Tottenham produced a disastrous north London derby performance while Arsenal ran riot to win 4-1, putting pressure on manager Thomas Frank and his approach to the game.
Thomas Frank has taken “full responsibility” for Tottenham’s humiliating defeat at rivals Arsenal. Frank became emotional and apologized to the traveling Spurs fans as the away end was nearly deserted by the final whistle.
Tottenham manager Frank admitted that his tactics were so wrong that he had to abandon his three-back defensive system at halftime.
There was also another unfavorable statistic for the Spurs. Spurs have the two lowest expected goals scored in a Premier League game this season, 0.07 against Arsenal in early November and 0.1 against Chelsea.
Tottenham finished in 9th place, 11 points behind their rivals Arsenal, who are aiming for the title. It was only the second time they started with that system, in the European Super Cup against Paris Saint-Germain, which they ultimately lost.
“I’m a big believer that you can be successful no matter what system you play. I totally understand that question and I’m always going to take full responsibility. If I didn’t perform today, full responsibility will always be on me,” Frank said.
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“We picked a team to play 5-4-1 and very smartly we changed the half-time right after the game started, 3-0 and the rest is history.
“What I want to say is that even with a different system, I needed to be more aggressive and better in my duels. It has nothing to do with the system, but today I have to take full responsibility.
“Obviously that’s a concern. We’re working hard to improve on that, but sometimes it’s not just playing and finding a great pass, but when you look at some of the situations in games like this where they won in high positions, Arsenal, at that time there was a little bit more open space.
“We didn’t win enough in those situations and we didn’t get any creativity out of it. I know the creativity was very low for me, but that wasn’t my biggest concern today.”
Frank admitted that his players were too passive and underperforming, which was a serious concern.
He added: “It’s obviously very disappointing that we didn’t perform better in the game against our biggest rivals Arsenal. I can only apologize to the fans for that. When I spoke on Friday, I was very confident that we were competitive today and that we didn’t go over 90 minutes.”
“We came out here and were aggressive, pressed high and tried to get after them. That part of it didn’t work. We didn’t get close enough to them in the situations we could.”
“It means we got pushed back and got a little too passive. It looks like we’re chasing them. When we finally got on the ball, we just didn’t do enough to get out of those situations.”
“As painful as it is to admit, they are definitely six years later and we are four months later. But they still expected more from us today. It’s not like we’ll dominate for more than 90 minutes, but we’ll be as competitive as we were against Man City and PSG.”
Frank admitted Tottenham had a lot of work to do, but implored patience after finishing bottom of the table last year despite winning the Europa League. “I definitely think we still have a lot of work to do. I think it’s fair to say we’re very disappointed and not satisfied with today’s performance,” Frank said.
“I don’t want to run away from that. Like I said, I’m sorry for the fans. I think it’s also fair to say where we came from. Last year we finished 17th and we’ve been trying to build something and today it didn’t look like we were trying to build anything.”
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