If
this game is been played a couple of months ago, then Spurs at home would’ve
been one we were expecting to win.
Nuno Espirito Santo was the manager and didn’t appear to have the slightest
fucking clue about what he was doing. Needless to say, time moved on and Daniel
Teflon Levy, fresh from his recent triumphs of appointing José Mourinho, trying
to join the European Super League and appointing Nuno, sacked him and managed
to appoint Antonio Conte which was a bit of a major disappointment because he
is universally held to be an excellent manager with a great track record
everywhere he’s been.
Spurs haven’t lost since Conte took over but they still somehow seem to be
finding their way under the new coach. Some players have come in from the cold
like Matt Doherty, Ben Davies and even Dele Alli who many had forgotten was
even a footballer. Harry Kane has shown signs of life over the last few weeks
but he really shouldn’t be playing today because somehow he got away with an ‘out
of control’ studs up lunge into the middle of Andy Robertson’s shin against
Liverpool last week. Any other player would’ve been sent off for that and what
was a classic case of the England captain been able to get away with murder.
Anyone remember Alan Shearer volleying Neil Lennon‘s head down the touchline
when he was England captain.
I certainly think that we can give Spurs a good game today. Conte hasn’t had
chance to sign any new players I said earlier so they still have the likes of
the dodgy Eric Dier and Davinson Sanchez at the back. I haven’t been over
impressed with Emerson Royal since he arrived in the summer and Reguilon is the
sort of defender who can’t actually defend. Our former skipper Pierre-Emile
Hojbjerg is in midfield and Dele Alli is actually in the side along with Harry
Kane and Son Heung Min, who of course. scored four times the last time we
played at St Mary’s. That front three of
Spurs has three of the biggest and most frequent divers in the league.
What Ralph would pick today was a bit of an unknown because it’s only 48 hours
since we played against West Ham and none of the Covid related absentees would
be available today. As it turned out, there was a sharp intake of breath as he
named what looked like the sort of team you would name in the Second round of
the League Cup away at a League 2 side. Three at the back with Yan Valery
augmenting Salisu and Bednarek. KWP and
Perraud at full-backs with Livramento nursing a knock. A midfield three of JWP, Diallo and Stuart
Armstrong, giving Romeu a rest and what looked like a forward line of Adam
Armstrong and wait for it….. Shane Long. Okay, it’s nearly 2022 and Shane Long
is still getting a game in the Premier League.
It’s a scrappy opening 10 minutes but Saints get into their stride, mainly
through being very quick to press Spurs and they don’t like it. We also look decent going forward with Valery
joining in from the back before feeding KWP and his cross into the area is
flicked wide by Shane Long. 10 years
ago, he still would have missed. Anyhow,
water is wet and Shane is offside.
The first threat from Spurs comes from a familiar source (remember the home
defeat last year) as we allow Kane to turn in midfield and spray a ball left to
Reguilon. KWP gets near him and Reguilon
reverts to his default (see Spurs away last year) and hits the deck. All the Spurs
players are round the ref, presumably asking for a red card, led of course by Kane
but Anthony Taylor is happy with the yellow. From the resulting free-kick, Son
chips in and Ben Davies heads home but is clearly offside.
24 minutes and we win a throw on the left hand side and you know what this
means, it’s time for Salisu to attempt a long throw again, which has become a ‘feature’
of our last few games. Again, it doesn’t
really go very far but this time, Dele Alli half clears it out to JWP who
absolutely smashes it, cutting across it with his right boot and it swerves
away, past Lloris and into the net. What
a strike that is, 1-0. All hail the God
of Middling to Average Length throws.
Nice for Dele to get his first assist in about two years.
Saints keep up with the aggressive pressing and the ball is bouncing around on
the right side and Emerson Royal knocks it past Salisu, who clatters into him
and gives the referee not much option but to book him especially as he’s got
away with a couple already. Again, the Spurs
player goes down like he needs a stretcher and oxygen but he’s fine once the
card comes out. Taylor seems to have had enough of us getting close to the
Tottenham players for a while because when Harry Kane miss controls the next
ball, under pressure from Bednarek, it’s another free-kick for not very much
and Ralph has thrown his toys out on the side of the pitch and earned himself a
yellow card.
We seem to doze off from a free-kick and Son is clean through. Salisu tries to
win the ball but takes him out. Clear penalty and referee has no option but to
give him a second yellow and send him off. Fucks sake. There was no need to
make the tackle there because Son’s touch was heavy and it was just going to
run through to Fraser. Harry Kane has
ballooned a penalty at St Mary‘s before but this time he absolutely creams it
and Fraser goes the wrong way. Interestingly, Fraser went the different way to
the way he has gone in every penalty he is faced into penalty shoot-out this
season. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d
gone his usual way to be honest.
From the kick off you can see that we've gone 4-4-1 with Valery at centre back. OK then.... please get to half time. From the kick-off the, ball goes towards Long but Reguilon clatters into him. Possibly an accident but probably not and it’s about the third incident he’s been involved in but the referee is not interested in that one at all. Half time and 10 men for the whole of the second half. It’s going to be a long one.
Conte is clearly agreeing with me a Reguilon and he’s off at half time to be replaced by Matt Doherty. This is going to be a case of just getting through ten minutes at a time without conceding and then almost immediately, Harry Winks clips a ball over the defence and Kane is in, takes a touch and bang, smashes it past Forster into the corner of the net. Brilliant finish. Fuck. A good 30 seconds passes before it flashes up on the screen and there is a VAR check for offside. Oh look, some knobhead in the Spurs end has thrown a flare on the pitch… and it’s been disallowed. I hope you’ve got another flare mate. Fucking idiot.
Dele Alli has done nothing except be a wanker and he’s off to be replaced with Lucas Moura, making Spurs even more of a threat. A cross comes in from the right hand side and Doherty goes up for it with Forster and somehow, the ball ends up in the net. What the fuck has happened there? Free-kick, foul on the keeper, obviously. Looks a bit soft but that gets given on every ground so complin when it goes against you but don’t be surprised.
Doherty is proving to be a threat coming off the left wing and Forster has to make a block at the near post from the Spurs sub. On 70 minutes it’s time for one of our own as Broja replaces Shane Long who is knackered. To be fair, he’s had a really good game and it’s good that he got a standing ovation as he went off with his name being chanted. There seemed to be an element of ‘goodbye’ about it as he applauded all four sides of the ground. Time goes on and we get to the last ten without any further alarms and the hard-working Adam Armstrong is replaced with Nathan Redmond.
All the action is up our end of the pitch though as Lucas fools everyone by playing an airshot but then recovers to dig out a cross which gets cleared the the edge of the box, Davies smashes it but KWP throws himself at it to head it away. Superb committed defending and that must have hurt.
Usually when a game is tight, you know that you’re going to get one chance at the end but when you only have 10 men, will you get that chance. Yes and it’s down to one man army Armando Broja as he beats Davies to the ball, then takes it off Dier and cuts in from the right. He hits it but Sanchez has got across and it deflects off him and over the bar. Such a shame that he couldn’t have let Sanchez slide past like he did with Duffy against Brighton. Five minutes extra to go.
93, 94 and one more cross into the box which Kane heads wide under pressure from KWP. For a second, it looks like we’re going to have one more attack as Broja picks it up on the half way line but the ref blows his whistle to end it. No one seems that bothered because we’ve got the draw but it’s a bit of a strange way to end it.
Well that feels like a win, no question about it. The team showed how to battle against adversity and sure, we rode our luck a little bit in the second half but considering the players we had out there and considering how much we put into the game, we deserved that bit of luck and we deserve the point at the end. To play an hour against Spurs with 10 men and not get beaten is a pretty solid afternoons work. When you bear in mind that our central defenders were Bednarek and Valery and we had Shane Long up front for 70 minutes and Adam Armstrong playing out of position on the left wing, it’s an excellent and unexpected point.
Shane Long had a really good game upfront in being a constant pain in the arse of the Tottenham defenders, moving them around and occupying the three central defenders that Tottenham had. He of course wasn’t a goal threat because he never is but when Broja came on, we really looked like we might nick it.
The major turning point far as luck was concerned was Kane’s goal being disallowed for offside. In the time between the ball hitting the net and the ball being disallowed for offside I was kind of thinking that we were going to get beat 4 or 5-1. That goal being disallowed was huge as we still had something to hold on to. Spurs will also complain about the challenge by Doherty on Forster which resulted in another disallowed goal. Hard to argue with them really but we all know that any challenge on the goalkeeper is going to be a free-kick. The bottom line is that Doherty wasn’t looking at the ball and made contact with Forster in mid-air. It’s always going to be a foul.
Anthony Taylor had what I will call an interesting first half. I have no issue with Salisu’s sending off. The first yellow may look soft in isolation but he’d already got away with two wild lunges at Spurs players, so that first booking was probably as much for totting up as it was for the actual foul which was very soft. Part of the trouble is the way that Salisu goes into challenges. He basically steams in so if he doesn’t get the ball, it’s always an opportunity for him to get a yellow card as it will look worse than it is. It was the perfect yellow card as far as Spurs are concerned – one of theirs makes a colossal meal out of the contact and goes down screaming like a big fucking blouse and then Kane gets in the face of the referee and the yellow card comes out. When Salisu went in for the second tackle on Son and didn’t get the ball, there was only one outcome. For once, Son didn’t have to dive as it was a clear foul and was always going to be a red card for a second yellow.
Saints defended very aggressively in the first half and with Tottenham‘s tendency to collapse in a heap at any contact at all, it was always going to be a difficult game for Taylor to referee. However, he did himself no favours for pulling up virtually every challenge that Saints made and then allowing Reguilon to foul at will. There’s only one reason that Reguilon was substituted at half time and I bet Antonio Conte couldn’t believe that he’d managed to get to half time and have the opportunity to use a substitute.
There is not a supporter anywhere who wouldn’t have rolled their eyes when they saw Yan Valery’s name on the team sheet, especially when they realised that he was going to be playing as part of a back three. After the red card, thought of him playing centre back in a flat back four was quite frankly horrifying but the boy did great, In what was a really impressive showing. Jan Bednarek had his best game for a long, long time today, not giving Kane an inch.
Talking of Kane, have you ever seen a player complain as much to the referee as this guy does? Bruno Fernandes maybe… Just get on with the fucking game and let the referee do his job. Whilst you’re doing that, tell Dele Alli that being an arrogant fucker is all well and good if you are playing well but if you haven’t played well for two years and all you have to show for it is a shit haircut and your career is going absolutely fucking nowhere, then just maybe you’d be better served by just getting on with it, instead of being a prick.
Back to us – KWP, brilliant today, what a player! . Perraud did a great job at left back as well considering he had the out of position Adam Armstrong in front of him who did, to be fair, put in a shift. Oh yeah, JWP… magnificent today, same as against West Ham. Bloke’s a machine. If he’s not back to his best then we’ll have the best midfielder in the country when he is
I think everybody would’ve taken a point before the game and certainly, everyone would’ve taken a point when they saw our starting line-up. To actually get that point, having played over an hour with 10 men is an outstanding days work. Next up is Newcastle. If they are allowed to call the game off because they’ve got a couple of big injuries and a couple of Covid cases, then it’s an absolute joke because we have rested players today in order to play them on Sunday. If the game gets pushed back a month or two then Newcastle will probably have signed a load of players and the injured will be fit again, so when you think of the integrity of the competition, how is it possibly fair they might even consider postponing the game. As I write I see that their game v Everton tomorrow has been called off. Outrageous.
One thing I’m proud of as a Saints fan is that we, as far as I know, had 4 players ruled out by Covid yesterday – Lyanco, Stephens, Adams, Tella. We also had Livramento, Smallbone and McCarthy injured and I have no idea where Djenepo has gone. No whinging or moaning – get on with it. Kids on the bench in Small and Simeu, kids in the team in Valery, Shane Long in the team, play the game. ‘Soft Southerners’ – I don’t think so.
Hopefully those big tough Geordies can take a leaf out of our book on Sunday and actually turn up.
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