There were a few very worrying seconds during this afternoon's 2-0 defeat to Portsmouth. Don't get me wrong, Few of the 5'400 seconds of the 90 depressingly dross minutes were particularly enjoyable but there was a moment, with about ten minutes to go, that was truly worrying.
The cameraman, taking time out from the scintillating on pitch action, scanned across to the Tottenham dugout and focused on Juande Ramos and his assistant Gus Poyet. Both were sat with their arms crossed staring and both were motionless and straight faced. Neither of them was pacing the technical area barking orders at the players. They weren't even discussing between them how they might change the course of a game which was slipping away from their side.
No, instead they just sat as if already resigned to defeat. They looked like two men who had completely lost hope; two men who had completely run out of ideas.
Now this may not have been so alarming if the original ideas had been any good, but today Ramos got it completely and totally wrong. From team selection to tactics, to substitutions and a total lack of motivation, Ramos was found severely wanting.
Such are the depth and breadth of his mistakes this afternoon that it's difficult to know quite where to start, but I shall begin were he presumably does - team selection.
First off, granting the consistently useless Gilberto his first start of the season in place of the injured Gareth Bale was laughable, especially considering Ramos opted for David Bentley on the right wing instead of Aaron Lennon. The result - one winger with no match fitness or practice and another with no form. Combined with the fact that neither has any pace and we lined up playing a counter-attacking 4-5-1, the signs were not encouraging before the match had even kicked off.
Without the injured Bale, the logical step would have been to build on a positive result against Newcastle by playing adventurously against a Portsmouth side who were bound to be fragile after conceding ten goals in their last two matches.
Instead Ramos set his team out to continue the policy of pumping long balls up to a lone striker who has yet to get to grips with the pace of Premiership football and, rather than opt for a 4-4-2, with Lennon and Bentley on either wing and Bent and Pavlyuchenko upfront - which would have at least have given us some pace and penetration - Ramos played for the point.
We are bottom of the league and we are playing against a side with little to no confidence, and we play for a point from the off! Ok, I'm not adverse to us setting out to be hard to beat but if we do that we have to have an outlet, someone with a bit of pace who can do some damage on the break. Instead we attempt to play counter-attacking football with players who look like they are running through treacle.
Ramos' illogical approach hampered the first half, where we enjoyed some decent spells of possession which were wasted by either a defender pumping pointless high balls to Pavyluchenko or sloppy finals balls after laborious build up play. It's all well and good playing short passes but if you don't have any penetration a team like Pompey will sit ten men behind the ball and make it very difficult for you to create chances, which is exactly what they did.
In the second half there was a brief period of pressure, bought about by -surprise, surprise - the introduction of Aaron Lennon and Giovani. Say what you like about Lennon's crossing ability, at least he gets forward and tries to make things happen, which is a lot more than can be said for Gilberto, who might as well not have been on the pitch in the first half.
Yet time and time again our efforts to drag ourselves back into the game were undermined by lazy, sloppy and ultimately heartless play by another player who may as well not have been on the pitch either - Jermaine Jenas.
A few neat flicks and one decent through ball aside, Jenas was atrocious this afternoon. His passing was lazy, his movement was non-existent and his hand-ball to gift Pompey a first half penalty was just down right stupid.
It was, without a shadow of a doubt, a serious mistake by Ramos to give Jenas the vice-captaincy this season. Because of the tragic, and almost laughable, situation concerning the fitness of Ledley King, whoever was going to be made vice captain after Robbie Keane left would be, for all intents and purposes, the captain for the vast majority of the season. This means that, no matter how many turgid performances Jenas turns in, he is unlikely to be substituted or dropped for a sustained period of time - despite the fact that, on this evidence, he fully deserves a spell on the bench.
I lost track of the amount of times I Jenas loping half-heartedly into challenges or shyly wandering around the pitch, making no effort whatsoever to be available for a pass, meaning the likes of O'Hara and Zokora rushing passes forward because they had no other option. But was he taken off? no. Instead Ramos took off Zokora, arguably our best central midfielder on the day, leaving Jenas on the pitch to continue his impression of a training cone.
It would be unfair, however, to place too much blame for on Jenas. Sure he was crap but he was crap in midweek. Is it his fault Ramos picked him? Perhaps Ramos is waiting for his role as stand-in captain to make him a better player; I wouldn't hold your breath Juande.
Not that the Spaniard is guaranteed to be around long enough to see it happen. If he continues to respond to being two-nil down by replacing his only striker rather than giving him some help up front then he may well be collecting his P-45 sooner rather than later.
Which brings us back to his lack of animation on the touch line. For me, the Ramos bubble has most certainly burst and the lack of motivation on the sidelines this afternoon only served to cement the feeling that he is not the man I hoped he was after he guided us to Carling Cup glory last season.
Since that day we have been woeful. Forget having to cope with gelling a new side together. That obviously doesn't help but it does little to explain why his tactics and team selection are so consistently awry. Where's Ramos the arch disciplinarian now? Where's the man who took a player off the pitch when his side weren't playing well and made them play with ten men?
Make no mistake this really is crisis time at the Lane. Something truly drastic must happen if we are to kick start our season and that starts with Ramos rolling up his sleeves and improving his own performance, not over the next month, of next few weeks but starting on Thursday. If not, this club is in deep, deep trouble.