FROM TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR STADIUM - Nottingham Forest gave Tottenham Hotspur a lesson in efficiency as the clinical visitors emerged with a 2-1 victory over their wasteful hosts on Monday night.
Elliot Anderson and Chris Wood converted half of Forest's four shots while Richarlison was only able to find the net with one of Tottenham's 22 efforts in a painfully profligate display for Ange Postecoglou's side.
The north London outfit find themselves in the depths of 16th place while Nottingham Forest boosted their hopes of Champions League qualification by climbing into the top three.
How the game unfolded
The mood around the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was refreshingly light and airy ahead of kick-off. The evening chill had not yet gripped a crowd still buoyed by last week's progress to an unexpected Europa League semi-final. Elliot Anderson burst that bubble inside the opening five minutes.
Anthony Elanga's scratchy corner deflected kindly into the path of Forest's No 8, who sliced his shot off the underside of Rodrigo Bentancur's thigh on its way past Guglielmo Vicario.
Chris Wood had been denied by a swift offside VAR review in the tenth minute but had his name on the scoresheet with barely a quarter of an hour gone. In the second phase of another set piece, Elanga found space to swing a devilish ball onto Wood's head.
Up against the best front-runners in the division, a side which is at its best when backed against the wall, Tottenham were consigned to swinging hopeful crosses into the box. Forest mopped up most of these optimistic deliveries and Mathys Tel blazed a wild effort wayward after Neco Williams made a rare first-half error.
Matz Sels' goal began to live an increasingly charmed life as Forest unashamedly focussed on preserving their two-goal lead rather than adding to it. Dejan Kulusevski had a glancing header cleared off the line by Harry Toffolo while Richarlison spurned three particularly presentable openings, managing at one one point to find his way into the net without bringing the ball with him.
The Brazilian finally got his goal in the 87th minute, climbing above a crowd of red shirts to steer Pedro Porro's superb cross beyond Sels, but it proved to be too little too late.
Player ratings
Check out player ratings from Tottenham 1-2 Nottingham Forest here.
Forest's subtle set-piece supremacy
In a division increasingly dominated by attention-seeking specialist coaches, a league where Arsenal's Nicolas Jover has his own mural, Forest's set-piece supremacy has slipped somewhat under the radar. Forget any figure immortalised in ink on a brick wall, Forest parted ways with their set-piece coach Simon Rusk in October.
Yet, two dead-ball goals on Monday took Forest's seasonal tally to 14, the joint-most across the Premier League (and one more than Arsenal). Unlike last term, when Postecoglou took a bizarrely defiant stance against the very concept of working on set pieces, Tottenham are no longer utterly hapless when it comes to dead balls. But Forest showed once again that there is still more of an edge for Spurs to find.
Spurs can't make dominance count - again
"There are certain things that are non-negotiable, and the first one is [that] I want my teams to have the ball," Postecoglou told Hudl's High Performance Insights congress in 2020. "So, our attacking philosophy, our defensive philosophy is all sort of measured around that."
Nuno Espirito Santo has a rather different approach. Forest average the lowest amount of possession in the Premier League. The yawning chasm which separates the two teams in this season's league table suggests which strategy has been more effective.
Forest were predictably content to let Spurs have the ball they crave, hunkering down in a red block which was content defending deep inside their own half. Espirito Santo was so wedded to a reactive approach that he swapped to a back-five for the entire second half.
The visitors may have launched far fewer attacks, yet each forward surge carried plenty of menace as the red arrows flew through an undercooked midfield unconvincingly guarded by the hardly menacing. Rodrigo Bentancur.
Spurs had their chances, but once again couldn't take them in a painfully familiar scenario. Including Monday's game - which saw Tottenham boast 70% of the ball - Postecoglou's side have won just one of the 11 Premier League games with their highest possession statistics of the campaign.
Nuno enjoys happy Tottenham return
The first time Nuno Espirito Santo returned to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium after spending four unhappy months in north London four years ago, his Forest side were well beaten and ended the day one place above the relegation zone. Now they reside in the top three and have an FA Cup semi-final to look forward to this weekend.
Reports at the time claimed that Espirito Santo never won over Tottenham's dressing room, as it was abundantly apparent that he was the club's fifth-choice (at best) candidate. Even Gennaro Gattuso was ahead of him in the pecking order back in the summer of 2021.
The same can scarcely be said of his relationship with the Forest squad. "The manager is fantastic. His man management is second to none," Elanga gushed earlier this month. "He believes in us, and we believe in him. When you have those two working together, you become unstoppable." That camaraderie seeped out of a collective effort to keep Spurs at bay.
Espirito Santo's Tottenham tenure was concluded after a run of five defeats in seven league games. Monday's loss ensured that Postecoglous has endured exactly the same run of dire form.
Tottenham eyeing unwanted records
Postecoglou jubilantly reported that there was a "fair bit of joy in the dressing room" after his side booked their place in the Europa League semi-final last Thursday. The mood may have been rather different on Monday.
Only one Spurs boss during the club's entire Premier League history has ever lost more than Postecoglou's current tally of 18 games in a single season. There are still five games left for the Australian to break Ossie Ardiles' unwanted record of 19 during the 1993/94 campaign.
Spurs finished a lowly 15th that season. There were 22 teams in the division that year and Tottenham now find themselves 16th out of 20. The last time they finished in the top-flight's bottom five was the relegation campaign of 1976/77.
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