Arsenal went six points clear at the top of the table and continued their home dominance in the north London derby with a 4-1 thrashing of a struggling Tottenham side at the Emirates on Sunday evening.
Former Spurs target – who was swiped under Thomas Frank’s nose by Mikel Arteta – Eberechi Eze was the man of the hour as he scored the first hat-trick in a meeting between the two sides since 1978, but even without the stardust offered up by their summer signing, Arsenal looked in perpetually in control as Tottenham created little.
A shock consolation goal from Richarlison helped put the visitors on the scoresheet, but as the hosts burnished their title-winning credentials, Tottenham looked way off the mark.
Here, Daily Mail Sport’s Football Editor IAN LADYMAN looks at four of the biggest talking points from an intriguing derby day.
Reality dawns on Frank
At least Thomas Frank now knows what it really means to be a Tottenham manager. It’s not acceptable to lose like this. Not at Arsenal, not without really ever trying to win.
Frank will argue that going toe to toe with the best team in the Premier League is asking for trouble and he may have a point.
The problem is that the way he went about this game was tantamount to surrender and that whiff of inferiority will follow him until he gets the chance to put right – if he last that long, of course.
The Dane is a bright guy. He knows how football works. He knows to organise a football team. Equally, he knows what perception is and here he looked for all the world as though he brought Tottenham across north London not to win but to try not to lose.
That’s okay if you are manager of Brentford, where every point you get against a big club is a mini-triumph, a strike against the head. It’s simply not good enough when you are in charge at Spurs, a club with aspirations of European credibility.
Frank’s 5-3-2 formation was a love letter to pragmatism. Stay in the game and then hope was the intention. But it was doomed from the start. How were Spurs supposed to get and keep the ball when they were always a man down in midfield? How were they were supposed to get any possession in the final third if their only out ball was a long pass up to Richarlison who would not be a target man even if he wore stilts?
The days of Ange Postecoglou’s daring and expansive football are gone and Tottenham fans should not yearn for them. They led this great football club all the way down to 17th place last season.
Equally Frank must find a way to satisfy both ends of football’s oldest equations if he is to survive at Spurs. They must be tighter than they were under his predecessor and they must be less chaotic. But they must have the courage to play some football too.
The first half was always likely to dictate how this game played out and by the midway point Spurs were 2-0 down, hadn’t had a shot or a corner and had mustered only two touches in the Arsenal penalty box. It spoke volumes.
Frank had come here looking for a tight contest and didn’t get one. As a result his club’s greatest rivals handed him a lesson he must learn quickly.
Palhinha is not the problem
Tottenham midfielder Joao Palhinha had hit back at Jamie Carragher’s assertion that he isn’t good enough for the Premier League by calling the Sky Sports pundit ‘embarrassing’. The truth of the matter is that the Portuguese holding player is the least of Tottenham’s problems.
Every team needs a dogged midfielder to tackle and read games and break up play. If they can get on the ball and pass and play as well then all the better.
And Palhinha – once of Fulham and then of Bayern Munich – is not the worst at that bit.
His most notable contribution here saw him dispossess Martin Zubimendi with a lunging tackle in the centre circle in the second half and that enabled Richarlison to beat David Raya from distance and at least give this game a bit of a competitive edge for a while.
Tottenham are missing ball players in midfield. Dejan Kulusevski is the best player at the club and can play centrally while James Maddison is also injured. They are both huge losses. Spurs will be better for their return but none of it will really matter if Frank doesn’t ask his players to be brave enough to get on the ball and play.
Richarlison will never be the answer
Richarlison took his chance instinctively well. It was a terrific bit of skill, given that Raya would have backpedalled and intercepted anything but the perfect shot. Nevertheless, Tottenham will not go where they want to go with the Brazilian playing up front.
Through his time at Watford and Everton and now at Spurs, a player with cumulative transfer fees of more than £100m has shown himself to be a forward of the occasional big moment rather than someone who can be relied upon consistently.
When he was first bought from Everton in the summer of 2022, it was thought he would play on one side of Harry Kane with Heung Min Son on the other. Here, with Spurs short of options, he was asked to play through the middle.
The 28-year-old is not robust enough or willing enough to do that job and away from home when possession is scarce, the lack of an out-ball will always hurt a team. Tottenham simply have too many forward players of which not enough is really known or proven.
Why, for example, did the Spurs recruitment team pay £55m for Mohammed Kudus instead of throwing money at West Ham to try and get Jarrod Bowen instead? Bowen would have been a perfect replacement for Son and the word is that he may well have come. Kudus, by comparison, looks like a frivolous decoration.
Arteta got his big call right
What a day for Eberechi Eze. A player who almost joined Spurs in the summer chose this day of all days to produce the performance of is life for the club he supported as a boy.
We should have known what was coming the moment he scooped a fabulous pass through to Declan Rice in just the third minute. That almost led to the first goal and pretty much everything the England player did after that was laced with quality.
But perhaps Mikel Arteta will be best pleased with a decision he saw born out at the other end of the field.
Injuries played a part in derailing last season’s title challenge and losing central defender Gabriel to a problem picked up on international duty asked Arteta a big question ahead of this game.
His decision to hand Piero Hincapie a first Premier League start was a big one. He could have asked Ben White to step in. But Arteta trusted the Ecuadorian – on loan from Bayer Leverkusen – and it paid off.
‘He has title winning experience in Germany,’ was Arteta’s pre-match rationale.
Squads, rather than teams, win titles and maybe, at the fourth time of asking, Arsenal maybe where they need to be in that regard.
