One of the things that I've recently been thinking about the struggles of our team is just general consistently. Both Jack and Spooky touched slightly on it but my main thought is when you look at our Saturday teamsheet (which looks close to first choice barring one or two) the only player you can really feel comfortable about putting in a performance and shift is Lloris. Almost every player out there could have a quality or terrible game and it's pretty much 50/50 on which it will be. It's not that our players don't have ability, it just isn't consistent.
Back when we were quality you could look at our team sheet and be pretty sure what you would get game for game from the likes of Modric, King, Bale, Kaboul, Van der Vaart, and Parker. Excluding King (because of health) you knew you would get at least 25-30 good league performances from our main group. The consistency of that group meant we were less dependent on players who would go through peaks and valleys of form like Adebayor, Lennon, Dawson, Defoe, BAE, Walker, Pav, Kranjcar, etc. If those players weren't at their best, we could absorb it because we had reliable performers around them.
Now I don't think there is a single player barring our goalkeeper that we could pencil in for even 25 quality performances. Thus we're very reliant on mercurial talents like Walker, Adebayor, Vertonghen, Eriksen, and Lamela to really develop and maintain form over the whole season which is something they haven't really proved they can do.
Hopefully the lack of consistency is just a mark of an extremely young team who has been lacking a proper leader as a manager and it will develop over time. But right now when you look at our team sheet we have to accept that a performance like West Brom is almost just as likely as our performance against QPR.
Basically Spurs at the moment: