It’s a good job the UEFA Cup has group stages, otherwise Tottenham Hotspur’s season would have just taken another meteorite in the face. More comedy goalkeeping, yet another player suspension, yet another seasoned pro speaking out. All the time Juande Ramos stands in the mud on the sidelines with the thousand-yard stare of the tortured war veteran, looking for all the world like he’s about to snap and punch David Bentley in the face.

Whichever way you look at it, Spurs’ season is holed below the waterline, and however much water they try to ship, they can never get rid of it all. The time for positives is passed, and it’s useless to speculate about January solutions. As Jonathan Woodgate has said, they’re “one million per cent in a relegation battle” (although Woodgate, not noted for his smarts, has failed to really capture the gravity of the situation, I feel). By the time January rolls around, who knows how bad it will have gotten?

Udinese away is probably not the easiest place to start your European exploits, especially when you’ve got as much confidence in your side as a snowball slowly trundling through the front gates of Hell, but Spurs didn’t even give themselves a chance. When you’re slap bang in the middle of cruddy form, you always seem to be one goal down. You wake up in the middle of the night and remember the minute thing you could have done to change the last loss. When eleven players are doing that simultaneously, it’s clear that the word crisis just seems too small.

From the back to the front Spurs are riddled with self doubt. Look at the loss to Stoke last Sunday. In injury time Stoke hit the frame of the Tottenham goal four times, and had Spurs won, that would be the kind of thing you laugh about when cutting together the end of season DVD. But right now, the pessimistic streak painted down the spines of the Tottenham XI sees that sequence and cradles its head, shaking and saying ‘It could have been so much worse.’

So do Spurs pull out of this self-destructive nosedive? A win would obviously do, although wins in the League Cup and UEFA Cup don’t seem to have helped much. The trouble is that no Premier League team now wants to be the one that lost to Tottenham. Players are just like fans in that respect – they may respect their fellow professionals but it doesn’t mean they don’t want them to do badly. There are plenty of sportspeople finding the Tottenham predicament as amusing as the rest of us do. So the likelihood of Bolton rolling over and waiting for their bellies to be tickled is remote.

Tottenham have match-winners. Modric, Bentley, Pavlyuchenko, Jenas, Lennon, even Bent are all capable of scoring spectacular goals that bring home the points. But why aren’t they capable of doing that simple task, which when you’re in good form, comes more naturally than breathing? Countless sides, mostly the ones just relegated, have that inquest every season and nobody’s ever come up with an answer. In football, you don’t have thirty-eight bad games in a row as a collective unit. There are so many factors involved, and it would take a genius to work it out.

One of the problems Tottenham are having at the moment is that everybody’s quick to protest their innocence but not big enough to take responsibility. It’s all very well for David Bentley to say that Spurs are a joke, or Jonathan Woodgate to bang on about how angry he is about last night’s performance, but ego is playing a part in the demise of Spurs’ season. One of the ways in which we regain confidence is by learning from mistakes, both unique and continual. No one Spurs player has come out and admitted, ‘yes, I played terribly. If I’d done x, we’d have probably won.’

Of course, football being a team game, players are quick to band together with collective responsibility. Tottenham’s first team has claimed they’re all in this mess and it’s up to all of them to get them out of it. But they believe this hype behind closed doors as well, and it’s unhealthy.

Forwards win matches, and defenders keep it won. Expecting Alan Hutton to win you the match is like expecting Luka Modric to save penalties. At a time like this, Spurs need reconstructing by the coaching staff, and every department needs to put under scrutiny, every player monitored. If Spurs lost because they’re not scoring, they need to be big enough to say so. If the defence played well but the goalkeeper made a mistake that lost them the game, say so. If Spurs score four and the opposition five, don’t look to blame the hat-trick hero. You get the feeling Tottenham leave the dressing room with general instructions to play in formation but little else.

It’s perhaps unfair to blame Spurs’ problems on Juande Ramos’ limited English but communication is crying out for improvement at White Hart Lane. Everyone seems so caught up in their own problems and stresses over form, finance and league position that they seem to be sitting there like naughty kids, with their arms folded over their chests and a determination not to say things to their colleagues’ faces. Why else would Woodgate feel the need to go public with his misgivings? A healthy club doesn’t have these kind of exclusives splashed all over the paper. Yet not one of the Spurs’ first team seems to be able to take a look at themselves and admit they need to improve their own play.

Like that famous Agatha Christie story, Murder on the Orient Express, by taking collective responsibility Tottenham hope to get away with murder, so no-one person is responsible. And unless Juande Ramos forces one or two of his players to break away from the pack and take the team in hand, grabbing responsibility, Tottenham will be one million percent relegated by the time they’ve all finished admitting their collective guilt.

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