The confusing thing Roberto De Zerbi did to Archie Gray and why his Xavi statement made no sense

Here are our Tottenham talking points after Roberto De Zerbi's era at the club began with a disappointing Premier League defeat at Sunderland

Welcome to Tottenham Hotspur, Roberto De Zerbi. If the Italian had any hope that he might bring an instant change in fortune to the ailing north London club then losing Mohammed Kudus and captain Cristian Romero in his first week snuffed that out.

There is a permanent expression the Spurs players have worn on their faces this season. It is somewhere between fear and looking sorry for themselves. After every match they fall to the floor, looking up at the skies for some divine inspiration that is not forthcoming.

Someone is prodded out with a stick each week to do the club's post-match interview, looking appropriately devastated and apologetic all in one go. Few do looking 'thoroughly fed up' better than Micky van de Ven, who picked the short straw in Sunderland on Sunday. Imagine how the fans feel, making their way up and down the country to watch yet another defeat.

Sunday's defeat at the Stadium of Light made it 14 games without a win in the Premier League and a whopping 106 days since these players last tasted victory at Selhurst Park on December 28.

It's easy to say the players don't care and they're not trying, but they do and they are. The problem is that they are being reactive through fear, rather than proactive through confidence so they are always one step behind.

De Zerbi had nine days to work with the squad ahead of the game on Sunday. He has made it very clear that he does not have the time to instil his complicated brand of football and instead will act as a psychologist, therapist and cheerleader instead with just a few tweaks here and there to the system.

"I can be a big brother, father, they don't need a coach. They don't need to improve football. They can play better and they will play better once we reach a different level of confidence," De Zerbi said after the game.

Some coaching would be nice though Roberto. For the resulting team under him on Sunday was a stitched together hybrid of Spurs sides of the past nine months and the four head coaches employed by the club in that time.

Sunday brought the inverted full-backs and advanced forwards of the Postecoglou era, the long throws and set pieces of the Frank tenure and the running and long balls of the brief Tudor reign.

Spurs were better when they were sweeping forward on Sunday, a sprinkling of well-worked moves getting them in and around the Sunderland box, only for dreadful finishing or a final pass to end the attack, Richarlison the chief culprit on the day.

Yet Tottenham remain fragile and fearful. One pass through the middle will open them up, one good cross will find an unmarked opponent in their box and heads will instantly drop.

Tottenham and Wolves are the only two teams in the Premier League this season yet to win a match after going behind. The Lilywhites just don't have the resolve and Nordi Mukiele's wickedly deflected effort summed up their season and their lack of response.

Spurs have fallen behind in 23 different matches during this campaign and have lost 16 of them and drawn the other seven.

It is a club lacking in leaders and they lost their main one as the tearful Romero hobbled off the pitch with 20 minutes to go.

The Argentine was shoved forward by Brian Brobbey into Antonin Kinsky just after the hour mark as he shepherded the ball back to the 23-year-old goalkeeper. As the defender was flung forward, Kinsky's head and shoulder rammed into the side of his knee, jarring his leg.

Both Spurs players lay on the ground writhing in pain, requiring treatment for a long period, while Brobbey, who was on a yellow card, escaped without even a stern talking to from the referee. It was a reckless act and could easily have caused a serious head injury to Kinsky along with whatever has happened to Romero.

When the Spurs skipper stood up he knew something was not right in his knee and the tears flowed, fearing perhaps that he may not only miss the fight to keep Tottenham in the Premier League but also the World Cup this summer.

"We don't know yet. We have to see in the next few days," De Zerbi told football.london. "I hope for us it's not an important problem because he's a crucial player for us. A good guy, top player, big personality and we need him to finish the season and to achieve our goal."

Reports back in Argentina stated that Romero felt pain and instability in his knee and the club will run tests on it in the days ahead once any swelling has subsided to see if the medial collateral ligament has been injured or if it was just sore from the impact.

If it is MCL related, then such injuries are graded in four ways from a slight stretch to a complete tear. The first keeps a player out for one to three weeks while a complete tear (grade four) would keep them out for 10 to 12 weeks on average.

Both Spurs and Argentina need Romero. Tottenham in particular have lost the 27-year-old for too many games already this season. He has played in just 32 of their 46 matches due to injury and suspension so far.

That this potential absence would be down to a reckless push will be tough to swallow and Spurs were not helped by the officials throughout.

Various fouls went unpunished throughout the match. The time one did when Randal Kolo Muani went down in the box through a combination of challenges from Omar Alderete and Luke O'Nien, referee Rob Jones pointed to the spot only to be called over to his monitor by the VAR officials and he duly ruled it out.

Kolo Muani was the brightest of Tottenham's trio of attackers but that's not something he should shout about. He spent as much time on the floor as he did actually doing something useful.

Yet the Frenchman was still more dangerous on the day than the service-starved Dominic Solanke, who fluffed the two chances he did have with a close range shot at Robin Roefs before the break that he should have scored with and then a second half header sent softly at the Dutchman.

Then there was Richarlison. The space in which the Brazilian operated on the left wing was the place where most good Spurs attacks came to die.

The 28-year-old is Tottenham's top scorer and a useful front man, but as a left winger he is lumbering and does not have the ability to beat a man nor the pace to be much use. Mukiele had such an easy time against the Brazilian that he decided to go up the other end and show him how to score himself.

De Zerbi would have wanted Richarlison in the team because he is a fighter but in crowbarring him in, he left his one effective wide man on the bench in Mathys Tel, who came on and delivered that cross for Solanke's second chance.

The midfield behind them was a mess. De Zerbi made a big show of talking up Conor Gallagher before the game, having wanted to sign the England international from Chelsea back in his Brighton days.

Yet the 26-year-old huffs and puffs without blowing anybody's door down. On Sunday, he gave the impression of always looking busy but you'd be hard pressed to note down anything worthwhile he actually contributed to the cause.

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Archie Gray was given the job of head janitor. It was his job to clean up anything that went wrong around him and that meant filling in for others, cutting out Sunderland passes and generally doing all the dirty work.

Yet Tottenham did not use the clever young midfielder in any progressive way. He touched the ball just 23 times, which made a big part of the team's pre-match warm-up all the more confusing.

Before the game, De Zerbi's staff put together a big rondo to prepare the players to bait and play around the Sunderland press. Everything during it went through Gray. While the others had bibs and switched to the inside of the rondo when they lost the ball, the 20-year-old was the sole go-to man in the middle for anyone looking for a pass.

He was the hub of it all, with De Zerbi watching on the whole time, and it hinted at a tactic that was never realised. Gray was mostly bypassed by his team-mates on the day he became the second youngest Spurs player to make 50 Premier League appearances for the club, 19 days older than Aaron Lennon.

Lucas Bergvall was played in the number 10 role and had even fewer touches of the ball with just 18. Only Solanke had fewer of the starting players on either side with 17.

Bergvall is a talented young midfielder but to use the Swede as a 10 is not his best fit and the system was crying out for the creative Xavi Simons in that position.

Yet, like Frank and Tudor before him, De Zerbi watched training over the previous week and decided the 22-year-old Dutchman was not for him, despite describing him as a "big talent" on Friday at his pre-match press conference.

Tottenham need to score goals and Xavi is their only fit playmaker with James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski out. He simply has to be on the pitch at a time when creating chances and hitting the net is the only thing that will keep Spurs up. Any deficiencies he may have defensively need to be worked around.

football.london had not even finished asking De Zerbi why he waited until the 85th minute to bring on Xavi before the Italian started to answer.

"Yes, why? Why? Because I changed three players, then after Romero's injury there was on the pitch Kolo Muani and Udogie," he said. "I didn't know when Udogie could finish, the energy to play, just for it. Without Romero's injury, Xavi would have come on before."

That answer made little sense because the obvious replacement for Bergvall in the 10 position was the Dutchman during that initial triple change rather than Pape Matar Sarr, who came on with Joao Palhinha and Tel.

The trio were ready to come on before Sunderland scored but only did after it happened. It's a regular sight this season to see Spurs prepare a double or triple change before the opponents score only for them to not make on to the pitch until after.

At a time when Tottenham need to be proactive rather than reactive, Xavi is one of the few players with Tel who will bring that.

Three coaches in a row not seeming to trust him reflects on the player as much as it does them, but in a season when so little has worked, breaking from the norm seems the way to go.

One positive of sorts from Sunday's performance was the return of Kinsky. The 23-year-old goalkeeper could have let that horrendous night in Madrid define him but he grabbed an unexpected opportunity to quickly come back into the side with both hands.

He made a big first half save from Brobbey, used the ball well with his feet, showed bravery to keep going after his big whack to the head from Romero's knee and could do nothing about the huge deflection off Micky van de Ven for Sunderland's winner.

The young Czech stopper could have been more dominant in claiming set pieces but that is likely a lingering after-effect of that Spanish evening as he tries to rebuild his confidence.

Otherwise there was little to get excited about with this latest Spurs team performance other than the odd sweeping attack that ended with a tame shot.

Sunderland boss Regis Le Bris admitted: "The opponent wasn’t strong enough to beat us, so I wasn’t too worried." The Frenchman wasn't wrong.

De Zerbi was asked if the fear of relegation itself is the problem within the team.

"I think so," answered the Italian with a nod. "But if you ask me, I am 46-years-old, I have much more experience than the players and I am positive absolutely because I know them as guys and as players."

He added: "They are suffering for this moment. They are not happy when we lose the game or not happy to see Tottenham at the bottom of the table. But we have to find the energy, the right spirit to be positive. They will see a positive coach because I believe in their qualities.

"We have not [got the right] to win the game just because we are Tottenham. You can't win the game on paper. You have to win showing the quality on the pitch, fighting on the pitch."

Up in the stands watching glumly on at the Stadium of Light were Spurs CEO Vinai Venkatesham, sporting director Johan Lange and one of the owners Vivienne Lewis.

Venkatesham and Lange in particular will be well aware that they have overseen an absolute disaster of a season which is currently freefalling towards a suitably horrendous conclusion.

While fortune has not been on Tottenham side, the decisions made along the way have only compounded the problems. There's not a single outward facing thing about the football side of the club that can be pointed to as having improved from last season under their stewardship.

For all the criticism he got for hiring and firing managers, Daniel Levy would never have stuck with the failed Frank experiment for so long amid the overwhelming fan uproar and it's unlikely he would have turned to the winless Tudor as the solution.

That's not to absolve the long-serving chairman of blame. The club's malaise began under him and it's unlikely that Spurs would be in this dire a situation seven years on if different decisions had been made during and since Mauricio Pochettino's tenure.

Even if Levy and the board had not sacked Postecoglou off the back of finally ending the club's trophy drought, this Spurs season would unlikely have been this awful.

The Australian would have prioritised the Premier League this time around as he did the Europa League last season. Goals would have been scored and the club would certainly not be on its second-longest run without a league win in their history, behind only the 16 games between December 1934 and April 1935.

"We have to work on one win because with one win we can change everything this season," said De Zerbi.

The Italian's logic on that is sound. Spurs must win for their confidence as well as the fact that their relegation rivals are all showing they can pick up points.

Next up comes De Zerbi's home debut at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and fate has ensured that his old side Brighton are the visitors. Spurs have to win because Leeds and Nottingham Forest host 20th and 19th-placed Wolves and Burnley respectively while West Ham travel to Crystal Palace off the back of their 4-0 hammering of Wolves on Friday night.

Something must change at Tottenham before it's too late. Fear has seeped into every nook and cranny of the north London club and it's time for all inside it to remember the motto it is built upon.

"Audere est facere - to dare is to do". If ever there was a time for that expression to be lived, breathed and carried out to the letter, it is now. It needs to be more than simply words on a wall or a badge.

The only way Tottenham Hotspur will survive this season from hell is if they come out swinging and scoring. Their identity crisis must end before it consumes them.