The Warm-Up: A confusing defeat for a confusing Spurs team
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Updated 08/03/2018 at 08:32 GMT
Plus: Manchester City lose YET AGAIN, two former giants slug it out and Andy Robertson seems like a good egg...
Gianluigi Buffon of Juventus shakes hands with Harry Kane of Tottenham Hotspur at the end of the UEFA Champions League Round of 16 Second Leg match between Tottenham Hotspur and Juventus at Wembley Stadium on March 7, 2018 in London, United Kingdom.
Image credit: Getty Images
THURSDAY’S BIG STORIES
Tottenham dominate Juventus, twice, but still lose
If you’re Tottenham, do you take encouragement or a hearty kick in the pants that you can dominate Juventus – Juventus! – for 165 out of 180 minutes, but still lose? Pro: the domination bit. Con: the losing bit.
Confusing emotions all round. For Tottenham were very emphatically the better team for all but around five minutes, around the hour mark, of their Champions League second-leg. But those five minutes featured two goals from Paulo Dybala and Gonzalo Higuain, rendering Son Heung-min’s first-half goal irrelevant.
Mauricio Pochettino put a brave face on things. “It wasn’t a lack of experience or concentration,” he said. “I think we conceded three chances and they scored twice. We can talk about different situations, but that’s the reality. They needed some luck to win. I feel very proud – we dominated overall.”
Chiellini had some rather more brutal words. “We knew Spurs were weak in defence and fragile mentally,” he said. Oof. Ouch. Kapow. Maybe that will hurt even more than the defeat.
Manchester City lose again (that’s technically accurate)
Lean in close kids, the Warm-Up has figured out a foolproof way of beating this flamboyantly sensational Manchester City team. What you have to do – and listen carefully, because this is important – is make sure they’re in an absolutely unassailable position where they realistically can’t actually lose. Then they’re sitting ducks.
That’s a whopping four games that City have lost this season, after FC Basel beat them 2-1 in the second leg of their Champions League knockout tie. Of course they didn’t really lose, because their 4-0 victory in the first-leg meant they could have laid out on a chaise lounge for 90 minutes and still would’ve been fine.
Not that Pep Guardiola shrugged and accepted the defeat, of course. “Even the first half was quite good, in the second half we forgot to attack, we forgot to play. Just to pass to pass for itself is nothing, so the second half was really, really poor.”
Still, when the biggest thing you can really complain about in a season is not doing that well in a tie you were already 4-0 up in, things probably aren’t so bad.
Arsenal v Milan, but not as we know it
If this tie was 15, even ten years ago, it might have been one for the ages. Arsenal and Milan were not only giants and institutions of the European game, but brilliant teams too. We could have been watching Vieira v Pirlo, Henry v Nesta, Shevchenko v Campbell.
Not these days though. This might turn out to be a fine game, a clash between two teams just trying to make it in the Europa League, but it’s not special like it one day might have been. And in that respect it might just be a little bit sad.
Still, game to play, show must go on and all that. “We need to be together,” Laurent Koscielny said. “That’s the most important. It doesn’t matter what’s going on outside. We are in a negative spiral and it’s difficult to get out of this. We need to have positive advice in our heads because the brain dictates to the body and the legs. We have to be positive to have a good result and, step by step, we will come back stronger.”
IN OTHER NEWS
Not only has he solved Liverpool’s left-back problem, but Andy Robertson seems to be an exceptionally good egg too. Robertson noticed that a young lad named Alfie had given some of his pocket money to a foodbank, so as a thank you sent him a signed Roberto Firmino shirt, and not only displayed a lovely gesture, but a spot of self-awareness too. "Let’s be honest Alfie – nobody wants the left-back’s shirt – which is why I got you Bobby’s instead. Hope that’s okay." We suspect it probably is.
HEROES AND ZEROS
Hero: Gigi Buffon
With around an hour on the clock at Wembley, football was staring a fairly grim prospect in the face: we were half an hour from never again seeing Gigi Buffon play in a game outside Italy.
Buffon will retire at the end of the season, unless Juventus win the Champions League. If they manage that for the first time since 1996, he’ll stay on for a crack at the World Club Championship. Buffon didn’t actually do anything extraordinary against Tottenham, but it was enough that he was there. What a man.
Zero: Gigi Buffon
Gigi, you’re leaving us. You can’t do this. The world is bad enough as it is. Sorry mate, but we’ve all had a little meeting and decided that you have to keep playing forever. None of this retiring stuff. Got that? Cheers.
RETRO CORNER
A little nostalgia, almost exactly ten years ago. Gooners – if you can beat the European champions with Abou Diaby and Emmanuel Eboue as your wingers, then anything is possible tonight.
HAT TIP
The transfer fee was eye-catching, the salary eye-watering, and the impact jaw-dropping. It seemed to be the move and the moment that signaled a power shift, a change in soccer’s established order. One of the brightest South American talents of his generation, heralded as the next best player in the world, moving to a rising force in Paris, drawn by money and glamour to a club long on cash and short on patience.Thirty years later, Neymar would have much the same effect, the Brazilian turned into the most expensive player on the planet by the untrammeled ambition of Paris Saint-Germain. But he was not the first to follow that path.
A couple of days late to it, but this tale of how another team in Paris attempted to buy stars and their way to global domination is well worth your time. Hats off to Rory Smith and Elian Peltier of the New York Times.
COMING UP
Europa! Europa! Europa! League! League! League! As the old saying goes, if you’re tired of Europe’s second-most prestigious competition then you’re tired of life. Or something like that. Anyway, Arsenal v Milan is the big draw, but there’s a whole bunch of other red hot, second-tier action for you if you glance up & down the fixture list. Enjoy.
Tomorrow’s Warm-Up will be brought to you by Tom Adams, who is anything but second tier.
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