Spurs lost their 100 per cent Europa League record with a 3-2 defeat to Galatasaray that should have been 6-2 but could easily in the end have been 3-3.
The Europa League always has the potential to throw up a madness.
Even before the introduction of the new daft format. Even in seasons where Spurs aren’t in it. Even when Galatasaray haven’t busied themselves compiling the most on-brand Super Lig team imaginable and then stuck Victor Actual Osimhen at the head of it. Even then, you always had a good chance of a madness.
But take the existing base level of the Europa’s nonsense potential, and then chuck all those other ingredients in there and really the only surprise is that this game, one which Spurs should simultaneously have lost by four or five goals while also ending it thinking they should probably have got themselves a point from two goals and a man down, wasn’t even more mental.
For about 70 minutes, this felt like a game that would be swiftly followed by some big post-match reveal. Like it would come down that a virus had swept through the Spurs camp or something. We’ve all seen the kind of sh*tness Spurs are capable of, but this was off the scale.
We genuinely stopped taking notes at about the 30-minute mark of how many times poor old Radu Dragusin gave the ball away within 40 yards of his own goal and, if anything, a first-half effort that seemed less a football match and more a 45-minute attempt to define the concept of ‘self-inflicted’ via the medium of dance was outdone by the sheer scale of the clusterf*ckery on display at the start of the second.
Osimhen scored two lovely goals in that first half, albeit with enormous amounts of help along the way from the visitors, as well as another chalked off for offside. He will nevertheless have sleepless nights wondering just how he failed to head home with one of these weird Mitre Delta rip-off balls they have in the Europa these days after missing a series of sitters in a second half where Spurs didn’t so much defend badly as for extended periods abandon the concept altogether.
Spurs were cartoonishly bad defensively and you started to feel a sense of genuine embarrassment for them at just how inept it all was and also for Galatasaray’s failure to take any of the great many chances that were coming their way. How on earth, you wondered, was this still only 3-1?
There was some mitigation in the fact that four of Spurs’ first-choice back five were absent here, with only Pedro Porro – who ended the night looking understandably both exhausted and bewildered – present and correct. The hapless and unfortunate Dragusin was partnered in central defence by Spurs’ ever-reliable gap-plugger-in-chief Ben Davies, with Archie Gray pressed into emergency service at left-back. The young central midfielder has now played in every position across the back four in his first four months at Tottenham, which is both a credit to his talent, versatility and maturity while also being something that you do worry might at some point become a genuine impediment to his overall progress.
With Fraser Forster in goal, the big winners of the night in some ways were Guglielmo Vicario, Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven. None of those players are perfect. Vicario is now visibly terrified of the very concept of corners. Romero can induce wind for all manner of reasons and Van de Ven’s rawness can still be exposed at the pointiest end of the game.
But what was striking watching their understudies try to play Angeball is just how much is asked of that trio and how good they actually are at it. This type of high-wire playing out from the back is a state of mind as much as anything. And from the outside it is far more likely to be noticed when it goes wrong than when it goes right, but actually almost all that is good about Spurs’ attacking football – which this season has been far more than last – is built from that high-risk approach at the very outset of their moves.
Vicario, Romero and Van de Ven have all made high-profile mistakes playing out from the back, but this really was a reminder that it’s a) very, very difficult and b) they make far fewer mistakes doing it than actually could reasonably be expected.
Sometimes, excellence can be taken for granted. Sometimes, the only way to realise how difficult something actually is, is to see those less adept attempt it. That’s why number-11 batters are one of the very best features of cricket, for instance. Radu Dragusin is definitely a number 11.
Then, after 70 minutes of near total embarrassment for Spurs, something else weird happened. Young striker Will Lankshear, who had earlier scored his first senior goal with Spurs’ only real chance of note, was slightly harshly sent off for two quasi-bookable offences.
On came Dominic Solanke, and up, up, up went Spurs’ level. He is becoming very important indeed to everything Spurs do. Suddenly, they were on the front foot, and when Porro’s cutback was cleverly backheeled home by Solanke the chance of something very, very funny was suddenly very, very real.
And everyone knew it. The tension in the crowd was palpable, as was the sense of panic that started flowing through the Galatasaray ranks. Having previously thoroughly controlled the game, they were suddenly holding on. How, nobody could really know. It absolutely shouldn’t have been like this.
They made it through seven agonising minutes of injury time and really, you have to say fair enough. But Spurs fans will always have that split-second where a deceptive TV angle and an over-excited Glenn Hoddle co-commentary really did make it look like Dejan Kulusevski was going to do a Pedro Mendes.
In the grand scheme, none of this really mattered. Spurs were a touch fortunate to come into this game with nine points, but it did mean defeat here was never going to be costly. But surely nobody could have expected it to be this plain weird.
