Mauricio Pochettino and Harry Kane blame possession problems after Liverpool compound Tottenham's misery

Jurgen Klopp's men counter-attacked with impunity at Wembley and Spurs know they must take better care of the ball against Internazionale on Tuesday

(Getty Images)

What has gone wrong for Tottenham Hotspur? All it took was a second straight defeat to start people wondering why Mauricio Pochettino’s side now look so much different, and so much worse, than they have done for the last few years.

On Monday they fly to Milan to face Internazionale, a match that should be a treat, but now looks like a trial. Lose that and this will be Spurs’ first run of three straight defeats since the Tim Sherwood nadir in March 2014.

Everyone has their own theory on why Spurs are losing and what they need to do this week. Before Saturday’s defeat to Liverpool, Pochettino had hammered his players for their lack of energy and attitude in the 2-1 defeat at Watford before the international break. But to hear Pochettino and Harry Kane dissect Saturday’s 2-1 defeat to Liverpool, they blamed something very different: a lack of quality on the ball.

Pochettino was clear that the Liverpool defeat was “completely different” from the Watford game, and that Tottenham’s failures were down to their problems building up from the back. Liverpool let Spurs have the ball all day, then just stole it from them. “If we’re going to say something wrong, it’s that we didn’t translate that consistency from the back,” he said. “That was the moment to play football, [but there was] a lot of doubt, and we were a little bit scared to play from the back.”

When Kane spoke on Saturday afternoon, he made a similar point: that Spurs lost to Liverpool because they were so bad with the ball. And that they will have to be more precise in future, starting with Inter on Tuesday night. It was rare to hear Kane describe a failing as specifically as that but sometimes it takes the senior players to point the finger for the good of the team.

(Getty Images)

“I don’t think we played well enough, we could have nicked something but we didn’t deserve to,” Kane said. “We had a lot of possession today, we gave a lot of balls away in the middle of the pitch. It wasn’t the energy, we fought and we battled but sometimes we have to be a bit more quality on the ball and keep possession as that is how we normally play.”

Kane kept making the same point, that a failure to use the ball properly in midfield was Spurs’ biggest problem on Saturday. “Today was more about what we did with the ball, I am sure the gaffer will point out a few things,” he said. “Nobody likes to lose big games and now we have another big game on Tuesday.”

Particularly frustrating for Spurs was the fact that Pochettino had picked a four-man diamond midfield – Mousa Dembele, Eric Dier, Harry Winks and Christian Eriksen – that should have been better at keeping the ball. They did get a grip on possession but could never create anything with it, and all of their passing looked pointless when they kept on gifting the ball to Liverpool with Danny Rose and Kieran Trippier stranded too far up the pitch.

“We have not given away possession away like that for a while, as it is unlike us and it is unfortunate it has happened in a big game,” Kane said. “With the lesser teams sometimes you can get away with it [against] but the top teams, especially the top six, you can’t. We were a bit sloppy.”

The question for Spurs is how they improve on Tuesday. They will surely have to start rotating, given how tired senior players look, even though both Kane and Pochettino said that fatigue could not be an excuse. But they are not exactly swamped with midfield options, and while Erik Lamela would improve the tempo of the side, they cannot bring in Moussa Sissoko and expect to keep the ball better.

Ultimately they will have to get more from the same players to get their season back on track. “We have another game on Tuesday that will be very tough,” Kane said. “We are going to have possession there and we have to put it right.”