Right. ESPN have done a piece where Nedum Onuoha explains what it's like to be in a relegation fight. "Nervousness and hope," he says. The pressure of the final games. The dressing room tension.

Very nice. Very eloquent. And I'm sure it's all true when you're a Premier League footballer on thirty grand a week with underfloor heating in the changing rooms and a sports psychologist on speed dial.

But let me tell you what relegation actually feels like. From the dugout. In League Two. Where the sports psychologist is your mate Dave who runs the kebab shop on the high street and whose advice is always the same: "Have a word with yourself, Andy."

In my day, we didn't have articles about the "emotional journey" of a relegation scrap. We had a chairman who smelt like cigarettes standing in the corridor after a 3-0 home defeat going, "So what's the plan then?" And the plan was always the same. Run harder. Tackle more. Hope the referee has a good day. That was tactics in the lower leagues.

Onuoha talks about players being nervous before big games. Nervous? I once had a centre back who was physically sick before every away match. Not from nerves. From the pre-match meal. Our club catering was a woman called Brenda who did jacket potatoes out of a van. You try keeping a clean sheet when your back four has had dodgy tuna and sweetcorn forty five minutes before kick off.

He mentions the hope you cling to. That's fair enough. I remember hope. It usually lasted about twelve minutes. You'd go 1-0 up, the away fans would go quiet, and you'd think: this is it, we're turning the corner. Then your goalkeeper would drop a cross and suddenly it's 2-1 and you're staring at the Championship form guide wondering if Shrewsbury away on a Tuesday night could actually be worse than this.

The answer is always yes. It can always be worse.

That's the problem with modern football. These Premier League lads talk about pressure like they invented it. You want pressure? Try telling a squad of fourteen fit players that you need to win four of the last five games when your top scorer has done his hamstring in training because he slipped on a patch of mud that the groundsman promised he'd sorted last Thursday.

Don't get me started on the groundsman.

Now I look at Tottenham sitting in the bottom three and I see De Zerbi staring down the barrel of something he's probably never experienced. Proper, stinking, ugly relegation football. The kind where you don't play out from the back because the pitch cuts up after twenty minutes and your centre halves can't pass to each other when they're ankle deep in a bog.

He'll want to play his lovely possession game. Build from the back. Control the tempo. Son. Good luck with that when you're 1-0 down at home to Brentford and the crowd is turning. Tempo goes out the window. Possession becomes a liability. What you need then is a big lad up front, two wingers who can run, and a midfielder who'd happily boot the ball into row Z and consider it a job well done.

That's what I had for twenty years. And we survived. Mostly.

Onuoha's right about one thing, mind. The final few games are different. Time slows down. Every goal elsewhere matters. You're checking your phone at half time like a teenager waiting for a text. You're doing maths you haven't done since school, working out goal difference scenarios on the back of a teamsheet.

It's horrible. It's brilliant. It's football at its most raw and honest.

And no amount of data, sports science, or tactical analysis can prepare you for the feeling of watching your season slip away in real time. That bit hasn't changed since I was in the dugout. That bit never changes.

Although at least De Zerbi's got underfloor heating.