'Painful' and 'no fight' - Spurs sorry for derby display

Tottenham manager Thomas Frank and goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario apologised to fans following Sunday's hapless performance against Arsenal in the north London derby.

Spurs were beaten 4-1 at Emirates Stadium - their joint-heaviest Premier League defeat by the Gunners - with Eberechi Eze scoring a hat-trick against the club he almost joined in the summer.

Richarlison replied with a sensational 40-yard effort, but that was scant consolation for the visitors, whose expected-goals (xG) total of 0.07 was the lowest in the top flight this season.

"It's extremely painful - I won't walk away from that," Frank, whose side have now lost three of their past five league games, told Sky Sports.

"We can only apologise to the fans for that performance. It was a bad performance. I've seen a lot of character and fight in this team, but we didn't win enough duels."

Frank switched to a back three against the league leaders, but the move failed to pay off as Arsenal cut through Spurs time and time again in the first half and deservedly led 2-0 at the break thanks to goals from Leandro Trossard and Eze.

The Dane changed the system at the break, but former Crystal Palace man Eze scored the third 35 seconds into the second half before completing the scoring 14 minutes from time.

"I will always take responsibility for my choice," Frank added. "My view on it is that no matter what formation we played, we didn't have enough duels or intensity in the decisive moments, [which makes it] very difficult to win a football match."

Vicario echoed his manager's sentiments as he told Sky Sports: "We have to apologise to the people that support us every day. They expected us to fight and today we didn't fight. That's not negotiable at this level.

"We were too passive. The gameplan we prepared was different. The emotions are high, but we need cool heads."

This was not the first time this season Tottenham have struggled to threaten the opposition in the final third.

In the 1-0 defeat at home by Chelsea earlier this month, Spurs managed only three attempts and posted an xG of 0.1 - the second lowest in the Premier League this season.

Their xG of 0.17 in the 1-0 reverse against Bournemouth in August was only marginally better.

"It has been an ongoing theme that we are working hard to improve," added Frank, whose side visit holders Paris St-Germain in the Champions League on Wednesday.

"It doesn't look good today, or against Chelsea. There will be noise - we played against our biggest rivals and we lost badly - but we'll keep noise out and focus.

"I know this team is competitive. Of course it looks bad, it was not good enough."

Former Tottenham midfielder Danny Murphy told BBC Sport: That performance today was as dominant an Arsenal performance against Tottenham as I've seen for a long time... there was a massive gulf between the two teams.

The Tottenham system with five at the back - be it a 3-4-3 or 5-4-1, whichever way you want to look at it - can cause the other team problems if, when you've got the ball, you are brave enough to push your wing-backs up a bit higher and get up the pitch a little bit and support the front three.

But what happened with Arsenal's quality and physicality was they just pinned Spurs back so they couldn't get out, and of course after the second goal which they felt a little bit harshly done by because of the men in front of the keeper, Spurs are then in a real predicament.

Because if you come out and really go after Arsenal you are going to get cut to pieces, and also 2-0 is a mountain to climb because they don't concede many goals.

But they will be hugely disappointed - they didn't really lay a glove on Arsenal when I thought after the first 20 minutes, they could have been braver, because they had given themselves a platform to do that.

It is a huge disappointment for Tottenham to lose any north London derby but to lose it in the manner they did was very poor.

They got completely overrun in the end really - outplayed and out-worked and didn't really hurt Arsenal enough. Yes Richarlison got a great goal out of nothing which I think was their first shot on target, but other than that they caused Arsenal no problems at all.

There was already a little bit of discontent at their home games from their supporters, wanting more. Now, because of that performance today, at Arsenal, that's going to grow... because of who this performance and result was against.

So the players are going to have to stand up and be counted and Frank is going to learn a lot about his players in the next couple of weeks.

He is going to learn who is up for it, who has got some courage and who wants to get on the ball and make things happen.