Tony Pulis believes the international break has come at the worst possible time for Roberto de Zerbi and Tottenham, robbing the head coach of the hours on the training pitch he needs to turn a heavily rebuilt squad into a functioning team.
Writing in his BBC Sport column, Pulis pointed to the scale of Spurs’ summer business. The board backed De Zerbi to the hilt with an outlay on new players of around £400m — an almost unprecedented occurrence for a club that has always been renowned for being careful with investment in its team. That spending sent expectations among many Tottenham supporters through the roof, particularly given the club had just avoided relegation two seasons running, finishing 17th twice in a row. Suddenly, some fans were looking forward to a season competing for trophies and a top-four finish.
Pulis argued that it is ridiculous to suggest De Zerbi should be under pressure already, especially after he kept the club up last season. De Zerbi took over with seven games to go and Spurs 17th in the Premier League, and three wins and two draws were enough to keep them up.
The early results and performances have been disappointing. Tottenham lost 3-2 at home to Aston Villa, and Spurs, Fulham and Bournemouth are the only top-flight teams yet to win a league game this season. Pulis noted that De Zerbi has plenty of other issues to deal with, from Tottenham’s poor home form to their inability to recover from conceding the first goal in games. But in his view the biggest challenge is fitting the players who have just arrived in with those already at the club, into a unit that plays as a team and produces results so that the money spent is justified.
That takes time, patience and the kind of small details supporters never see. Instead, the majority of De Zerbi’s players have now been taken away from him for another three weeks on international duty. Pulis said De Zerbi was always playing catch-up because his players were not all in place when the season began, and the club were still adding to the squad even after the campaign had started — costing him the chance to assess his squad and impose his own principles on his top group of players.
He used his own experience to illustrate how long combinations can take to click. At Stoke he signed centre-halves Gerry Taggart and Michael Duberry, complete opposites in how they dealt with space: Taggart wanted to drop off deeper because he was not overly quick, while Duberry was fast and never worried about leaving space behind him. Pulis could not make Taggart any quicker, so he had to convince Duberry to step away from his main strengths of pace and power and work along Taggart’s lines instead. Even after a great deal of time together on the grass in training, it still took time for the pair to work in unison.
Pulis contrasted Tottenham’s position with clubs that have a settled identity, naming Sunderland last season and Brighton, along with Brentford and Bournemouth. Those clubs, he said, might change their manager but they do not change their identity, so they know what strengths a player needs for a given position. Without that solid base behind you, bringing in as many as 10 new signings in one window, as Spurs have done, creates many issues for the coach.
He also pointed out that De Zerbi is only a few months into the job and is still getting to know the existing players as well as the new ones, on and off the pitch. A pre-season together would have helped the new arrivals get up to speed with their team-mates and with De Zerbi’s front-foot style of play, but that did not happen.
Pulis offered a further illustration of how a manager learns which players understand the importance of teamwork. At one club he inherited a right-back signed from a top Premier League team for more than £1m — big money at the time — who kept taking up what Pulis considered poor positions. After stopping the session at least four times to make his point, the player told him he did not believe it was right, so Pulis replaced him with a young reserve full-back who understood his role was for the team rather than himself.
Getting things right off the pitch is just as important, Pulis wrote, which means finding out what players are like as individuals and understanding their lifestyles. At West Brom he had three South American players whom he and his assistant, David Kemp, took out for dinner with their families, a gesture he believes won a degree of respect and trust they would never have earned otherwise. He also recalled a Premier League player whose routine he could not believe — training from 8.30am to 1pm, home and in bed until 9 or 10pm, then out for dinner and a casino until the early hours — yet who remained an integral part of keeping a struggling club up and was never a problem because he was a great team member, even if it took him time to integrate.
Pulis is clear about where he stands. He likes De Zerbi’s passion and his approach, and accepts that will count for nothing if Spurs do not eventually produce — but, he says, the manager deserves a proper chance.