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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Sport
Barney Ronay at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium

Tottenham’s confused mess of a team exposed by Chelsea’s crash tackle king

Moisés Caicedo slides in to tackle Pape Sarr.
Moisés Caicedo slides in to tackle Pape Sarr. Photograph: Peter Cziborra/Action Images/Reuters

Sitting through this tightly stitched but still oddly shapeless game of football, you kept thinking: what does this remind me of? The trapped energy, the collisions. The sense of something always but never really happening.

Oh yes. Watching the full 90 minutes of Chelsea’s narrow but still comfortable 1-0 defeat of Tottenham was like staring at one of those hypnotic drunken city centre brawls that appear on social media from time to time, where nothing ever really seems to start or stop, where the whole thing is just a kind of tortured flailing, but one that must also be pored over endlessly in the comments.

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