More Than Half A Page Of Scribbled Lines

 "Tottenham Hotspur strolled to a rather uneventful three nil victory on their return to European Club Competition" is a sentence that was never likely to be written by anyone covering the club but even by Spurs standards of chaos Thursday nights game was something else. OK, so even I can't blame ENIC for the serious accident that caused the A10 to be closed near to the junction with the North Circular Road and for trains from Cheshunt and Enfield being severely disrupted. This meant that with the kick-off time approaching the opposition hadn't even made it to the ground. I'm not sure where they were staying but their coach (the bloke in the tracksuit, not the fifty-two seat mode of transport) said after the game that the journey had taken two and a half hours. Welcome To London. All this led to a kick off delayed to 8.35pm. By 8.43pm Spurs were down to ten men. Radu Dragusin let a simple pass from Ben Davies run passed him, Juninho (not the Middlesborough one unf

Thursday night brings the welcome return of European football to The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in the shape of a Europa League 'League' match against Qarabag FK, the current champions of the Azerbaijan Premier League. Having just checked the odds for the game (something I'm not usually interested in as a non-gambler) I see that Spurs are 1/6 to win. Probably not surprising given the relative strength on paper at least of the respective leagues and the current squads available to the coaches to select from. More surprising to me was the odds given for the eventual winners of the competition: Taken from 'Oddschecker' on Wednesday 25th September This shows that along with Manchester United, Spurs are joint favourites. Given that the ENIC sponsored trophy drought now stretches to sixteen seasons I find their optimism slightly baffling. I also know that these odds are affected by wagers that have been placed so some people somewhere must have a lot more faith than me. It

It's often said that football matches are won and lost in midfield and in what was the best Spurs performance for a fair old while this was more than true. Brentford were obviously shorn of some important players, their midfield physicality being an important component in their usually efficient football machine. Having said all that, the old cliche 'You can only beat what's in front of you' still applies and our side certainly made sure they did. After losing the Derby at home and then scraping past a Championship side in the League Cup, the last thing anyone would have wanted was to concede after twenty three seconds so of course Spurs conceded after twenty three seconds. Fortunately this didn't turn out to be the downer it could have been and the side responded very positively, creating a couple of half chances even before Dominic Solanke seized on a weak save from a Maddison shot to tap home his first goal for the club seven minutes later.  Dom off the mark. Ano

There's a statue named 'Self Sacrifice' in Broadgate, Coventry that depicts the naked horse ride through the city taken by Lady Godiva. This was by all accounts a very early protest against her own husbands repressive taxation policy. Leaving aside the hope that both Extinction Rebellion and the so-called English Defence League never take up this method, there were probably many people at that time that would have curled up with embarrassment at those actions. This brings me nicely onto the fixture last Wednesday evening in the Carabao / EFL / League / Cup which pitted Spurs against their Championship opponents from that City. It was by general acceptance one of the worst performances for many a year, even by the standards of some of our recent cup debacles.  Ange Postecoglou made eight changes to the team that lost to Arsenal the previous weekend. This was twice as many as I would have been comfortable with but obviously I'm not in and around the squad and have no idea

Its always best I find to give it a couple of days after yet another defeat in the North London Derby before trying to put my thoughts together on the outcome. In what seems to be a re-occurring theme, Spurs had 63% possession and twice as many goal attempts as their opponent but this time around didn't ever really look like scoring. Its fair to say that this is mainly down to the quality of the opposition. You have to be honest and say that Arsenal are a far superior side to the current Spurs team, despite at the weekend missing two of their best players and the bloke they signed to replace one of those should be not be available. Arsenal are of course three years or so ahead of Spurs in their current 'project', a word I can't stand in this context and their board have backed their coach to the tune of well over half a billion since he got the job. But as we all are well aware, its not what you spend but why you spend it that makes the difference. From where I sit I se