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Big team. Penalty. Red card. Repeat

5 min read
by Liam Keyes
With the City result slowly fading from our memory, Liam Keyes decides it's time to have another look at the game. Watch. Review. Repeat. Report. What's that definition of insanity?

Having got home at 9am and still obviously feeling the effects of the night before, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the early Saturday kick-off against Manchester City, and nor was I really expecting Tottenham to take anything from it. But there was a part of me, the part not coated in cynicism (or perhaps not grounded in reality), that thought maybe, just maybe, the lessons from last year had been learned.

It wasn’t a case of intoxication-induced-optimism because the thing with supporting a mercurial, (surely) neutral’s favourite like Tottenham, is that I have the same foolish hope before every game against top opposition. The kind of things-are-bound-to-change-eventually logic which explains why, when mixed with the unpredictability of the Premier League, I persisted with Soldado in my FF team until about Christmas last year.

But recently, whether it takes 60 seconds or 60 minutes, there’s a point where the opposition always seems to make their quality count and the floodgates open: it’s when not if. It’s not a sense of entitlement which maintains my “we’re owed a win” rationale, instead it’s because for a team like Tottenham it should theoretically be hard to keep losing by such great margins.

[linequote]Tottenham and I seem matched in our efforts to echo what Einstein said about insanity[/linequote]

And yet they do, and with great vigour. Each time a penalty or red card is awarded, and I realise that I’ve again been tricked by my own faulty reasoning, my face becomes pained as though I’m Bear Grylls who, having to (read: wanting to) drink his own urine to survive in the wild, has through the power of taste realised that his film crew must have cruelly spiked his drink with asparagus. Again.

Bear would no doubt cry “But I love urine! I feel so conflicted!” Before downing the whole lot because while he knows that it’s not going to be as good as he was hoping, he can’t help himself: he just loves it. Substitute urine for Tottenham and I’m the same when it comes to games versus the top four and no doubt on December 3rd against Chelsea there’ll be a small part of me still thinking “surely this time it’ll be different”.

Tottenham and I seem matched in our efforts to echo what Einstein said about insanity. Repeating the same mistakes over and over, with the belief that an ingrained propensity to carry out rash “tackles” will somehow bring about a result other than an exercise in late-game damage limitation.

[fullquote]Indeed, bar the inevitable conceded goal, Tottenham started brightly with an equal share in chances[/fullquote]

You can point to Sherwood’s prophetic words at half-time or bemoan Lampard’s (deliberate) lack of steel but Tottenham need to learn to stop getting themselves in tricky positions to begin with. If there’s the opportunity for a penalty or a game changing red card, then let’s face it, it’ll probably happen and this is especially true in a game where the referee had to maintain a consistency with Lampard’s dive being the benchmark.

The fact that Tottenham were good going forward, and demonstrated that they can play confident one-touch football against teams other than QPR or those from the far-flung regions of Europe makes the defeat even harder to take, with the game being a case of one step forward, three penalties back.

Indeed, bar the inevitable conceded goal, Tottenham started brightly with an equal share in chances and even managed not to lose the game within the first 90 seconds. Even when they went down they didn’t crumble and Eriksen scored within minutes from a Soldado assist: by no means the perfect start but it was at least progress on multiple fronts.

City’s win was deserved, but for 60+ minutes the majority of the team battled to draw level again and even after 90 minutes their performances merited more than a 4-1 defeat. For me then, contrary to how it may seem, the positives cannot quite be swallowed by the negatives. You could even say that it’s quite impressive to “only” lose 4-1 away to City despite giving away three penalties and at the same time only receive one red card.

Still though, Aguero alone could have scored half a dozen. He didn’t because of Lloris, which is sort of the point of having a world-class goalkeeper but the fact remains that against last season’s top four, Tottenham haven’t kept a clean sheet since against Chelsea in 2012.

Tottenham may not have the quality to necessarily beat the top four, but you’d think they’d at least be able to bring to an end a run of penalty and/or red card-infused defeats against Liverpool, City and Chelsea which now reads: 6-0, 0-5, 1-5, 4-0, 4-0 0-3 and 4-1. Add Arsenal into the mix as well (with some more red cards for good measure) and in the last 25 games played against the four sides, Tottenham have conceded 69 goals. Even the likes of Stoke or Sunderland have a better record in recent memory than that.

Obviously part of this stems from the fact that Stoke or Sunderland know how to approach big games whereas Tottenham are too “good” to park the bus (although Chelsea and Real Madrid aren’t adverse to it) and too “bad” to go head-to-head and in trying to marry the two, they usually end up doing neither.

[linequote]It’s a catch-22 and at the moment Tottenham are like a batsman unsure whether to go for a six or just play it safe[/linequote]

It was enjoyable to watch Tottenham going forward last Saturday and while it perhaps wasn’t quite as expansively-suicidal as last year, pressure was still put on the defence by committing numbers forward. But equally, if the opposite had been done, with Pochettino favouring a more defensive approach, would you place much money on no-one succumbing to a moment of panic when under the cosh for 90 minutes?

It’s a catch-22 and at the moment Tottenham are like a batsman unsure whether to go for a six or just play it safe, and as they consider how best to protect their bail they get bowled out and sent to the stands.

All views and opinions expressed in this article are the views and opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of The Fighting Cock. We offer a platform for fans to commit their views to text and voice their thoughts. Football is a passionate game and as long as the views stay within the parameters of what is acceptable, we encourage people to write, get involved and share their thoughts on the mighty Tottenham Hotspur.

1 Comment

  1. abe
    23/10/2014 @ 2:18 pm

    How true. These days you are almost sure Spurs will either give away a penalty and/or have a player sent off when playing one of the bigger teams. But this is Spurs, and it would not be Spurs if we just did things the simple way.

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