Spurs show signs they’re learning when they press by claiming previous clean sheet

Jack Pitt-Brooke

Tottenham’s last clean sheet in the league felt like a lifetime ago. It came on September 14, when Spurs beat Crystal Palace 4-0 at home, back when the main question at the club was whether Mauricio Pochettino could spark the players — or himself — out of the sadness of losing the Champions League final. Three long months and 11 league games passed between that game and this one, a 5-0 win that was more complete than anything they have done all year.

There was plenty for Tottenham fans to enjoy here but maybe nothing quite as important as shutting out Burnley. Spurs had conceded eight goals in Mourinho’s first four games, making the team look totally unrecognisable from his great teams of the past.

Mourinho knows this and the central theme of his press conference on Friday afternoon was that Spurs were conceding too many “cheap goals” and must improve their “defensive process”. Not just by pointing fingers at individuals who made mistakes, but asking how the whole team can do better. “Dele Alli has to work, of course, with the two midfield players and with wingers closing well the spaces,” Mourinho explained on Friday, “trying to be more compact, and to protect better our defensive line.”

And on Saturday that is exactly what Spurs did. They were not perfect. Jay Rodriguez had two good headed chances, Davinson Sanchez had to block from Chris Wood on the line after the ball hit the bar. But they were still better at the back than they have been all season.

At the heart of it was Toby Alderweireld, continuing his resurgence under the new manager, showing, as he pointed out afterwards, he will “always give my 100 per cent for the club”. In this new set-up he has Jan Vertonghen to his left and Sanchez to his right, and he is at the centre of that Spurs back line, a nominal four that is more often a three when Serge Aurier pushes up down the right.

But, as Alderweireld explained to The Athletic after the game, the story was not one of individuals but of the collective, better organised and more intelligent than they have been, starting to feel the benefit of Mourinho’s coaching.

“Being tactical,” Alderweireld replied when asked how they kept their first clean sheet. “People think about defensive process, it’s not only the keeper, the centre-backs or the full-backs. It’s a team process. So it starts with the goalkeeper.” Just like attacking play, defensive play is an inherently collective endeavour. “You can compare with the build-up in an attacking way. If you don’t play well from the back, and stuff like this, you don’t come to create chances. It works as a team.”

Even though Spurs dominated they still had plenty of defending to do. Burnley played the only way they know how: long balls, trying to turn Spurs, getting Wood and Rodriguez in behind, and plenty of crosses into the box. “Defensively, everybody works very hard,” Alderweireld said. “Burnley play one v one, two strikers, wide wingers, so we had a difficult job today. It looks easy maybe on television, but it was very, very difficult. Because they play like they are searching for luck, with long balls, second balls, so you have to be ready all the time.”

There have been moments under Mourinho so far when the team has been too keen to press, but has not done it in the right way and has left itself exposed. As if they have been caught between the transition from Pochettino’s style to Mourinho’s. This time they were smarter, pressing as a unit, not leaving themselves open, and not losing their shape.

Alderweireld was pleased his team did not fall into the same trap here. “Sometimes we want to press, and not everyone is doing their job, so then they could play out of it, and then the pressure comes on the defence,” he said. “It’s a team thing. Today we didn’t press all the time. Sometimes we played compact, but there was a high line, so I think we did well there.”

And nobody was more gratified than Mourinho. He told his players at half-time, with the game nearly dead at 3-0, that the clean sheet should now be their “collective ambition”. He wanted more defensive work from his attacking players here and he got it. At one point early in the second half Aurier over-committed to a tackle he did not make and Burnley were in down the left. Erik Pieters was about to swing in a cross when Lucas Moura darted in to tackle. The whole ground applauded, but nobody more passionately than Mourinho himself.

This was the first time Spurs had looked like a Mourinho team, but the challenge now is to do that every week. And it is not easy, this was Mourinho’s 18th day in the job and his fifth game. Mourinho described himself last week as a “pitch coach”, not a “meetings coach”, desperate to get more time to work with his players on the training ground. That is why he is not taking his best players to Munich this week for a dead rubber, and why he will be coaching them for all of next week, in between the Wolves and Chelsea games, rather than giving them any days off.

“The amount of games is like unbelievable, you know,” Alderweireld said. “So there is no time to work. But when there is a little bit of time we try to. And then you see some things coming back.”