There is a limit to what fans will put up with, and no one knows precisely what that limit is until it is reached.

On Thursday night at Brentford, that breaking point was hit. One thousand, seven hundred and 23 Tottenham Hotspur fans had travelled out to west London in the bitter cold. And they had watched Tottenham yet again do absolutely nothing, create nothing, threaten nothing, imagine nothing, score nothing, and achieve nothing but a clean sheet and a point that moves them up to 12th.

Speaking afterwards, head coach Thomas Frank hailed a “very, very strong defensive performance”.

This was not the first Tottenham attacking no-show under Frank. There have been far too many already, given he is only halfway through his first season. And so when he went over to the away fans to applaud them at the end, they could not hide their feelings about him. This was not just booing this result or this performance. It was specifically directed at Frank himself.

You could sense that a reaction like this was coming. All game, the mood of the away end had been bubbling, rising towards that invisible limit of patience. The fans had sung ‘Boring, boring Tottenham’ and ‘We want our money back’. They had pointedly sung the names of plenty of former players — including Brennan Johnson — warming themselves up around the glow of memories of happier times.

In the final miserable minutes of this appalling game, the end of their tether had been reached. They were increasingly aghast at every missed opportunity to make something happen, whether Richarlison bungling a simple pass or Guglielmo Vicario taking his time before launching it. And then Frank walked over and bore the brunt of it.

This was not the first time that Spurs fans booed this season. But it felt like the most pointedly personal booing so far. Nor can this be taken in isolation. This was not disappointment at a mistake, or frustration over another bad day at the office. There was nothing random or unfortunate about Spurs’ badness here. Because Spurs were bad in precisely the ways that you would expect them to be bad, the ways in which you have seen them be bad too many times this season already. This was some of the worst football you will ever see. But you could never call it a surprise.

The problem was that Spurs were set up with no capacity to move the ball forward. Frank reunited Joao Palhinha and Rodrigo Bentancur in the middle, but with the added twist of Archie Gray playing at 10. Spurs’ options for ball progression included Pedro Porro hitting the ball down the line and Spurs’ centre-backs going back to Vicario, who hurriedly hacked the ball downfield. That was essentially it. Their best moments were Gray having a shot blocked from the edge of the box and Richarlison swinging wildly at a volley from a difficult angle. After that, there was little.