Things can always get worse. Much, much worse. If there is a place below rock bottom, Tottenham seem determined to go there. The Champions League may not be a priority, Igor Tudor publicly declaring survival their concern, but that didn’t make it any less painful, nor easier to forget. Instead, this will linger. It wasn’t even the 5-2 defeat that hurt, not really, and it certainly wasn’t their now inevitable exit from Europe: it was how it happened, the opening period here quite possibly the stupidest, most absurd, most astonishing minutes of football you have ever seen.
If, that is, you can really call it football; this was a dramatic act of self-destruction that “Spursy” doesn’t get anywhere near, the final ridiculous scene of a tragedy, the ultimate humiliation. Only, terrifyingly, that may still be to come, because if the Metropolitano was a testing ground for the fight against relegation, as the manager said, the conclusion can only be that they are horribly ill-equipped to escape the abyss. This was both deeply comic and also desperately sad, especially when poor Antonin Kinsky departed down the tunnel, broken, substituted on 17 minutes having gifted two of the three goals Atlético Madrid had already scored.
