Tottenham moves out of relegation zone with crucial Aston Villa win

Tottenham Hotspur, a club with a billion-dollar stadium and Champions League aspirations baked into its DNA, just celebrated climbing to 17th place in the Premier League. That sentence alone tells you everything about how this season has gone. A 2-1 win over Aston Villa on May 3 pulled Spurs out of the relegation zone for the first time in weeks, ending a 15-game winless run in the league. Goals from Conor Gallagher and Richarlison were enough to lift the club above West Ham United, who had already lost earlier in the day. The numbers behind the nightmare Tottenham now sit on 37 points from 35 matches. For context, that is the kind of tally that typically gets a newly promoted side polite applause. For a club of Spurs’ stature and spending, it is a crisis dressed in a football shirt. The 15-game winless streak was the longest drought of Tottenham’s modern era. Before Saturday’s result, the very real possibility of Tottenham being relegated for the first time since 1977 was not a joke on social media. It was a line in the bookmakers’ odds. Roberto De Zerbi, who was appointed manager on March 31, has been tasked with performing the most thankless job in English football: keeping one ...