Tottenham vs Burnley Odds
| Tottenham Odds | -300 |
| Burnley Odds | +650 |
| Draw | +500 |
| Over / Under | 3.5 -175o / +137u |
Tottenham continues their push toward the top four when they host Burnley.
Spurs are going through a difficult run and have lost four straight matches to Newcastle, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool. Questions are starting to come up about Ange Postecoglou and his philosophies, so Spurs desperately need a win here to quiet the critics. They are seven points behind Aston Villa with a game in hand for top four, so they basically need to win out to have any hope of getting back into the Champions League.
Burnley are somehow still alive to survive relegation, but are going to need to win out and receive a lot of help. Their 5-1 loss at home against Newcastle didn't do them any favors, so now they will need to pull off a major upset against Tottenham and beat Nottingham Forest on the final day if they haven't already been relegated. Tottenham beat them 5-2 in the previous meeting, so they will need to be a lot better defensively to pull off the upset.
Tottenham
Everything with Tottenham over the past few weeks, during this bad run of form, is centered around Postecoglou not caring about set pieces. The good news in this matchup is they most likely won't have to worry about set pieces because Burnley is last in the Premier League in xG per set piece and have only scored five goals off of them.
The other reason that Tottenham has struggled defensively is because of their ability to defend in transition. Because Postecoglou's in-possession system of a 2-3-5 build up is designed to overload the last line of defense and push the fullbacks high up the pitch, it often leaves Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven in one-on-one situations defending in transition. Good transition teams, like Newcastle, have punished them, but Burnley is far from a good transition team, ranking 12th in final third to box entry conversion rate.
The Tottenham offense that has declined in recent weeks. It's without a doubt due to the fact that they've played better competition, but they have only created 8.1 npxG over their past six matches, which is actually less than Burnley have created over that same time period.
The losses of Destiny Udogie and Timo Werner has been felt as the two of them — with their ball carrying and creative ability — made it much easier for Tottenham to break down passive defensive set ups.
Burnley
Burnley have faced two transition-based teams — Manchester United and Newcastle — in recent matches and will now be facing a possession based build up team, so I don't think we are going see an end-to-end type of match.
At the beginning of November, Burnley switched to a 4-4-2 to give them more defensive stability. They also started playing more passively because the aggressive pressing just wasn’t working. Since they made the switch to a 4-4-2, they are allowing 1.74 xG per 90 minutes. Prior, they were allowing 1.95 xG per 90 minutes.
Burnley also made a change at goalkeeper, starting Arijanet Muric, who has been incredible. In eight matches, he has a +6.6 post shot xG +/-.
Tottenham vs Burnley
Prediction
Given the way the matches have been going recently, one would believe this match is going to be chaotic.
In just six of Tottenham’s 34 matches this year have there been more than four expected goals created and I'm not sure Burnley is going to press them relentlessly like they tried to do in the first meeting.
Since Burnley has switched to a 4-4-2, it's given them more defensive stability, and their best possible route to getting three points in this match is not turn this into an up-and-down track meet, but to counter attack Tottenham and get those one-on-one situations.
I only have 3.4 goals projected, so I like the value on Under 4 goals at -112.
Pick: Under 4 (-112 via Bet365)
