Tottenham Hotspur head coach Robert Vilahamn reflects on a ‘underachieving’ campaign for his side as Spurs gear up to face WSL champions Chelsea at Whitehart Lane on the penultimate weekend of the 2024/25 season.
Aston Villa’s 5-2 rout of the club’s north London rivals Arsenal leaves Tottenham in a precarious position, now 10th on the Women’s Super League table. This season has been especially disheartening for Lilywhite fans, coming off a 2023/24 campaign that featured a memorable day at Wembley Stadium and a historic derby win at The Lane.
With two games left to play, Tottenham currently have six less goals scored and six more conceded in comparison to their 2023/24 campaign. Speaking to The Halfway Line about the marginal differences on the stats sheet, Vilahamn addressed where it has all gone wrong on the table for Spurs.
“It’s something we have created ourselves, the position we have. I think you have a few games where I think we should have won those games against teams around us. If we would have won two or two and a half of those games, we would be in the fifth place. Then that’s the small margin, as we speak about when everybody’s saying that we have the worst season ever. But it’s true though, we are not overachieving, we are actually underachieving. But it’s a few small games that could have made this table look little bit better.
“But to be honest, I don’t really care if we are fifth or 10th. It’s more like we need to be much better in being consistent when we play some games against the top teams, we need to be much more competitive and find ways to compete in those games, and some games, we need to deliver more goals and have better clean sheets so we win these other games.
“So we’re going to learn a lot from this season, and it’s not only on the pitch. We need to learn a lot off the pitch, in the club as well. And I can promise you, there’s a lot of stuff we know that we haven’t been doing so good that we need to improve on, but perhaps we didn’t know it before we went into the season and now we know.
“So I think it’s a mixture of learning by mistakes or stuff that we didn’t know, but that’s the whole plan, with patience and what we want to do, stats wise, how we play, how we want to show an identity. We have an identity. We have a certain style apply, but we need to win games through that as well. We cannot just sit here three years in a row and say we play some good football, but that’s what we’re trying to solve. That’s why we always try to push for the next level. So it’s not a good season. We’re not happy with it, but I’m very sure what we need to do to make it better next season.”
Tottenham will now have to host WSL title holders Chelsea at Whitehart Lane, after a narrow 1-0 victory over Manchester United crowned the Blues champions for the sixth consecutive season.
Vilahamn tells The Halfway Line that other clubs in the WSL will need to work harder in order to catch up to Chelsea’s box-office legacy of dominance.
“I think Chelsea is so dynamic in how they play,” Vilahamn expressed. “Of course, you see a style, but then you see tactical aspects, and I think Sonia [Bompastor] has brought a few of them with sometimes playing [Sandy] Baltimore to the left back and then moving up to on build on three, you can see a lot of rotations, but you can also see the different types of players.
“So even if they play this information, when they play a certain player, and Ramirez is the nine, or Aggie Beever-Jones is the nine, then you get different dynamics. I think that’s the biggest strength they have, that they have an organisation, they have tactics, but they also have some high quality players, and the bench is also high quality players. So they can always find ways to get into the game or find a way to win the game.
“Last game, they find a set piece to score on. So, I think that shows the high quality of what they are doing. Obviously they showed everything in the transfer window around Christmas as well, that they keep investing so we [Tottenham] and other clubs need to keep going and then keep going, because otherwise they’re going to extend the gap, and we don’t want that.”
