The table and the attack disagree
Tottenham go into the international break bottom of the Premier League with two points from five matches. The easy reading is that an expensive summer has produced a bad team, and it is a reading the rest of their football so far does not support.
They keep the ball for 60.6% of their matches, the third highest share in the league. They also reach dangerous areas more often than every side but 1, so this is not a team being pinned back or starved of the ball while the table turns against it.
The numbers describe a recognisable kind of side. Tottenham cross more than most teams and beat defenders with the ball more than anyone, so the ball is being worked into the area again and again, and it is their output in the final third that keeps letting them down.
The attack has grown since last season rather than shrunk. Tottenham now take 14.52 shots per match, seventh in the league after finishing fourteenth on the same measure last season, and their big chances have climbed from thirteenth to seventh as well.
68 shots and 2 goals
The gap sits almost entirely in front of goal. Tottenham have scored twice from 68 shots, 2.9 goals for every hundred attempts, and only one club in the league has done worse.
For scale, Manchester City sit top of the same list at 20 goals for every hundred shots. Crystal Palace sit in the middle at 9.1, which is roughly the rate an ordinary finishing side would settle at over a longer run.
The misses are spread across the whole team rather than resting on one striker having a bad few games. Tonali has taken eight shots without scoring and Marmoush seven, while Pedro Porro and Mathys Tel have added a handful each without a goal between them.
That spread matters to the argument. A single forward in a slump can be dropped or rested. When midfielders, strikers and full backs are all failing to score from their chances at once, a side is more likely looking at variance that evens out than at a flaw that has to be rebuilt.
Is what they bought in the summer working?
Three of the summer's biggest fees in the Premier League went to Tottenham. Tonali arrived from Newcastle for €108m and Mateus Fernandes from West Ham for €99m. Savinho came across from Manchester City for €88m, the third of the three.
The instinct when a side sits so poorly is to count that money and call it wasted, and Savinho is the clearest case against that instinct. His game is the one Tottenham's attack leans on, taking the ball wide, going past his full back and either shooting or finding a runner. Half of his six shots have found the target, which is the profile of a winger doing his job in a team that is not finishing.
Tonali has played more than any of the three and taken more shots than any of them without scoring, which is the same story as the rest of the team. Mateus Fernandes has had the least football of the three, 250 minutes, and in that time he has made five key passes and created two big chances. Neither has the look of a bad signing yet, and the side around them beats opponents with the ball more than any other in the league.
The strongest case against
The fair objection is that a high volume of shots can hide a low quality of shots, and a team taking a lot of hopeful efforts from distance will miss most of them for reasons that have nothing to do with luck.
Tottenham's chance creation answers a little bit of that. They are producing 2.35 big chances per match, a real rise on last season's 1.56, so the good openings are there alongside the speculative ones, even if five games cannot show how many fell to the players best placed to finish them.
The defence is a second concern and a more ordinary one. Tottenham won the ball back more than any side in the league last season and have slipped to eighth on tackles and interceptions, conceding at the league's middling rate rather than keeping teams out.
Why the finishing matters most
Across a season, finishing rates drift back towards the 'mean' far more readily than chance creation does. A team that keeps arriving in the box tends to start scoring, while a team that has stopped arriving there rarely starts creating again by accident.
That is the right lens for the last fortnight, a goalless draw with Everton and a 3-2 home defeat to Aston Villa, in which a side creating this much took one point. None of it makes bottom place comfortable, and a side in that position cannot bank on being unlucky for long, but it does point to where the problem could potentially be.