To suggest that to win a football match you have to play better than your opponents seems like stating the blindingly obvious.
If you do play the better football, and still get beaten, there are those who will say that ‘you didn’t deserve to lose’, an inane statement if ever there was one.
I can’t say that Spurs deserved to lose against Juventus – but neither can I possibly believe that the Italian champions didn’t deserve to win.
There can be no doubting that Tottenham Hotspur played the better football, by far. Our boys laid siege to the Juventus goal and could have scored more than the solitary strike fumbled over the line by Heung Min Son.
So what happened?
Half time.
Staring down the barrel of elimination from the Champions League, the visitors clearly made some hard decisions. Like the mature grown-ups they are, they admitted to themselves that they could never outplay this Tottenham side. Not at football. They would have to employ different tactics.
They would have to transform what had been up to then a football match into a scrap. So they started kicking our boys systematically, racking up yellow cards but steering clear of reds by ensuring that it was a different player committing the foul every time.
I caught my breath at a potential ankle-breaking kick aimed at Dele Alli that earned a yellow. There were others. But Juve did more than that. They had two scoring chances and they took both. Unlike us. The Italians did what they had to do. They won ugly. Is the ability to do this something a team can learn? I don’t know. At the end our boys had the shell-shocked look of players who didn’t know how they lost the tie.
That’s because they’re young and innocent. They learnt a hard lesson from some clever old pros, but it was a lesson nonetheless. The big worry is whether they will let the disappointment of this defeat derail the rest of their season. Or, just perhaps, they will employ the lessons that they learned against a certain Manchester City in the not-too-distant future. Here’s hoping.
By Shannon
Share this article
