Скачать или смотреть This might be the most competitive ever Premier League - and it's bad news for Spurs

As Igor Tudor walked into the Tottenham Hotspur dressing room after that defeat to Arsenal, he carried the air of a man realising just how big this challenge is. His message to the players was much the same as the one he relayed to the media: it’s time to look in the mirror. Because right now, that squad is staring at something that had still seemed impossible for so long. They’re in a relegation battle. Spurs, one of the Super League founders and currently among the wealthiest clubs in the world, could go down.

Some Tottenham fans reading this will no doubt be screaming that they’ve been warning of this for months, that the club has long been in real danger of sleepwalking into relegation. In attempting to take a non-supporter view, though, it was hard not to think the squad simply had too much quality. The wage bill was too high, suggesting there was just enough individual class.

Except the reality is that the situation has now gone far beyond that. This is no longer about quality. As Tudor rightly intuited, this is about psychology, about emotion, about the swirl engulfing the club.

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