Match report: Atletico 5-2 Tottenham
Things can aways 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 only concern, but that didn’t make it any less painful, nor easier to forget. This, instead, will linger for a long time. 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 20 minutes quite possibly the stupidest, most absurd, most astonishing minutes of football you have ever seen.
If, that is, you can really call it football all; this was a dramatic act of self-destruction that ‘Spursy’ doesn’t get anywhere near, both deeply comic and also desperately sad, the final ridiculous scene of a tragedy, the ultimate humiliation. Only, terrifyingly, that may still be to come, because if this the Metropolitano was a testing ground for the fight against relegation as the manager said, the conclusion can only be that the abyss is opening up. There could be no joy, certainly, in watching poor Antonin Kinsky heading down the tunnel, broken and withdrawn on just 16 minutes, inconsolable after glaring errors led to two of the goals that had already given Atlético a 3-0 lead.
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Match report: Newcastle 1-1 Barcelona
It was a night when the Tyneside passions pulsed; the nervous energy, too, because this was something unprecedented – a first Champions League knockout tie in Newcastle’s history. It was not just the gilded level of the opposition that fired the excitement, the imagination. Eddie Howe was in little doubt that it was the biggest game Newcastle had ever played.
Newcastle had to do more than subdue Barcelona, the top team in Spain last season and so far this time out. They had to manage the occasion because it was one that came to rest on the edge of a knife. As the minutes ticked down, the chances so scarce, they knew that one moment was always likely to be decisive. At either end.
