Sonny returns after his 3 match ban, while Harry Kane will be out until March with a hamstring tear, which was the inevitable outcome of overuse by both Spurs and England. Ndombele, who seems to get injured getting out of bed, is unavailable for selection. He showed up in London out of shape after his big money move and has been a massive disappointment ever since. This is the worst I've felt about Spurs for a long time. We have put in some dismal performances against struggling sides all season so a win at the Riverside is far from a formality with this lot and a manager who is struggling to show he still has what it takes.
That was a tough match, good thing we put out a strong team. It will take a while to learn how to play without Kane.
Eric Dier in defense and Winks in midfield...why? I don't understand it. Again, a novice manager had his team better prepared than Mourinho. Remind me again why we are paying this guy 15 mil a year to pick Dier and Winks? Embarrassing.
On the plus side it was nice to see Keano and Woody. Two former players who were in the last team to win a trophy.
Louise Taylor of the Guardian summed it up perfectly: If I was a Spurs fan, I would be a bit worried about the lack of pace in their general play. For all that Middlesbrough were very hard to break down, the passing in midfield was mostly ponderous, which led very quickly to a full-back’s crosses becoming their main outlet. Reminiscent of United anyone? The only thing missing was Fellaini coming on in the second half...
I like this one: "Again, I come to work with the players that are available and I'm not thinking about the market. I think my job is to do what I did today, what I'm going to do tomorrow, which is to work with a small group of players. "The players playing are permanently recovering but recovering is not enough. If you look at the number of injuries to Premier League players in the past two weeks, you realise recovering is not enough. The most protected players belong to the squads with so many solutions that there is space for rotation. I don't want to think about it. "Of course the market is open until the end of January. Everybody in the club wants to give the teams the best conditions but at the same time the world doesn't end at the end of this season. "We have a few months until the end of the season to fight for results obviously but nothing ends at the end of the season. The end of the season is just the end of a first period. "Yesterday I was watching the Liverpool match and I was watching the best team in the world at the moment. Then I Googled it just to confirm, Jurgen arrived in October 2015. 2016, 17, 18, 19 and now 20. Eight transfer windows, lots of players leaving, lots of players coming and even more important than that, time for him to put his philosophy, his training methods, his fingerprint. "Beautiful results as a consequence of fantastic work, step-by-step, phase-by-phase. In the first season they finished sixth or something like that and four years later they are not just the world champions, they are the best team in the world in this moment. No panic, calm. "I have experience, the club has lots of experience, Mr Levy has lots of experiences. Calm doesn't mean we don't want to win the next match. The next match we always want to win."
Classic Jose, as soon as the results sour, the excuses come out, this from a manager who has never lasted 4 seasons at any club. He dusted this speech off from the ones he used at Man U (see the speech he gave after he went out against Sevilla in the CL). It is never his fault, amazing. Klopp has been successful because the hierarchy at Liverpool backed him, which Levy has never done with any of his managers. Is 18 years of history going to change now?
IF we get by Boro (and that's a big if the way we are playing this season), we would play Southampton away in the 4th round. The replay against Boro will be on Tuesday, January 14th at 2:45 pm ET.
Wait until January. Edit: Seriously, I wrote this without realizing that it is already January. I'm working too much.
Whenever your team is doing poorly, time seems to grind to a halt. Maybe that is Mourinho's secret power, to control the flow of time - he certainly spends a lot of time in the past.