MATCH THREAD TOTTENHAM v Chelsea Monday 6 th November 20-00 kick off
- Thread starter Walthamstow wanderer
- Start date
Absolutely agree Matic.
trustmeiknow1
Vital 1st Team Regular
He wanted both. Ball and man. It's either bias are lack of playing experience that leads anyone to think different.
Matic
Alert Team
I think Romero wants both in every tackle he goes into. He just has a 'take no prisoners' style of play - be it tackles, headers, passes, shots.
Spursex
Alert Team
You said:
When you're not in control of your body, you're out of control and likely to have your actions interpreted as wreckless, which it was. As I've said a thousand times, stay on your feet and then you don't risk injuring or being injured (or far less likely) and you are not forcing an official to make a decision about your bodily movement and intent.
It was a red, doesn't matter how many excuses we make, by the letter of the law, it was a red.
Spursex
Alert Team
Sadly, I find myself in complete agreement with you. They need to mature and use their footballing intelligence, their actions cost us the game.
RichmondSpur
Vital Football Hero
We see eye to eye on this one.
Spursex
Alert Team
I can't disagree with that, but two wrongs has never made a right - every action looks worse when frozen for a split second - tellingly what was the reaction of our player after this incident? - he treated it like a tickle of a footballing incident, which it was...
Romero tackle - Red all day. I was hoping we were growing out of the one braindead moment a match from him...guess he regressed for this one.
Udogie - Kid needs to be composed from the get go. He is showing a troubling tendency to pick up early yellows and then playing with fire the rest of match...it finally burnt us.
What frustrates me the most about his game....we looked like we could have come away with a point...or even all three even when down men. I think without the red cards...we would have blown them the hell out!!! UGHHH
Udogie - Kid needs to be composed from the get go. He is showing a troubling tendency to pick up early yellows and then playing with fire the rest of match...it finally burnt us.
What frustrates me the most about his game....we looked like we could have come away with a point...or even all three even when down men. I think without the red cards...we would have blown them the hell out!!! UGHHH
Not overly excited about it. This is a game I think we should have easily won...we were the better team by far even shorthanded.
BL - We gave this one away...to Mopo of all people....UGH
But like I have said before...this team and AP finally get to deal with some adversity...time to see how they adapt.
I trust AP will get them going.
Matic
Alert Team
How the player reacts really shouldn't be a factor and interestingly, between the two games, both players who were on the receiving end of intentional elbows acted polar opposites to each other. Jorginho went down like a nuke went off next to him and Udogie gave his head a rub but was more focused on getting the ball for the throw in quickly - although you could tell he felt it. VAR deemed both were fine, thus setting a bit of a precedent.
Do we have to wait for another player's skull or eye socket to fracture before VAR starts to take this type of challenge seriously? I'm very much playing devils advocate here and being a little bit exaggerative, but I do feel it highlights a point. Was James's elbow any less petulant and dangerous than Romero's tackle?
D
Departed
Guest
On another note, just before Chelsea scored their second and after we had had some decent chances I texted Ex and said we might win this! And we could have if our finishing was better.
Oh I agree with this! We had a few really good looks and if our finishing was better we may have come away with points in this...
Hence my frustration that we were shorthanded...with a full compliment..I think we would have blown them off the pitch!!
Spursex
Alert Team
Tottenham vs Chelsea chaos: 10 mad moments ranked
By Nick Miller
3h ago
The category of football games that qualifies for its own Wikipedia page may just have a new entry.
Was Chelsea’s 4-1 win over Tottenham a great example of high-octane, incredibly fun football, or a completely farcical match that should barely be regarded as sport, more akin to a couple of village idiots whacking each other over the head with planks of wood?
Either view is valid, but if you’re on the fence, then consider this: if Jose Mourinho was watching this clash of his two former teams, he would have been tutting, complaining to his disinterested family and mumbling something about a hockey score. If you want to be on his side, fair enough.
For the rest of us, this was, as the old cliche goes, the game that had it all. Five actual goals. Four disallowed goals. One penalty. Two red cards. 11 yellow cards, one of which was for a manager who earned much praise after the game for saying we should all respect the decision of referees. There wasn’t much peril towards the end and there was no full-scale 22-man brawl, but as the card count might suggest, there was plenty of aggro, so we can live without that.
Singling out any of the incidents from that match might be a fool’s errand, but we have never pretended to not be fools, so here are a few of the craziest moments from a wild, wild game.
10) Tottenham lose two of their best players in same minute
Perhaps it’s a slight exaggeration to say James Maddison and Micky van de Ven are absolutely Tottenham’s two best players – Yves Bissouma, Destiny Udogie and Son Heung-min would like a word – but they’ve probably been their two most transformational players this season: a brilliant creator whose ability to carve out chances has been vital in helping them mitigate the loss of Harry Kane, and a pacy left-sided centre-back has allowed them to be as dynamic at the back as they are going forwards.Spurs have been brilliant, but they’ve also had their share of luck: it felt like some malevolent deity with a bleak sense of humour was balancing the scales in one fell swoop, striking down the pair so they both had to be replaced in first-half stoppage time.
9) Eric Dier!
Oh, boy, it was so close. Dier has been out of the picture for a while: these were his first competitive minutes under Ange Postecoglou and he nearly left in the summer. But oh, lord, this would have been something, as Dier drifted in at the back post to side foot the sweetest of volleys into the top corner, only to be denied by the narrowest of offsides.8) The old Romero returns
It’s worth briefly dwelling on Romero, who had never failed to reach double figures in bookings in previous seasons but had broadly kept his nose clean this season. Until now.Perhaps the racing blood of the occasion got to him and he lost the run of things for a second because he probably should have been sent off about 10 minutes earlier for a kick on Levi Colwill. And while he protested at length about the eventual decision, simply winning the ball won’t cut it anymore — or, at least, it won’t cut it if you win the ball and then send your studs through an opponent’s leg like it’s a cheese wire through some warm Swiss.
Still, his victim, Enzo Fernandez, carried on, so we assume those shinguards are made of kevlar.
7) Chelsea having three goals disallowed in the space of 15 minutes
Moises Caicedo’s skimmed finish was sandwiched by a pair of Raheem Sterling strikes that were chalked off, the first for one of those handballs that took the VAR a while to establish so inevitably feels slightly harsh, the second for a more straightforward offside.Tottenham had two of their own disallowed as well. It was at this point that our collective heads began spinning clean off our bodies.
6) Destiny’s child(like reaction to a frantic match)
The question ‘how much is Udogie in the window?’ when January comes around might have a slightly different answer now if the people who decide these things knock off value because a player makes entirely brainless decisions that result in slow-motion disasters.Like Romero, Udogie could have been sent off for a two-footer in the first half, but you could at least offer the excuse of a 20-year-old getting a bit too giddy in a competitive game.
But, having already been booked, the Italian’s decision to lunge at Sterling and chop him down was like an 18-wheeler truck slowly careening out of control: you could see it happening from miles off, you wanted to stop it, but there was nothing you could do.
In fact, it’s worth looking at the emotional journey Udogie went on while making the tackle.
As he chases Sterling, he’s hopeful: “Maybe I can win this,” the look on his face suggests…
… but then doubts start to creep in, the problem being that he’s already halfway through the challenge before he realises…
… ah. Despair. Regret. Acceptance. See you in a couple of weeks, Destiny.
5) Tottenham’s defensive line
Was Tottenham’s fabled high defensive line a combination of aggressive self-harm and remarkable naivety, or a symbol of them being as committed to their ethos as Postecoglou is to ending every sentence with the word “mate”?The view of this tactical expert is: they might as well have given it a go. The alternative would have been to sit back and wait for Chelsea to batter them into submission. There was no way they were going to survive 40-odd minutes with nine men and a central defence comprised of a midfielder and a bloke who hadn’t played any competitive football since May.
4) Tottenham playing 4-3-2 with Dier and Royal as centre-backs
Any Tottenham fan who went for a nap at just after 8pm and woke up 40-odd minutes later would have been in for a shock, like a sort of condensed version of the film Goodbye Lenin, where a devoted Communist suffers a heart attack and goes into a coma before the fall of the Berlin Wall, then wakes up after it comes down and her family has to hide the change in circumstances, lest the introduction of capitalism shocks her into another heart attack.The sight of Dier in the team at all would have been startling enough, but being partnered by Royal, a full-back who might generously be described as ‘erratic’… well, let’s just hope there were no Spurs fans of delicate dispositions who turned on the TV to find that.
3) Tottenham finishing the match with only three of the outfielders who started it
It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t sound possible, but with two sendings off and five substitutions, they were almost unrecognisable by the 61st minute.2) Jackson hat-trick
After scoring his third goal, Nicolas Jackson celebrated with gusto. As he should: it was a Premier League hat-trick after all and that’s what anyone who visits his house and observes the match ball on one of those funny little plinths will be told. Still, those who have seen that clip of Michael Owen absolutely rinsing a schoolboy goalkeeper, then giving it the big one, only for Neville Southall to say: “Well done, he’s 13,” will be familiar with the vibe.Hats off to him, but him strutting off with not only the ball but a man-of-the-match award too, despite seemingly having a 75-minute existential crisis before the first goal, was a pretty weird sight. Which made it perfect for a weird, wild, remarkable game of football.
Spursex
Alert Team
part II
First, Sterling falls to the floor under a vague challenge and a more whistle-happy referee might have blown up right there, even though it isn’t a foul. Then Romero miscontrols the ball in the penalty area and compensates by hoofing it clear, but, like a hyped Paul Gascoigne in the 1991 FA Cup final, continues the hoof straight throug Fernandez’s shins: red card.
Then the ball reaches Caicedo, who plays a sort of football-croquet hybrid game, using Jackson’s legs as the hoop, skimming it into the bottom corner. But wait! Jackson’s buttocks are offside: the Senegal striker is a slender man and no Eden Hazard, but if he had just done one or two more squats…
Goal disallowed, but the penalty for Romero’s foul is awarded, which Cole Palmer pings in off the post. The ball hit the net about eight minutes and 20 seconds after the initial incident, the officials fiddling around with the VAR system in the interim and proving that football, even at its most chaotic, can be both thrilling and boring at the same time.
1) Chelsea scored a goal… it was disallowed… but they got a penalty… which they scored… and Tottenham had a player sent off
It’s no exaggeration to say you’ll watch entire matches this season that don’t have as much incident as was crammed into about 10 seconds in the 27th minute of this one.First, Sterling falls to the floor under a vague challenge and a more whistle-happy referee might have blown up right there, even though it isn’t a foul. Then Romero miscontrols the ball in the penalty area and compensates by hoofing it clear, but, like a hyped Paul Gascoigne in the 1991 FA Cup final, continues the hoof straight throug Fernandez’s shins: red card.
Then the ball reaches Caicedo, who plays a sort of football-croquet hybrid game, using Jackson’s legs as the hoop, skimming it into the bottom corner. But wait! Jackson’s buttocks are offside: the Senegal striker is a slender man and no Eden Hazard, but if he had just done one or two more squats…
Goal disallowed, but the penalty for Romero’s foul is awarded, which Cole Palmer pings in off the post. The ball hit the net about eight minutes and 20 seconds after the initial incident, the officials fiddling around with the VAR system in the interim and proving that football, even at its most chaotic, can be both thrilling and boring at the same time.
Spursex
Alert Team
We need to learn from this game; we were in control for 15-20 mins, then completely lost the plot as we played like headless chickens.
Our immaturity and lack of an intelligent leader showed, and ultimately undermined us - not every game can be a party and played with such huge gaps in our tactical approach.
Hopefully, this will give Ange pause for thought and so will our two red card idiots who will learn to start thinking their way through games.
Yep!!
Matic
Alert Team
I lost it at this part. It was the strangest part of the whole game for me. He got 3 virtual tap-ins, nearly fell over whilst attempting the third one and even had a chance for a fourth (that he boshed into row Z from 8 yards) - yet got man of the match. There was only one man of the match on that pitch and he was Vicario.
Pompey Yid
Vital Champions League
As an ex-CH I am 100% with you there LH, we defenders must stick together, as you noted half hearted tackles can result in injury to yourself, it most certainly isn't your fault your opponent is slower.
