Ian Wright has claimed that Nuno Espirito Santo is even more pragmatic than Jose Mourinho in the way he sets his team up.
Daniel Levy promised a return to the Tottenham DNA of attacking and free-flowing football in the summer ahead of announcing the new managerial appointment.
However, Nuno has not been able to deliver that so far, with Tottenham struggling to create chances in some games and also looking defensively vulnerable in others.
After chopping and changing the side, the 47-year-old now seems to have settled on to his best eleven, employing a 4-2-3-1 formation with Oliver Skipp and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg anchoring the midfield and Tanguy Ndombele given the licence to roam.
However, Wright believes that Nuno still has plenty of issues to sort out in middle of the park.
The Arsenal legend said on Optus Sport’s The Kelly & Wrighty Show (as relayed by The Metro): “I think with Nuno his major problem is his midfield. You’ve got Harry Kane who is not getting chances.
“We know everything that’s happened with Harry Kane, he’s trying to do his stuff and trying to get on with it.
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“But when you’re looking at [Tanguy] Ndombele and [Giovani] Lo Celso, who are supposed to be the creative element of Tottenham, they’re just not consistent enough.
“Then if he’s going to play [Oliver] Skipp, [Pierre-Emile] Hojbjerg and maybe [Harry] Winks, you can’t see a lot of creativity coming from that.
“The fact that Dele Alli has done his best work as that second striker… Son’s doing that now so what happens to Dele Alli? I can’t see where it’s going to get better, I can’t see the pattern of what they’re trying to do.
“I’m trying to see with Nuno how it fits. Off the back of the Manchester City game, you’re thinking, ‘Ah, Tottenham!’, but since then I’ve not seen anything.
“The Arsenal result was one we’re very pleased with from an Arsenal point of view, but it wasn’t a Tottenham team that turned up there that, to me, looked like they knew what they were doing.
“I’m not going to take anything away from what Arsenal did because you have to put teams away and I thought Arsenal did that very ruthlessness, but at the same time, I looked at the Tottenham side and I didn’t know what their game-plan was.
“Nuno is very pragmatic in what he does. I think he’s a level down from Mourinho in respects of his game, it’s even more pragmatic, on the break, that kind of stuff. Tottenham need a lot more than that.”
Wright also suggested that the Tottenham boss might have preferred to sell Harry Kane and bring a couple of his own players in during the summer transfer window.
He added: “I just get the impression that Nuno, when Kane started, was almost like: ‘Oh, he’s staying? Oh!’
“So now he can’t maybe bring in a couple of players that he wanted to embed his style into the team and now it feels like they are just ambling along.”
Spurs Web Opinion
This idea that Nuno is playing more pragmatic/defensive football than Mourinho is not borne out by the evidence of what we have seen from the team so far this season. While Nuno’s tactics have not worked in many games, he is evidently trying to adopt a more possession-based approach and it is apparent that we are committing a lot more players in attack than we did under Jose last season.
Our lack of creativity has certainly been an issue in some matches but to put it simply down to Nuno’s ‘pragmatism’ is lazy analysis – one that is borne out by his perceived approach at Wolves rather than an honest assessment of the style he has tried to implement at Spurs so far this season.
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