A common refrain heard in the crowds of the Tottenham Hotspur stadium on Saturday Afternoon was that the performance felt like a throwback to the worst of the Angeball era. As well as some of the ponderous buildup, a disappointing defeat to Bournemouth in the aftermath of a rousing victory against Man City also contained uncomfortable echoes of the era that led to the worst premier league finish in the club’s history.

So to conduct a brief post-mortem – was the performance against Bournemouth and indication that Frank isn’t the all-conquering saviour and that Spurs truly are a club that just can’t change their spots when it comes to consistent inconsistency.

What I saw unfold on the pitch was the equivalent of death by a thousand cuts, in marginal losses taking place all over the pitch. Dave Brailsford brought the concept of victory through the summation of many small marginal gains – and Tottenham’s performance is one of the more stark exponents of how this goes both ways – you can win by just winning small in many different areas, but you can also lose without having a glaring big issue at hand.

In the case of the game played out under a leaden sky today, it seemed to me to be a simple case that a number of players’ performances were woefully under par, with the result being an entirely disjointed effort. The players in question – Pedro Porro, Brennan Johnson, Richarlison (and Kudus to a different degree) were all guilty of poor decision making and poor technical execution.

If we start with Brennan Johnson – his was the unfortunate Hyde to his goalscoring Jekyll. The Welshman is still a hugely polarising figure amongst the fanbase due to his proclivity for being entirely anonymous, and sometimes outright bad, right up until he pops up at the far post to apply the finishing touch to an excellent team move. While the level of vitriol should never reach the level it did at the beginning of last season, the degree of fans’ frustration is understandable with Johnson’s performances being akin to a relationship where you’re treated terribly most of the time, but with just about frequent enough grand gestures that convince you that it’s worth staying together. Against Bournemouth there was no goal, and unfortunately for Spurs, Johnson wasn’t just anonymous, he was often guilty of wasting good transitions with poor movement, a poor touch or a downright awful pass.

Pedro Porro and Richarlison can be bundled together in this analysis, as they form a tandem that have been key to the upswing that can be attributed to the change in approach under Thomas Frank. Spurs’ happiness to go direct to counteract a high man press has been largely successful in their first two league games as a result of Richarlison’s excellent physical play, being able to get the ball under control under aerial pressure, and then either spin into an attack or lay it off to an advancing colleague. Like Johnson – Richarlison wasn’t just ‘not great’ – his inability to gain control of the ball didn’t just remove a positive aspect of Spurs’ play, it often left them vulnerable to a counterattack, and eventually lead to them abandoning the direct approach, which played into Bournemouth being able to press and force Spurs into slow buildup from the back.

One of the big reasons for Richarlison’s excellent start to the season has been that not only were Tottenham happy to go long and direct to him from the back, but Porro regularly would fire in pacing, swinging crosses that either gave Richarlison an attempt on goal, or allowed him to feed off to another attacker in and around the box. This avenue of attack entirely dried up – partly as Porro’s delivery seemed to abandon him, but partly because he seemed to lack some of the buccaneering spirit that has powered his early season form.

This also leads us nicely into Kudus. Unlike the rest of the players on this list, you couldn’t necessarily level at him that he had a poor game, but he has been a big difference maker in his games so far, and he was not that at all on Saturday Afternoon. He had a few exciting runs, and put a few balls into the box that were crying out for someone to gamble on, but he had a fair share of dribbles where he took in a man too far as well. Both he and Porro were no doubt affected by the imposing figure of Antoine Semenyo on their wing – Porro’s inability to get forwards in earnest was definitely a direct result of the threat that Semenyo posed, and without the distraction of Porro’s overlapping runs, Kudus struggled to gain the half-yard of space that his wizardry on the ball can turn into a killer moment for his team.

Like most judgement calls around the highs and lows of sport, Spurs’ level this season is likely to fall somewhere between the high of the Man City game and the low of the defeat to Bournemouth today. A referendum on Thomas Frank isn’t needed yet – Spurs will just need their key players to performances to fall the right side of those narrow margins more often than not for them to have a season that the first two games promised is possible.