Too many injury returnees

It felt like a classic case of rushing players back from injury to play in a big game. Mauricio Pochettino is always talking about his squad rather than his team, but it often feels like he only trusts a core of 14 or 15 players.

You can get away with one, maybe two returning players that have been recovering from injuries, but to have three back in the starting line-up and another on the bench seemed to count against Spurs.

Dele Alli and Harry Kane were among the most disappointing Spurs players on the day and looked a long way short of their best.

Hugo Lloris seemed fine but then he had less movement to contend with. Harry Winks did not have the impact he would have liked when he came off the bench.

Add to that the fact he replaced a rusty Dembele who is a shadow of his former self right now and the team was just carrying too many passengers.

You can't get away with that against a top six team and you certainly can't get away with it in a north London derby.

Mike Dean again the centre of attention

No referee courts attention quite like Mike Dean. He's the man in the middle that nobody wants. There was one point in the second half when both sets of fans at the Emirates were jeering or sarcastically applauding his every move.

Show Player

"It's so difficult to explain when you lose in this way. It's some small details that maybe are big details in football and change everything," said Pochettino afterwards.

"Until that moment happened maybe there were things, like Xhaka should be sent off before, the foul wasn't a foul, the goal was offside, but in the end we lost and we need to go home and keep going."

The 'foul' on Alexis Sanchez by Davinson Sanchez was nothing of the sort. It was a perfectly timed tackle. The press box was three times as far away from the incident than Dean's position and not one journalist thought it was a foul, long before the first replays rolled in.

It did change the dynamic of the game and gave Arsenal more belief, but Pochettino can't use it as the main reason behind the defeat. His team were lethargic and flat from the off and if they play like that in Dortmund then they threaten to derail all the good momentum taken from the Real Madrid victory.

Time to worry about Mousa Dembele?

It wasn't the old Mousa Dembele. There were glimpses of him in there - a couple of clever pirouettes and using his body to bounce opponents away from him, but he looked rusty.

He looked like a man who was starting his first Premier League match in almost three months and you do wonder when the next start will come.

Pochettino admits he has to manage the player's game time carefully. Dembele himself revealed in the summer that he will always play with some pain in his foot.

That injury kept him out of the end of last season with an operation in May, while other injuries have dogged him this season ever since he started back to back cup games in the Champions League (Dortmund) and Carabao Cup (Barnsley)

On his day Dembele is one of the best midfielders in the Premier League. He's not a player who contributes much in the final third, but he does his work in a deeper role, pulling the opponents' players out of position and breaking through the rigid lines of other teams. If he had any kind of attacking sense he could be one of the world's best.

After lasting just 62 minutes at the Emirates, the numbers don't look good for Dembele right now. He's played just 424 minutes in the Premier League and 114 in the Champions League this campaign, spending more time on the bench than in the starting XI. Last season he started 24 of the team's 38 Premier League matches and just two of the six Champions League matches.

Dembele shuffles through the mixed zone after matches looking more than his 30 years of age and you wonder how long he can keep getting patched up and sent out for minutes here and there.

With Harry Winks' emergence, the Belgian needs to put together a run of starts to show his body is still up to the task otherwise he'll end up playing second fiddle to the young England international from now on.

Some positives

In every defeat you must pick put some positives. There weren't many to be found on Saturday afternoon, but a couple of players just about kept their head above water.

Davinson Sanchez acquitted himself well on the whole. He made a couple of rash challenges and got caught out by some of his namesake Alexis Sanchez's movement - but he isn't the first and won't be the last to struggle with the Chilean.

On the whole though the big Tottenham defender make plenty of good decisions, including the excellent first half tackle on Sanchez which was ludicrously penalised by Mike Dean.

He has settled in so well at Spurs and with Pochettino admitting they still haven't been able to work him specifically in training, he'll only get better.

The other player who did better than others was Moussa Sissoko. Some people will never like him, but he put in far more effort than the other fan favourites on the pitch.

He broke constantly past challenges and gave Arsenal plenty of problems. Often others lost the ball after those runs, sometimes his inconsistent technique was responsible but he gave more than plenty of his team-mates out there.

Lamela is on the way back

Erik Lamela is not the saviour and if you're pinning your hopes on a player that's been out for more than a year you're in trouble. Spurs aren't in trouble, but the returning Argentine will bring another option for Pochettino to turn to.

The 25-year-old is one of his compatriot's trusted core of players and the reports were all good from his return to action as an overage player in the U23s' 3-2 defeat to Chelsea at Tottenham's Hotspur Way training complex.

Lamela got an hour under his belt, his first competitive minutes since his last game on October 25, 2016. He is not registered for the Champions League so he will have a week to train and allow the sports science team to monitor his hips' response to that first match. Pochettino may decide to take him with to Germany to get him used to being part of the first team match day experience again.

A place on the bench against a struggling West Brom team next Saturday could be a realistic return to first team action now he's given the thumbs up to the club that he's confident enough to play competitive football again.

His long absence has provoked plenty of frustration and anger among some sections of the Spurs support as did the fact that he did not trust his hips after so long out and was seen as simply picking up a pay cheque each week.

Lamela is finally on the way back now and he was providing assists and key passes before his disappearance from the face of the earth and he will hope to prove he can do that again. Spurs need creative risk takers in the final third to put pressure on the likes of Eriksen and Alli and Lamela can do that.