UP WILL GO ANTONIO
Antonio Conte has seen it all as a manager. Things you wouldn’t believe. He’s won Serie A titles with Juventus and Inter, lifted Premier Leagues and FA Cups with Chelsea, even watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Turnpike Lane. But he’s never tasted glory in Europe. A single measly Big Cup quarter-final with Juventus in 2013 is the best he’s managed on the continent, if you don’t count nearly winning Big Vase in 2020 with a team containing Ashley Young, Alexis Sánchez and Victor Moses, which we probably should do, but for the ease of narrative, don’t. Either way, it’s all very strange. Oh oh Antonio!
It’d be enough to make the most mild-mannered of men lose their supercool. But as we all know, Po’ Conte is cursed with a short temper, its trigger rather ironically made out of 100% genuine hair. And that snapped on Wednesday night in spectacular fashion, when Harry Kane’s injury-time strike against Sporting, a goal that would have dramatically sent Spurs into Big Cup’s knockout stage, was ruled out after a four-minute VAR consultation. The decision was ultimately the correct one, Kane having been pictured fractionally offside from Emerson Royal’s header milliseconds before whipping home, but the combination of circumstance and interminable wait was always going to end with Conte’s canopy spinning around faster than a Zonophone shellac.
The inevitable red card and subsequent post-match press-conference meltdown – a bravura one-answer soliloquy in which the Tottenham manager questioned the “honesty” of his dismissal and the VAR process – has met with similarly predictable consequences. Conte is now banned from the dugout for next Tuesday’s decisive match at Marseille, from which Spurs need to take a point if they’re to qualify for the last 16. With their influential manager forced to sit impotently in the stand, and barred from having any contact with his team before or during the game, that’s now far from a given. If they fail to make it, and Conte’s constant demands for significant January investment aren’t met, don’t be totally surprised should Antonio leave Spurs alone-i-o for a new sweetheart.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
“There are universal values that should define football values such as respect, dignity, trust, and courage. When we represent our nation, we aspire to embody these values” – the Australian men’s national team release a video with 16 players delivering their collective statement of protest over the human rights record of Qatar.
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FIVER LETTERS
“The decision to award John Lawton the letter o’the day prize over 1,056 others on the same subject (yesterday’s Fiver letters) would appear to be as opaque as, oh I don’t know, Fifa choosing Qatar to host the Human Rights World Cup” – Phillip Charlton.
“Re: yesterday’s Fiver. Can I be the first of roughly 1,056 others to point out the huge missed opportunity from The Fiver in not labelling Juventus’s Big Cup failure as ‘Turin Breaks’. Actually, now I think about it, it is absolutely bang on form for this column given Turin Brakes, Juventus and The Fiver were all good roughly 20 years ago” – Matt Leonard (and no others).
Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. And you can always tweet The Fiver via @guardian_sport. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’ the day is … Rollover, who wins a copy of Inside Qatar by John McManus. We’ll give away the final two on Friday then, so get scribbling.
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