Tottenham news: Opinion – Leadership questions as ‘travel sickness’ continues

It would appear Ange Postecoglou’s Spurs team suffers from travel sickness. Sunday’s defeat by Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park brought the tally to three defeats from five games on the road in the Premier League this season.

It is still early days in this campaign, but our away performances in the league last season only produced seven victories overall, which does not bode well.

While the players are struggling to steady themselves away from our stadium, even the most ardent of Ange supporters must be feeling slightly unsettled from that most recent performance and result against a team that, until they played us, had not won a game at all.

Aside from the usual off-pitch, manager-focused frustrations around substitutions and tactical changes being made too late or not at all, Sunday’s performance left me wondering: who is our leader on the pitch?

The all-too-familiar platitudes, mournful apologies and promises to work harder and do better next time spilled out of the players’ mouths in their post-match interviews. Guglielmo Vicario reflected that this team might sometimes lack the desire to fight.

So, who is the player to lead that fight? Cristian Romero was the man with the captain’s armband against Palace, but he was also partly responsible for the goal with a poorly judged looped pass to Micky van de Ven.

Of course, leadership exists beyond an armband and it does not always need to be the individual who shouts loudest. Any number of players could choose to lead this team through games by demonstrating whatever it is we need in each moment. Fight. Composure. Resilience. Energy. Creativity. Discipline.

We will not always need the same type of character in each game, but we will always need effective leadership. It is time to see who steps up to the challenge.

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