Tottenham’s Josh Onomah doesn’t deserve fan criticism

Tottenham fans who were critical of Josh Onomah after the FA Cup loss to Crystal Palace need to find some perspective

Tottenham attacker Josh Onomah received a startling amount of criticism after the club’s loss to Crystal Palace yesterday. Spurs fans need to understand that every one of the club’s starlets are not going to progress at the rate of Dele Alli.

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While I understand the frustration of Tottenham fans after the disappointing result against Palace, I can’t understand why so many Spurs fans need to find a scapegoat. Even if fans require the identification of a player to blame for the FA Cup defeat, it shouldn’t be Josh Onomah.

First off, Onomah is a grand total of 18-years-old. I don’t know what you were doing at that age, but I suspect it wasn’t starting in a Premier League side’s attacking midfield. Onomah’s ability to even look as if he deserved to be on the field for the game ,given the presence of much more experienced opponents, is a significant accomplishment.

Instead, a significant number of Tottenham fans took to Twitter and other social media outlets to criticize the young starlet. Of course, social media isn’t an accurate representation of a fan base, but I was still astonished at the venom and pessimism aimed at Onomah. I realize I don’t have enough space here to include every ridiculous tweet I saw, but the one below is a pretty good example of the kind of thing I ran across entirely too often.

I've seen enough of Josh Onomah to know he isn't going to make it at Tottenham. Massive chance for him yesterday, and he fluffed his lines.
— Chris #COYS (@bridyid5) February 22, 2016

In all honesty, the Onomah criticism has my blood boiling. That’s why I felt compelled to write this piece in defense of Onomah. Even if you aren’t inclined to give him a pass on his performance based on his age, there’s another compelling reason not to place any blame on him for the Crystal Palace loss. That reason is that Onomah didn’t play poorly against the Eagles.

I thought it was pretty obvious by watching the match that he was a bright presence in attack. Certainly his finishing left a little bit to be desired, but he was a threat going forward. Add in his consistent hard work and I thought you had a solidly above average performance.

Clearly, some people saw something different in Onomah’s performance. Never one to dismiss criticism of Tottenham players out of hand, I did a little statistical digging to see if my eyes had deceived me. I went and checked his performance rating on Whoscored.com who awarded him a 7 based on his match performance. In short, saying Onomah had a poor game was wrong based on the eye test or statistical measures.

Tottenham fans have to get over the incessant need to have a scapegoat every time we lose a match. Sometimes in football, you don’t take your chances and the luck runs against you. When that happens, you can lose matches that you probably should win. That’s what happened against Crystal Palace.

Sure, it wasn’t a Tottenham performance that’s going to go down in history as one of the greatest of all-time, but it wasn’t putrid either. In a similar fashion Onomah will have much better games during his Tottenham career, but his performance against Alan Pardew’s men certainly wasn’t below average.

In conclusion, Spurs fans need to relax about the loss to Palace, and particularly about the performance of Josh Onomah. The latter, is a reason to be excited about Tottenham’s future, not pissed off about its present.