Igor Tudor ended Tottenham's disastrous Thursday night by speaking about a boat.
Spurs appear to drive their head coaches to despair and naval analogies, with Thomas Frank having declared before his departure that the north London club is a big super tanker that would take a while to turn. The problem with such analogies is they also conjure images of sinking ships.
The HMS Tottenham Hotspur is taking on water quickly because it's been punched full of holes by the decisions of the club's players, head coaches and hierarchy.
The Spurs fans are disgusted by what they are seeing. At half-time, as they headed to the concourse, a couple of them shouted across at the club analysts in the press area that they are "taking the club down".
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One supporter came back out from the interval and unleashed his feelings up towards those in the director's box, which included CEO Vinai Venkatesham, sporting director Johan Lange, long-serving chief operating and finance officer Matthew Collecott and one of the owners, Vivienne Lewis.
The fan bellowed 'You've killed the club' before proceeding to boo them all for a couple of minutes to make his point fully as stewards attempted to usher him back to his seat.
The supporters are thoroughly fed up with this current abomination of Spurs and some even claimed crowd noise was being pumped in or amplified over speakers inside the stadium.
They are tired of it all. They booed at half-time after they had booed Guglielmo Vicario when he next touched the ball after being slow to come out to Ismaila Sarr's second goal before the break.
In the 94th minute the travelling Palace fans sang 'You're going to boo in a minute' and the remaining Tottenham supporters left among the initial reported crowd of 60,213 duly played their part.
This was a game that turned horribly for the home side in the space of nine minutes in the first half.
First they got a reprieve on 29 minutes when Sarr's face was adjudged to have been offside after his shot had deflected up into the air off Pedro Porro and looped over Vicario and into the net.
Five minutes later and 19-year-old Archie Gray, Spurs' man of the match by a country mile, did well to take down Mathys Tel's cross and jink around two Palace defenders before picking out Dominic Solanke to score.
A collective sigh of relief was let out inside the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Nine of Solanke's last 10 Premier League goals have come in that arena and it made it five goals in the striker's previous eight starts in the competition.
Gray has been involved in four league goals this season with two goals and two assists, and only Bournemouth’s Junior Kroupi, with eight, has more goal involvements as a teenager in the Premier League during this campaign.
Yet everything went wrong just four minutes later. A Jorgen Strand Larsen flick hit Micky van de Ven and ricocheted up into the air. Kevin Danso lost the battle with the Norwegian to head the ball and Van de Ven realised too late that it was going to fall for Sarr.
The Spurs captain for the night put his brain into standby mode, grabbing the Senegal international's arm as he ran towards goal and pulling him back and to the floor. Sarr tumbled and referee Andy Madley had no choice but to brandish the red card and award the penalty.
In one moment, Tottenham's hopes for the night were ripped apart. It was another example of a Spurs leader losing their head, Van de Ven learning from Cristian Romero, who was sitting out the final match of his four-game suspension for that wild lunge on Casemiro.
When football.london asked if Van de Ven had spoken to his team-mates at half-time or after the game, Igor Tudor would only say: "That's a private thing in the dressing room."
To be fair to Van de Ven, it was his first sending off for the club, but Spurs have the second most red cards in the Premier League with four and the most yellow cards with 72.
football.london asked Tudor if there was a discipline issue at the club and the Croatian bewilderingly responded without missing a beat: "Discipline? There is no discipline issue at all. Opposite."
Tottenham's press officer ended the press conference in that moment, probably knowing that no good was going to come from the 47-year-old continuing to answer questions.
Tudor's misplaced optimism felt similar to Frank's on the night before he was sacked.
"I will tell you now maybe it will sound strange but I believe more after this game than I believed before," he said. "I saw something. I need to choose the right guys because the boat is going in the direction that I want to go and needs to go and who is in the boat can stay.
"Otherwise they can leave the boat. So when the other players will come back and choosing the right [players] I’m sure we will have a good team and the victories will come back. It’s not easy to accept the moment where we are now but it is how it is."
Tudor, who had begun the match with a back three featuring Porro on its right, had responded to Sarr's converted penalty and the red card by getting the experienced Yves Bissouma and Conor Gallagher on to the pitch.
That ended Souza's first start for Spurs before he had completed a first half for the club while Randal Kolo Muani also came off and marched straight down the tunnel.
Despite the experienced additions, the hosts crumbled in added time in the first half, carved apart by Palace's star man Adam Wharton. First the 22-year-old seized on a ball won back after Tel's dangerous pass and played a perfect pass for Strand Larsen to poke between Vicario's legs.
Then Wharton played a pinpoint ball over the top into Sarr's run and Vicario realised the danger too late and the Palace attacker got to the ball first and prodded it past him, prompting boos and then those targeted at the Spurs keeper.
It meant Tottenham have conceded two or more goals in nine consecutive league matches for the first time in their history and a large number of fans departed into the night, knowing their club had let them down again.
If there's any credit to be awarded on a wretched evening, it's that the 10 men did perform reasonably well in the second half, Danso and Solanke forcing Dean Henderson into saves despite their numerical disadvantage. Ultimately though it always felt like a long shot.
Again a team of senior professionals was led by a teenager in Gray and the odd dribble by 20-year-old Tel and the more experienced Solanke.
The only time the remaining Spurs fans really had something to applaud in the second half was when last season's top scorer Brennan Johnson came off the bench for Palace. He reminded them of better times.
At the final whistle there were only more boos. Spurs have failed to win in 11 successive league games for the first time since October 1975 and it is the first time they suffered defeat in five successive Premier League matches since November 2004.
The horrendous stats just keep coming. Not since 1935 have Tottenham gone on a longer winless run in league football to begin a calendar year than their 11 matches in 2026 so far. It was 15 back then but something needs to change otherwise that could easily be repeated.
For rather than repeating his football firefighting act at many previous clubs, Tudor has become only the second Spurs boss in the Premier League era to lose all of his first three games in charge, after Martin Jol did the same back in 2004.
Right now there is too much hope being pinned upon those players who might return around the international break such as Mohammed Kudus, Lucas Bergvall and Destiny Udogie, while only Dejan Kulusevski, sat inside the stadium on Thursday night, will know when he can finally return.
Palace boss Oliver Glasner said after the game: "It’s not my right to talk about Spurs, I talk about my team, about my players and for us it is a great win here because I remember when we started. We came here and lost 3-1. To be honest we had no chance to win this game.
"They were so much better and I see the last two games here we have won. I think this is just the development and progression of Crystal Palace."
As much as Palace have progressed, so Spurs have gone in the other direction - that night in Bilbao aside.
