Morning all.
So, against my better judgement, I watched the game last night. I won’t say I was encouraged by the first half, because there’s just such a high-wire element to how Spurs play that it felt like it could go wrong at any time. Playing it out from the back is all well and good, but you need to choose your moments.
In the second half, they kept giving it away in their own defensive third, and then City scored. Romero, with his empty box of a head, ran beyond the gigantic Norwegian guy, and Porro just ignored him too, allowing Haaland to tap home unmarked. I know his movement is good, but it’s not as if he can turn himself invisible or something. The whole thing was defensively awful from Spurs, from start to finish.
I turned off at that point, went to bed. Read my book (the new John Connolly if you must know). I hoped my phone would buzz. It was mostly unbuzzed. Then it buzzed. Phil Costa sent me a clip of Son’s miss. What a chance, but football is, as we’ve often said, a game of fine margins. It wasn’t deliberate, it was just a bad miss. He fluffed his lines. I’m not going down the conspiracy route with this one, although I did think Postecoglou’s comments after the game about how the last 48 hours have opened his eyes to certain things at that football club were certainly very interesting.
I didn’t know until this morning it was 2-0, Haaland with a penalty, and it puts them in pole position going into the final day. The temptation, of course, is to go back and pore over moments that have happened between August and now. From that Son miss to things we could and probably should have done better in the course of this season. That is understandable, it’s human nature, and I get it completely.
But it’s important to understand that the ‘if only’ aspect to football (and other sports) is the thing that makes it so compelling. If football is the tobacco, the ‘if only’ is the nicotine, the active ingredient that keeps us addicted….
Source link : https://arseblog.com/2024/05/a-final-day-miracle-required-but/
Author : arseblog
Publish date : 2024-05-15 06:31:59
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