The Human Touch.

The subtle leadership skills that make sports teams succeed, or fail.

By the time I switched on the telly to see how Spurs were faring against Newcastle on Sunday, they were 3-0 down. Soon, it was 5-0 and it ended at 6-1. Spurs’ players have since offered to recompense fans for their tickets.

Being a Spurs fan has been a painful rollercoaster over the last few years. Under Pochettino, the team largely punched above its weight, coming close to winning the league twice in successive years, and reaching the final of the Champions League. But since then there have been two (in my view) entirely inappropriate managers - Mourinho and Conte - ‘been there, done that’ egomaniacs with defensive tactical approaches at odds with the Spurs ethos of ‘To Dare is to Do’. I don’t necessarily have a problem with a manager who wants to make a team hard to score against, but you surely have to develop a game plan that plays to strengths, not weaknesses. Spurs are weak in defence and have, potentially, one of the best attacks in the league. Go figure.

Football people, and indeed the Spurs fanbase, seem to want to blame the owner, Daniel Levy, for the club’s predicament. But what does Levy really do? He funds things, like building a new stadium and buying new players. Spurs’ squad is no match for Man City’s, or Liverpool’s, but it isn’t a bad group of players. So to see them perform with so little spirit on Sunday, in a game where there was still so much to play for, warrants a closer look.

I think perhaps the biggest issue for a team that starts to drown like this is a lack of real leadership. This can’t be Levy. It can be the coach, but I’m sure Stellini said motivating words and had a tactical plan to compete with Newcastle. So then it’s down to the players. Lloris is the captain. He’s a quiet guy whose default facial expression is terrified. Harry Kane is England captain, but he doesn’t seem to say a lot on the pitch. He does lead by example, but in a team that’s underperforming so badly he can’t influence a game much. Hojbjerg strikes me as a leader, but he’s lost form and confidence along with the rest of the team.

So, ultimately, 11 guys run onto the field with no confidence, no energy, and nobody to look to to inspire and lead. It’s not surprising they got hammered.

Sports teams rarely climb their way slowly out of deep troughs. They leap out, having had a fire lit under them; something that shakes players out of their lethargy, breaks shackles, releases pressure. And that comes from leadership.

Look at Roy Hodgson at Crystal Palace. Many people felt that firing Viera was unjustified after a run of tough games against top teams, but Hodgson seems to have empowered a talented group of players to just go and express themselves. They are scoring goals and winning games (notwithstanding last night’s loss to Wolves!).

Away from football, look at England’s cricket test team. Floundering under the previous leadership, they brought in Brendan McCullum - a New Zealander with very little coaching experience and a reputation for being a gung ho cricketer himself - made Ben Stokes captain, and the transformation was almost instantaneous. The players didn’t really change. What changed was the subtle nuances of leadership that took away fear of failure and replaced it with the sheer joy of playing.

Sport when you’re losing is no fun. And then you try too hard not to lose. You become physically and mentally inhibited; paralysed by fear. It takes something, or someone, to release that pressure before performances can improve. But as we’ve seen, with the right leadership and inspiration, change can be sudden and dramatic.

I think this is also what Rory McIlroy needs. He’s the best golfer in the world, but struggles to play his best when the stakes are the highest, because he feels too much pressure and it affects his performance. He works with Bob Rotella, whose modus operandi is generally to lower expectation and take it ‘a shot at a time’ … but that clearly hasn’t worked. Rory needs someone to go deeper into what causes him to tie up when the pressure is on, and reprogram himself to thrive in those situations rather than being cowed by them. Easier said than done, but if magic dust can be sprinkled on football and cricket teams, then why not a golfer?

So where will Spurs find that spark to arrest their current decline? I guess it has to be a new manager, but it also has to be a left-field choice - like McCullum was for the England cricket team - not another Conte or Mourinho. Someone who brings in fresh thinking and helps the players find the joy of playing again. How does that square with Conte’s portrayal of Spurs being a dysfunctional club from top to bottom? Well, it doesn’t. Levy and the powers that be have to make a brilliant choice of manager - thinking outside the box - and then set that person free to work some magic.

Vincent Kompany, perhaps?