By David Butler
Last weekend Tottenham gifted Liverpool a late own goal maintaining the momentum for the Premier League title race. As usual when these last gasp incidents happen the world of social media goes into overdrive. One of the more popular claims, that constantly reasserts itself, is that Tottenham have a proclivity to collapse and concede late goals. This view has crept into public perception – it is woven into Tottenham’s DNA to ‘bottle it’ and that this is a ‘cultural’ facet of the club. Mental strengths and resilience are often called into question.
Let’s consider the evidence on late goals for and against Tottenham when the margins are tight, meaning that they shape the result. These are the late goals that matter as they swing the result when only a one goal margin between the teams exists. I define late goals as those from the 85th minute to the final whistle.
Since the Premier League began Tottenham have been involved in 133 of these encounters where late goals changed the outcome. The facts are that 56 late incidents have gone against Tottenham (where they conceded) but 77 have gone in their favour (where they scored).
The first table shows the breakdown of the 56 times Spurs went from winning to drawing (2 points dropped), drawing to losing (1 pointed dropped) and winning to losing (3 points dropped). Since 1992 Tottenham have dropped 78 points late on – the one total turnaround was against Everton in 2012 when Steven Pienaar (90), and Nikica Jelavic (90+2) scored in the dying stages.
Last weekend Tottenham gifted Liverpool a late own goal maintaining the momentum for the Premier League title race. As usual when these last gasp incidents happen the world of social media goes into overdrive. One of the more popular claims, that constantly reasserts itself, is that Tottenham have a proclivity to collapse and concede late goals. This view has crept into public perception – it is woven into Tottenham’s DNA to ‘bottle it’ and that this is a ‘cultural’ facet of the club. Mental strengths and resilience are often called into question.
Let’s consider the evidence on late goals for and against Tottenham when the margins are tight, meaning that they shape the result. These are the late goals that matter as they swing the result when only a one goal margin between the teams exists. I define late goals as those from the 85th minute to the final whistle.
Since the Premier League began Tottenham have been involved in 133 of these encounters where late goals changed the outcome. The facts are that 56 late incidents have gone against Tottenham (where they conceded) but 77 have gone in their favour (where they scored).
The first table shows the breakdown of the 56 times Spurs went from winning to drawing (2 points dropped), drawing to losing (1 pointed dropped) and winning to losing (3 points dropped). Since 1992 Tottenham have dropped 78 points late on – the one total turnaround was against Everton in 2012 when Steven Pienaar (90), and Nikica Jelavic (90+2) scored in the dying stages.
The second table shows the 77 times Spurs went from drawing to winning (2 points gained), losing to drawing (1 pointed gained) and losing to winning (3 points gained). Since 1992 Tottenham have gained 130 points late on. Many of these have been against traditionally big clubs – twice in recent times they have trumped Liverpool at the death (Roman Pavlyuchenko and Aaron Lennon scored very late goals in 2008 and 2010 respectively). Spurs have also completely turned it around in the dying minutes four times in the Premier League. In 1993 Darren Anderton (88) and Darren Caskey (90) flipped an incoming loss to Everton on its head. More recently, Spurs have twice grasped a win from the jaws of defeat against West Ham courtesy of Dimitar Berbatov- Paul Stalteri (06/07) and two Harry Kane goals (16/17). They also turned around a losing position late on against Swansea in 2017
Tottenham have a net gain of 52 late points over the history of the Premier League – perhaps the perennial bottlers tag is misplaced. Easy to recall incidents, like last weekend, will likely skew judgements and detract from the evidence that paints a bigger picture. It will be interesting to compare this to the other five clubs that have always participated in the competition.
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