Maybe I’ve been guilty of this in the past myself and just not noticed at the point, but I’ve seen more than one piece on the interweb today laying into the performance of Christian Eriksen during Tottenham’s victory over Manchester United yesterday evening.
Football is about opinions and you’ll never get a consensus – it’s one of the reasons why the game fascinates people as in many cases show ten people the identical incident and you’ll get ten different takes on it.
Anyway, the thrust of the pieces I saw suggested that the 26-year-old Dane failed to impress on Monday night and it led to the risk of comparisons with Mesut Ozil who it’s believed doesn’t show up in the big games.
Just said the same thing, Ali needs to sort himself out and Kane has to hold the ball up better
— David Bricknell (@DBricknell10) August 27, 2018
Eriksen has been bloody awful tonight so far
— Si (@rookieyoung1) August 27, 2018
Eriksen is so overrated
— jack (@_jackthfc) August 27, 2018
Eriksen started how he has started the season… rubbish
— Trevor Lloyd (@Trevorlloyd92) August 27, 2018
Eriksen has been so sloppy
— jamie (@jamied90_) August 27, 2018
Bit of a stinker from Eriksen so far. #thfc
— Austin Buckeridge (@austinbucker) August 27, 2018
Absolute state of Eriksen so far, missing in big game shocker
— Chris (@CJ88x) August 27, 2018
I’ll say quickly there’s nowt wrong with the above thoughts and there’s nothing wrong with those fans holding that view when they took to social media and commented. I imagine by full-time they may well have felt differently and seen improvement given the final score.
So me doing an article during the first half pointing out Eriksen and others had started the match poorly is fair game. Publishing after the match had finished with the angle that those tweets prove Eriksen had a poor game – when you can look at the time of the tweets for yourself, well, that’s different in my humble.
By the end of the game, Eriksen had two key passes (2nd), an assist, joint fifth pass accuracy, fourth best on overall touches and he’d also got himself on the tackle and interception list.
Hardly a stinker or proof he doesn’t perform in the big games. He wasn’t our best player, but he certainly wasn’t our worst in contribution – he played his part.
Saying fans ‘tear’ into a player for a performance, when the comments you rely on don’t even see out the first half and making that applicable to 90 minutes…