You can change 10 players. You can go back to a back three. You can bring back Lucas Moura, Eric Dier and Dele Alli. You can start Ireland’s most exciting teenager since Robbie Keane. You can do everything to try to inject some freshness and energy into this Tottenham team. And then you can still find it all comes to nothing, that the rot is hard to stop, the staleness is ingrained, and there is very little that you and your staff can do about it.



Mauricio Pochettino looked powerless for much of Tuesday evening but never more than at the end, as his players were engulfed by waves of thousands of gleeful Colchester United fans who could barely believe what they had seen.



Colchester are tenth in in League Two. But here they had beaten a team who less than four months ago were playing in the Champions League final. Yes, they had needed penalties to do it and yes, Spurs had enough chances to win in 90 minutes. But so what? As Pochettino admitted afterwards, this...