Doomed Spurs enter acceptance stage of their grief for ludicrous relegation

We do wonder whether Spurs have been so bad for so long that people are no longer appropriately astonished about the ludicrousness of their impending relegation.

Spurs have now won just 11 of their last 54 Premier League matches . It’s a 16-month misery spiral in which they’ve also contrived to win more games in Europe (13) than their own domestic league. It is absurd and, if anything for me, Clive, they’ve almost relegated themselves too well.

And this has just started to seep into Spurs’ own support.

We’ve railed for years about how the Big Six are insulated from failure, about how there really is only so far they can fall and fail no matter how bad or mismanaged they are. Spurs are about to blow all that out of the water and the reaction for now is still mainly just ‘LOL good banter, this’.

Perhaps it will change when it’s actually confirmed. Perhaps there is a sense from the outside of still thinking or assuming they’ll somehow escape despite themselves because life is just that unfair.

Even the bookies – and thus by association punters – have, while finally at the weekend accepting Spurs are now favourites to go, not quite accepted just how overwhelmingly probable it now feels from the inside. They are still, with most firms, just about odds-on to survive, which might very well be the worst bet we’ve ever seen in the history of bets until you realise that Spurs are also evens to win at Wolves in a couple of weeks’ time.

Should go without saying that Spurs, right now, are not evens to win any game of football against anyone.

What also goes without saying is that almost no Spurs fans think their survival chances are anywhere close to 50:50. Most would put it somewhere nearer 0:100.

Almost no Spurs fan now expects survival. Many no longer believe it is even possible. Many have resorted to finding what crumbs of joy they can from living vicariously through Arsenal’s jittery panicky collapse that will, at worst, see them finish second in the Premier League.

We noticed a significant shift in mindset when Spurs weren’t even playing. On Monday night, when Leeds secured their own survival with victory at Man United , the Online Spurs Fans barely looked up. For months now every Forest, West Ham and Leeds game has obviously been an event for Spurs fans too, as Spurs games have been for fans of those clubs. No longer.

The phlegm-flecked fury at the undeniably infuriating sight of Brian Brobbey’s third yellow-card offence of the afternoon putting their captain out for the season’s last rites appears to have represented the last raging against the dying of the light.

Spurs fans themselves have now seemingly thrown their hands in the air at the futility of it all and moved on from drawing up plans for how they might somehow survive this season to trying instead to work out what happens in the summer and beyond as a Championship club. Leeds tearing Man United apart barely interrupted those discussions.

Our suspicion is that this is just the eye of the storm. A fugue state brought on by the extreme stress of it all, and that fresh agony will hit once again when it’s all finally mathematically confirmed – especially if it happens against Chelsea or via the West Ham-Arsenal game. But it does seem at least slightly encouraging somehow to see them for now in an acceptance stage of their grief.

It’s all still spectacularly and unimaginably bad, obviously, but at this stage ‘Can we maybe hold on to Archie Gray, do you reckon? Or Kevin Danso, perhaps?’ are surely far healthier delusions than any ‘If we can just beat Brighton…’ prognostications.

Spurs can’t just beat Brighton. Or Wolves. Or anyone else. The fans at least have reached that state of enlightenment even if it does still feel like everyone else is still slightly playing catch-up.

HINT: if you’re still talking at all about a ‘relegation battle’ then you haven’t grasped the situation. There is, yet again, no Premier League relegation battle to speak of because there are, yet again, three catastrophically bad teams who are much, much worse than everyone else