Jack Pitt-Brooke, Charlie Eccleshare and James Maw discussed all of the latest goings-on at Tottenham Hotspur during the most recent edition of The Athletic’s Spurs podcast The View from The Lane and Pitt-Brooke made a claim about the north London club’s chances of winning the 2020/21 Premier League during the show.
This came after the Lilywhites took just a point from this past weekend’s top-flight clash with West Ham United, despite taking a 3-0 lead just 16 minutes into the game and holding onto that lead until the 82nd minute of the contest.
This past weekend’s draw with West Ham leaves Spurs sitting in seventh place in the Premier League table, as Jose Mourinho’s side have won two, drawn two and lost one of their first five league games this term.
Despite giving up a three-goal lead at the weekend, Pitt-Brooke was optimistic about Spurs’ title hopes during this recent edition of The View from The Lane podcast. Here is what the journalist had to say about Tottenham’s chances of winning the league:
“Honestly, I think Tottenham can win the league.
“This is the strangest season in modern football history. The football is getting stranger, not less strange, that much has been clear from the results in the last few weeks.
“The two teams who dominated English football in the last three years – [Manchester] City – I have no idea how good they are or not, sometimes I think they’re having a kind of [Mauricio] Pochettino final season effect and the players are exhausted of [Pep] Guardiola, that said, I thought they were pretty good against Arsenal.
“Liverpool conceded seven goals against Aston Villa before they lost Virgil van Dijk for most of the season and I have no idea how they’ll be able to cope without him although, again, obviously they’ve got the best attacking players and they should still be very good going forward.
“[Manchester] United and Chelsea – I’ve said on previous podcasts why I don’t think they’re any good. Everton have got no experience at the top end of the table. It’s going to be an incredibly open season and I think everything that we think we know about football and what to expect between now and the rest of the season, I think, can go out the window.
“It’s a ridiculous calendar, it’s going to demand more, physically, from the players than ever before and I think it’s an incredibly high-variance season. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that they’re not capable of the levels of performance required to get up to the top. I’ve got no idea what’s going to happen this season but the possibilities are so broad that I wouldn’t rule Spurs being the best team in the country by the end of the season out of it. I do think that everything is on the table.”
Can Spurs win the league this season?
YES
NO
TIF Thoughts on what Pitt-Brooke had to say about Spurs’ Premier League title hopes…
So, as can be seen in what Pitt-Brooke had to say, it seems as though he isn’t convinced about the quality of Spurs’ potential main title challengers at present, with the journalist indicating that he isn’t sure Manchester City and Liverpool will be as strong as they have been in recent years this term and going on to say that he isn’t sure the other two teams who made up last season’s Premier League top-four – Manchester United and Chelsea are good enough to win the title either, while he also cast doubt over current league leaders Everton and their title hopes.
It may yet be too early to definitively say whether or not Spurs are likely to be challenging for the Premier League title at the end of the season, however, given that they have failed to accumulate more than three straight league wins thus far under Mourinho, since he became Tottenham manager last November, in either the 2019/20 season or the 2020/21 campaign, perhaps the Lilywhites will need to be more consistent in order to remove all doubt that they can challenge for the title.