On big Champions League nights like this one, when you have favorites like Bayern Munich and big names like Barcelona to be across, resources need to be carefully allocated at every publisher, even ours. There is a lot to be covered and no room for indulging the whims of writers.
And yet here I am, very publicly apologizing to the editors who asked me to stay across Newcastle United vs. Barcelona. I know what you want from me: how did Will Osula fare against that high line, the difficulties La Liga’s top side keep having against Premier League opposition, wasn’t Lamine Yamal coolness personified with that late penalty? I know that’s the sort of thing you want.
But what would you have had me do, not watch Tottenham Hotspur? That is something you cannot deny me or any other neutral viewer of European football. For all the worst reasons, there is no more box office team in this sport right now than Spurs. They are the footballing equivalent of Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room.” They are abysmal, devoid of artistic merit and you cannot consider yourself a true connoisseur of the medium if you have not seen them at least once.
For years to come, people will talk about Igor Tudor’s Tottenham. You think this is bad, they’ll say, huddled around the fire of an oil drum, the cries of the zombie horde audible from many miles away. You ain’t seen nothing, kid. I was there at the Metropolitano when Antonin Kinsky was thrown to the wolves by Tudor.
They won’t believe those stories, mind you. Historians a thousand years hence will be convinced something got muddled in the telling. The bravery in the face of a defeat long since evident? No, that was the Crystal Palace game. Same for the wild tackle by Micky van de Ven, an act of incomprehensible clumsiness. With distance, we must assume that stories have been exaggerated in the telling.
Maybe Kinsky, hurled into the XI because Guglielmo Vicario had become unplayable, did let in three goals in a shambolic first 17 minutes but no manager would be so callous as to ignore a goalkeeper he had felt compelled to publicly humiliate. This must just be retro-actively fitting a narrative onto Tudor’s inevitable sacking. If only those tapes could be recovered. They’re somewhere in a landfill, alongside copies of that ET Atari game.
Those of us who lived through these nights will know they are infinitely stranger. Did you see the man making multiple ham sandwiches? What about the umpteen occasions when Tottenham defenders went slip-sliding around the pitch in more cartoonish fashion than Disney on Ice?
The strangest aspect of all might have been Tudor’s baffling crisis management. It’s not so much the substitution of Kinsky as the refusal to acknowledge a young man of whom a great deal was asked on his first appearance since October. That Djed Spence supposedly had to make a point of engaging in professional courtesies with his head coach says it all.
The last 24 days are not just the story of a supposed firefighter lobbing molotovs on the flames. No one would be hiring him in the first place if Tottenham were in the sort of place they ought to be. There are serious questions about the application of players who might not be as good as had been assumed, but can’t be this bad. There should be a similar investigation into years of serious injuries, into recruitment that seems to sort every position by duel success percentage and then start bidding. It is, however, overwhelmingly clear that Tudor will exacerbate everything that is wrong at Tottenham. His tenure is a car crash you cannot help but slow down to observe.
This was an incredibly unserious performance from a team that needed to show organization, discipline and unity. For a great many, the unrepentant silliness of Spurs will be the gift that keeps on giving, whatever future depths this team plumb. It is worth a great many of those players considering what their refusal to do the basics might mean for their co-workers if the unthinkable becomes a reality and they find themselves relegated from the Premier League. You could be forgiven for thinking plenty of these players are already thinking about their next team. Unfortunately for them, those prospective employers will have access to the tapes of this nonsense.
Frankly, if they are like everyone else with even a passing interest in football, they won’t have been able to look away from Tottenham in the first place.
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