Beef Bagel

It wasn’t exciting but it was most certainly needed. A win, a clean sheet - job done for game Juan.

Sitting there having a good chat with the Lads in Front before the game, we were full of expectancy and semi-optimism as I’m sure all Spurs fans were. We’ve all seen to many false dawns to be expecting to be basking in the midday sun just yet. The big question on The Bagel’s lips was ‘who is Ramos going to favour; what drastic changes will he be making to his starting XI?’ The answer as we soon discovered was absolutely none, or so I thought until after the event when something was pointed out to me by the Butterman - Huddlestone was not on the bench.

Big Bad Tom didn’t have the best of games against Blackburn but more likely is probably the fitness issue. Mohammad will not always go to the Man Mountain, sometimes the Man Mountain must run around and chase Mohammad and for 90 minutes too. Instead that cold spot on the bench was kept a little warmer by the considerably more narrow buttocks of Prince Kevin, who is as yet to grace the turf at WHL.

It’ll be interesting to see how Huddlestone responds. Seeing as he doesn’t use his body mass much, it wouldn’t do any harm to his game to shed the pounds but the problem may be that either a) he will not or b) he cannot. No one’s saying the dude is fat. In fact, it actually may be genuinely big boned and just not built to run about for that length of time, but there clearly is an excellent player in there and it’d be a shame to lose his pin-point passes and watch him succeed down at Portsmouth or Villa or Wigan if he’s really unlucky. This new regime may hit our young giant the hardest of all.

The other fascinating moment of an otherwise pedestrian encounter was the substitution of Kaboul for Tainio after 55 minutes or so. “Hang on here,” we were all thinking, “what’s this crazy Spaniard up to? We’ve played Bonders in the middle when we’ve had to but to do it out of choice and particularly after a criminal piece of defending by Pascal at full back had so nearly conceded a goal?”

Naturally our doubts were silenced very quickly as Chimbondabonda rose high - and from a set piece - to score our second goal and as the defence looked tighter than before. Nice move Juande. It should get Kaboul to buck his ideas up a little too. He won’t be sleeping too well tonight. He’s probably on the phone to Huddlestone right now, provided they’re not in bed together. Well you never know how these things are.

What was very amusing was to see how the substitutions took about double the time they should as the players’ tactical instructions were passed via the means of a half mad Uruguayan. It makes you wonder if there was anything lost in translation or any kind of Chinese Whispers effect?

Ramos: (in Spanish) Ok Teemu, get out there, get your head on everything, hold onto the ball and sure it up.

Poyet: Ok Teemu, get out there, give head to everyone, hold onto their balls and then clean it up.

Got to hand it to Blackpool though, excellent fans; some of the best I’ve seen at the Lane. Sure it was their big day out on their big cup run of the season but they filled their allocation, they banged their drum and they sang their little orange hearts out from start to finish. What’s more, they came to play football and they didn’t look bad at all. If they’d taken their chances, it would have been a very different story but this is our story and this is the first chapter, Chapter Juan.

“There can only be bagel.”

The Bagel.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 1:27 am and is filed under Match Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.