that will always be prone to disintegration?
Perhaps it is to do with the number of new arrivals last summer, although none of the seven players brought in at a cost of £110 million (Dh672.5m) started last Saturday.
The sense is that, gifted a unique windfall from the sale of Gareth Bale, a vast sum of money that had been organically generated rather than coming from the pockets of a petrochemical oligarch, the club has squandered it.
Tottenham have already begun to talk of a new policy for this summer, of bringing in “quality not quantity” – words that cannot do much for the morale of those who came in last summer.
It says much for how little threat Arsene Wenger perceives from Tottenham that he spent most of his pre-match press conference defending Sherwood, suggesting Benfica manager Jorge Jesus had been out of line in a spat between the two benches on Thursday and urging Spurs to have patience.
“I don’t know Sherwood as a coach,” Wenger said. “I knew him as a player because I am a long time in this job. I like the fact that he has learnt his job and gets his chance. In England you rightly complain that young managers don’t get a chance. When you get one you have to support him.”
Wenger knows him because Sherwood played for Spurs for four years, during which time they beat his Arsenal only once – in a fractious game in 1999 in which Fredrik Ljungberg and Martin Keown were sent off and Sherwood was accused of having elbowed Emmanuel Petit.
His wider point is a sound one, though: the Sherwood issue has gone beyond the specific. Other than Harry Redknapp, he is the first English manager to take charge of a side with realistic top four aspirations since Bobby Robson retired from Newcastle United in 2004.
There is a perceived need for him to succeed because there is a desperation that top clubs should not always look abroad for managers, a desire that an English manager should at last win the Premier League. That, inevitably, has skewed the analysis: Sherwood is not just a young manager learning his job; he is the great English hope.
On Sunday, the focus narrows again. This is about staying in the race for fourth and about the parochial passions of north London. But it is also about keeping the English hope in a job next season.
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