The clouds of the exhausting winter are starting to clear. The path ahead of Tottenham Hotspur is narrow but visible, even with doubts swirling over the fitness of Dejan Kulusevski. On Thursday, they must take their first forward step.
Any European knockout game is a big occasion but this week’s trip to Alkmaar to face AZ in the first leg of the Europa League last 16 feels especially momentous.
We all know where this path leads, if Spurs can just make their way along it: San Mames Stadium on 21 May.
Tottenham are six games away from the Europa League final. If they force their way past AZ, then it would be Ajax or Eintracht Frankfurt in the quarter-finals just before Easter. And then possibly Lazio or Olympiacos (or Bodo/Glimt or Viktoria Plzen) in the semi-finals in early May. Three two-legged ties, all of them against good teams, each one another step towards the target of Bilbao.
To get there would be a huge achievement: a first final since 2021, a first European final since 2019. A chance for Spurs fans to travel abroad in numbers. A hope of recreating some of that magical Madrid energy that feels so distant now.
And if you can allow yourself to picture it, just think what it would mean for Son Heung-min to lift that trophy 11 weeks from now: Tottenham’s first since 2008, and just the second of the ENIC era. The club’s first European trophy since 1984, back in the days of Graham Roberts, Steve Archibald, Gary Stevens and the rest. And a place back in next season’s Champions League, for the first time since 2022-23, with everything that does for a club’s cachet and turnover.
It does not need to be said what a deeply significant moment it would be for Spurs fans; how many of them would be moved to tears by the sight of Son, 10 years after he joined the club, holding up that glistening silver flask. To finally see Tottenham win, after years of seeing them do everything else, would be a bumper emotional pay-off — like the first rain after a drought, or the bursting of a seemingly-impregnable dam.
In an instant, it would make sense of so much that has gone before.
There would be a more specific, more personal meaning, too. For Ange Postecoglou, triumph in the Europa League would be the most profound vindication. Only eight Tottenham managers have ever won a trophy (with all due respect to Peter Shreeves’ Spurs sharing the 1991 Charity Shield, which we are not counting here). Postecoglou would instantly take his place alongside immortal Tottenham figures.
He would have achieved something that even Mauricio Pochettino, Spurs’ greatest manager of the 21st century, could not.
For most of this season, Postecoglou has been on the back foot, having to defend his ideas and methods. Perhaps that is unavoidable when the team underperforms as badly as they have in the league. Even after their recent mini-revival, those three straight league wins against Brentford, Manchester United and Ipswich, Spurs have still lost more than half of their league games this season.
They are still most likely heading for a finish at the top of the bottom half of the table. Opta make their likeliest league finishes 13th, 14th and then 12th.
Postecoglou knows that Tottenham’s league position is not where they should be. After the 4-1 win at Ipswich Town, he said it was “obviously not good enough” and their placing in the table remained “unacceptable”. Of course, there are reasons for this, not least the injury crisis that has effectively deprived him of a whole team’s worth of players, including some of their most important, for the most significant part of the campaign.
Tottenham have shown patience with Postecoglou through this, sticking with him even when the team has been further down the table than anyone could ever have expected.
Whether this horrible domestic campaign actually matters or not will ultimately be decided in Europe. If Spurs reach the Bilbao final, no one will care how many league games they lost or where they finished in the table. If they can qualify for the Champions League through winning the Europa, it will not matter how far away from the top four (or five) they ended up. The whole league season would be condemned to the footnotes of history. And Postecoglou would always then be the man who won Spurs a European trophy, or at least took them close to one.
If he could live up to the implicit promise in his line about winning a trophy in his second season, he would look like an almost magical figure, one who not only accomplishes great things but announces that he will do so in advance.
But if Spurs go out of the Europa League now, or in the next stage, then there will be nowhere to hide. Tottenham’s league form would become the unavoidable story of the season. There could be no distractions from it, little else to cheer people up. By May, Spurs still would have taken a giant leap backwards in the league, and would have nothing in the cups to show for it.
This is why these remaining Europa League games mean so much.
Spurs are playing for more than just this one particular competition. They are playing for the whole Postecoglou era. A good run in this competition would justify Postecoglou’s appointment in 2023. It would build on his progress in his first season, and neutralise any criticism of his style this season. It would create a perfectly digestible narrative: this winter’s crisis as the darkness before the dazzling vindicating triumph at the end of the film.
And maybe this is an unfair framing, to say that everything is riding on these games, and that Tottenham need to win and keep winning. We all know how contingent knockout football is. We know the limitations of drawing conclusions from its random outcomes. But we live in a reductive world.
And this particular path to Bilbao is the only path to vindication that Postecoglou has left.
(Top photo: Rob Newell – CameraSport via Getty Images)
