Tottenham title challenge lasts 45 minutes as Jamie Vardy shows Dominic Solanke how it’s done

It took ten games for the Tottenham title challenge to end last season, but it lasted just 45 minutes in 2024/2025. Familiar problems endure for Ange Postecoglou.

After £65m man Dominic Solanke nodded one straight at the goalkeeper early on and looked to to be the only incongruous part of a Tottenham team that was clicking impressively, Jamie Vardy – whom we had been told incessantly Had No Pre-Season by the commentary team, perhaps in a bid to explain his almost complete lack of involvement up to that point in the 57th minute – glanced a chance of similar difficulty, his first sniff, past Gugliermo Vicario to give Leicester parity in a game they should have been well out of.

It was lovely to see some life in the old dog, even if our whimsical hopes of a season of prime Vardy were short-lived as the Leicester striker raced through on goal off the last Tottenham man soon after to miss a chance he would have gobbled up in his heyday. He looked utterly exhausted as he shouted into the night sky. But then again, he Had No Pre-Season!

Spurs were dominant in the first half. The full-backs were high and aggressive, the centre-backs quick and comfortable and James Maddison pulled the strings in midfield. It felt very like the start of last season, when after the first ten games Tottenham led the way in the Premier League and were deemed to be in the title race, premature though that felt before their collapse against Chelsea and absurd as it turned out come the end of the campaign

Their goal was Ange Postecoglou’s style in a nutshell: forward pass after forward pass to pin Leicester into their own box before the ball was set back for Maddison to deliver a lovely cross for Pedro Porro – a full-back in a striker’s position – to flick beyond Mads Hermansen.

Spurs had 10 shots and 22 touches in the opposition box to Leicester’s one on both counts in the first 45 minutes. The gulf was massive; so big that it felt like it couldn’t merely be a case of a seasoned group of top flight players putting a team ill-prepared for life in the Premier League to the sword, but a relegation candidate against a side prepared to do something special this season. How wrong we were.

After a half-time ‘lads, it’s Tottenham’ from Steve Cooper, Leicester got in Spurs faces, made the most of space behind the bombing full-backs and could quite easily have won the game in the end. Vicario made that one point-blank save from Vardy and another in injury time after Lucas Bergvall gave the ball away having come on as a substitute to produce a delightfully Spursy cameo featuring a few lovely touches and that one panic-stricken moment that nearly cost his team.

READ MORE: Solanke to Spurs a perfect transfer to sum up a club that could go either way this season

Postecoglou will be hugely frustrated. His team should have been out of sight, and probably would have been had Solanke been in and around the team for even two or three weeks longer. He missed that one big chance but also wasn’t quite on the same wavelength of his teammates throughout the game. Balls were crossed into areas he should have been in while many of the runs he made went unnoticed.

But there were other issues. Cristian Romero was attracted to the ball, as is frequently the case, to give Vardy far too much space in the box to score, and Micky van de Ven looks set once again for a workload that may well prove to be too much for one – admittedly very fast – individual, with the flanks in behind Destiny Udogie and Pedro Porro the very obvious areas opposition teams can hurt them consistently.

The difference in composure from the first half to the second was the most alarming aspect of the game though. They very clearly did not like it up’em, and that enduring quirk of Spurs teams that somehow spans generations remains the significant hurdle for Postecoglou’s side to mount a title challenge. Maybe next season.