Is Nuno Espirito Santo the right manager to arrest Tottenham's slump?

Tottenham
(Image credit: Getty)

Pep Guardiola is the last man to retain the Premier League’s manager-of-the-month award. Suffice to say that the winner for January and February is no danger of losing that status to the August recipient. Nuno Espirito Santo’s sorry September has seen Tottenham compile the worst record in the division, scoring a solitary goal, conceding three in three consecutive games for the first time since 2003.

It is rare a reign seems to be unravelling at such speed. Sunday’s North London derby defeat was the sort of wretched display, where every idea is emphatically disproved, where the team looks disjointed, incoherent and unmotivated, that it resembled the kinds of performances that get managers sacked. Six league games into his tenure, Nuno is not so imperilled. Yet it was so comprehensive, so chastening that it leaves legitimate questions if he can engineer a revival or if the job is too big for him.

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Richard Jolly

Richard Jolly also writes for the National, the Guardian, the Observer, the Straits Times, the Independent, Sporting Life, Football 365 and the Blizzard. He has written for the FourFourTwo website since 2018 and for the magazine in the 1990s and the 2020s, but not in between. He has covered 1500+ games and remembers a disturbing number of the 0-0 draws.