Outplayed Youngsters Get Away With it

Apologies for the lack of posts recently, I’ve been on my holidays.

I watched last night’s game with my Spurs supporting friend, we don’t tend to watch derbies together but we made an exception, needless to say I got a bit of stick. Rightly too, we were comprehensively outplayed. Spurs were excellent and should have won the game convincingly; we were awful. Out thought, out run, and out passed, I can think of no one who put in any more than an average performance last night, with some such as Gilberto, Djourou, Senderos, Denilson, and Diaby truly poor. Theo did very little, and I can’t actually recall him retaining the ball on more than one occasion (including his goal!) but score he did, and it was heartening to see him in the right place at the right time after a savvy run onto Eduardo’s clever pass. Robin’s return was premature, one beautiful concealed ball was central to our only decent piece of play in the first half, but he was knackered by half time. Let’s hope suggestions of another injury are pure cautioun. More worryingly our defensive pair looked shocking, both were at fault for the goal and Berbatov and Keane should have capitalised on their abject positioning and weak clearances. Crucially, Spurs dominated the midfield. Denilson’s peripheral performance allowed Malbranque, Jenas and O’Hara to run the game with ease, I’m not even gonna talk about Gilberto Silva anymore than to say: ‘You’ve been great for us, but your time is up.’

With reports of injuries to both Djourou and Senderos, and Toure and Eboue off on their African adventure we’re looking incredibly light this morning. It now appears that Lassana Diarra will leave. I wrote an impassioned defence of this player a month ago, and I truly believe we would have been much more competitive with him in the side last night. He was central to our impressive victories over Blackburn and Newcastle earlier in the competition; his drive, aggression and passing ability would have provided is the total opposite of what our Brazilian duo offered. But he is clearly a fool. He would have positioned himself as the third choice midfielder at the club in the short term, and would genuinely have challenged Flamini for a place next season. Moreover, with our looming defensive problems, right-back, the position he holds for his national team could have been crucial: a back four of Diarra-Sagna-Gallas-Clichy looks more solid than say Sagna-Hoyte/Gilberto-Gallas-Clichy. I for one am genuinely disappointed at what now appears to be an inevitability, I can only pray that the manager and/or the player himself has a change of heart.

Despite last night, we still have a chance at White Hart Lane in two weeks time. We can’t get much worse than that, and it’s not as though Spurs have turned their home into an impenetrable fortress; I can safely predict that they won’t be playing for a 0-0. Arsene promises to keep faith with youth so let’s hope they learn from the first leg and nick it to make the final two years running.