Here’s our match report from White Hart Lane. Enjoy! And with that, I’m off. It’s been a blast. Bye!
In case you couldn’t see it on the tweet, here’s @tomst’s screengrab from earlier. Without doubt the picture of the night. I’m not sure what it says about Tottenham’s dressing-room togetherness, but it’s either a) nothing really, or b) something bad.
Dele Alli talks to ESPN. The first question: “Mauricio Pochettino asked you to get a strong start here, and you did just that.” Um, weren’t they a goal down inside seven minutes?
Final score: Tottenham 3-1 Qarabag
90+4 mins: Peeeeeeep! It’s all over!
90+3 mins: Alli cuts in from the left and tries to pass into the far corner. The ball bobbles slowly wide.
90+2 mins: Spurs are looking comfortable now. Still a little bit rubbish, but definitely going to win.
90+1 mins: Into stoppage time we roar – there’ll be at least three minutes – and it starts with Michel getting booked either for pulling Alli’s shirt or tripping him, or indeed a combination of the two.
90 mins: Hilarious pass! NJié with it, chipping from midway into the Qarabag half, wide on the left, straight to Almeida on the halfway line, and on the shoulder of the last defender. Spurs get away with it.
87 mins: That’s unlucky for Qarabag. Sadygov had won the ball with a lovely full-length diving tackle, but then when he got up his legs stopped working – presumably cramp involved – and he hobbled like some battle-scarred nonagenarian until Kane took the ball away again. He then got into a bit of an argument with Alli, for which both were booked.
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GOAL! Tottenham 3-1 Qarabag (Lamela, 86)
Qarabag give the ball away, get away with it, so give the ball away again, and this time they don’t get away with it! Kane nicks the ball back and passes to Lamela, who chips the keeper!
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85 mins: For some reason, Sehic – whose side is a goal down with a fraction over five minutes to play – has just been booked for time-wasting.
84 mins: Kane shoots! From a free-kick, 35 yards out, and over the bar.
82 mins: Lamela has the ball in the net! But the flag’s up! He was in all sorts of space for all sorts of time, but Carroll waited until the very moment he strayed offside before passing.
81 mins: Rose shoots! Found by a nicely-weighted Winks pass, he ignores the optimistic angle and lashes the ball across goal and wide, with Kane literally hopping with frustration in the middle.
79 mins: Two more substitutions for Qarabag: Michel replaces Dani Quintana, and Alharbi El Jadeqaoui comes on for Ismayilov. That’s the substitutions done for today.
77 mins: Carroll tries a chip over the backline for Kane to run onto, but in order to reach it the striker would have had to be even more offside. As it is he was only a bit offside, and the ball ran out of play.
75 mins: Now the substitution is made, Dier coming off and Winks coming on. Harry Winks wears the number 29 on his back, and I for one am disappointed that it isn’t 40.
73 mins: The substitutions have taken the wind out of this game’s once-billowing sails. Still, there’s still 20-odd minutes for things to heat up again.
@Simon_Burnton Korean commentators are having a jolly extended discussion on how Njie sounds like "eunji", a common Korean female name.
— James Seo (@lossless) September 17, 2015
And with good reason, too. I imagine that Njie does sound a lot like Eunji, and you can rest assured that if it sounded a lot like “Amanda” I’d be having an extended discussion about it myself.
70 mins: Dier goes down, and Spurs ready Harry Winks while the physios treat him. They underestimate their physios, clearly – Dier stands up, and Winks dons his bib and sits back down.
68 mins: Chance for Qarabag! Agolli crosses from the left, and Dani is all alone at the back stick! He directs the header down and across goal, but Lloris falls on it.
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67 mins: Njié’s first job is to take a free-kick. He pretty much passes it to the nearest defender.
66 mins: Multiple substitutions: Samuel Armenteros comes on for Qarabag, while Spurs swap Kane for Son, and Njié for Townsend.
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64 mins: Ismayilov bursts into the area! He twists! He turns! He twists a little more! Then he turns again! Then a defender strolls up and kicks the ball away. It was the footballing equivalent of that Indiana Jones gun/sword scene.
62 mins: Townsend tries to pass down the middle, for Lamela to run onto. The pass was overhit, though, and would have rolled into the area for Sehic to pick up calmly had the keeper not rushed out wildly and attempted – and duly miscued – a flying bootaway.
59 mins: Qarabag play the ball over the Spurs defence from the half-way line and suddenly have a man running clear – this is a little too easy, really – but he treads on it, falls over, the ball ping-pongs around a bit and at the end of it all Dani Quintana shoots from 20 yards, and Lloris saves.
57 mins: Alli passes to Lamela, on the edge of the area. He could have shot but he’s tried that a couple of times and ended with egg on his face and isn’t up for any more attempts, so he waits for Son’s run and passes to him, to the left of goal. He tries to chip the keeper, but Sehic catches it on his way down.
Photograph: Andrew Boyers/Reuters
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56 mins: “Rose looks a little off the pace against a team which is FA cup third round chancer calibre,” writes Jeremy Dresner. “You can see why luke shaw got a call from his old gaffer.” Rose is a half-decent back-up left-back, though, isn’t he?
@Simon_Burnton some people react to moments of great happiness by doing Blue Steel. I'm the same
— Barney Ronay (@barneyronay) September 17, 2015
54 mins: Heavens, this is fun. In the way that only an absurdly high-paced match between two insanely flawed sides can be.
52 mins: Lamela hits the post! He starts the move in his own half, and in the end Dier passes into the middle from the left, where Alli and Lamela are both running towards it. The Argentinian claims the chance, shoots past the keeper, but it flies off the inside of the post, back across goal, and wide!
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50 mins: And now Rose does some attacking! Down the left he goes, through a challenge or two, and then he toe-pokes goalwards from an angle, but it’s saved. Meanwhile, here’s an intriguing photograph:
@Simon_Burnton what on earth is this all about after Son's second? Grumpy Lamela & Rose https://t.co/ThDXkfZ0Io
— Ian Clark (@ijclark) September 17, 2015
47 mins: Qarabag are on the attack right away! Rose gives the ball away and the visitors roar forward, but Ismayilov’s cross is cleared for a corner! Which Lloris catches!
Peeeeeeeeeeep!
46 mins: Tottenham get the ball re-rolling.
Back come the players, the managers hopefully having patted them on the back and told them to keep on keeping on.
The marking for the Tottenham equaliser just looks worse and worse every time you watch it. And given that it looked like the worst marking I’d ever seen in my entire life on first viewing, that’s saying something.
Half time: Tottenham 2-1 Qarabag
Well. An absolute hoot. Some impossibly poor defending, most tellingly for Tottenham’s equaliser – but also for any number of missed chances – and some bright attacking from both sides. More of the same, please.
44 mins: And Qarabag whoosh down the other end, and once again there’s a man in all sorts of space on the left! The shot, though, is ludicrously, comically high.
44 mins: Another great chance! Townsend clips a pass over the defence and perfectly into the path of Lamela! But he shows all the control of a large truckle of cheddar. Goal kick.
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42 mins: And another chance for Qarabag! It’s a pretty good move from them, ending up with a man free on the left, and a cross to Reynaldo, who heads over with Rose bothering him.
42 mins: This has been quite fun. The very many Spurs season ticket-holders who haven’t bothered turning up have missed out on an unexpectedly see-sawing humdinger of a half.
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39 mins: Inexplicable miss! From Qarabag! A cross from the left, Rose tries to chest back to Lloris, and Ismayilov steals in! He only has to go round the keeper and tap into the empty net! Or tap past the onrushing keeper and straight into the net! But no! He boots it over the bar!
Come on my Son 1-1
— Lord Sugar (@Lord_Sugar) September 17, 2015
The Korean Spurs player name is SON and he has now scored 2 goals https://t.co/fftuZlwXHs
— Lord Sugar (@Lord_Sugar) September 17, 2015
37 mins: And an answer, of sorts, to Eliot Crowe’s query. “I think shallow is not equivalent to high because it is in the same direction as deep but not so far,” explains Robin Hazlehurst. “To see something high you look up, to see something low you look down. But to see something deep you look down and to see something shallow you look down, but not so far (think of standing in a river). So a shallow line is sort of somewhere in the middle, not deep but not high. A baritone line if you will. Maybe we should talk about bass and soprano defensive lines then …” So now it’s all clear then.
36 mins: Inexplicable miss! Another corner on the right, this time passed back to Trippier, who crosses onto the head of Alderweireld, who heads over for no good reason.
35 mins: Chance for Alli! He’s suddenly played in by Townsend, again on the right of the penalty area, but he shoots low, right into the keeper’s leg.
32 mins: When it comes to football punmanship this is pretty much an open goal, but still, someone’s got to knock ‘em in.
@Simon_Burnton I thought Qarabag were supermarket team, but remembered that was in fact Qariabag.
— David Griffiths (@dangerbird1972) September 17, 2015
And another goal! Tottenham 2-1 Qarabag (Son, 29 miins)
Son, 25 yards out, plays the ball into Dele Alli, running past the defence down the right side of the penalty area, who checks back, waits for the run, and then rolls the ball back to Son, who sidefoots into the back of the net!
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GOAL! Tottenham 1-1 Qarabag (Son, 28 mins)
An equaliser! Spurs win a corner on the right, Lamela whips it in and Son, standing around in the middle of the six-yard box untroubled by any sort of defender, pokes it in. That is perhaps the single worst instance of penalty-area marking I’ve ever witnessed.
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26 mins: In breaking other football news, Fifa bigwig Jerome Valcke has “been released from his duties effective immediately until further notice”. Crikey.
24 mins: Oooh! Son shoots again, this time with his right foot, and it whistles across goal and just wide from 25 yards.
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22 mins; Qarabag play keep-ball for a while, before eventually working space for Richard to shoot low, left-footed but not very powerfully from 20 yards.
21 mins: “Assuming the usual levels of Europa League intensity & excitement, I have a time-filling question for you,” writes Eliot Crowe, promisingly. “Why are the two extremes of defending described as playing a ‘high’ line or defending ‘deep’? Why is it not deep/shallow or high/low?” I’m afraid I have no idea, though it’s not purely a footballing phenomenon: the same is also true of voices, is it not?
19 mins: Qarabag win a corner, but Spurs, after vaguely threatening to force it over their own line, clear.
@Simon_Burnton seems like there is no way through for spurs against any opposition, early days but this team are a dour watch
— Mr John glynn (@irishjohnny_g) September 17, 2015
If only they had a home game against limited opponents in which to run riot and raise morale! Oh …
16 mins: Now Son does attempt a left-footed shot, from 25 yards out, but it’s blocked and skews behind for a corner. From which, Alderweireld rises unmarked but he’s well short of the near post, and heads over.
14 mins: So, the stage is set. Qarabag have the lead, and will want to keep hold of it. They haven’t quite parked the bus – they’re still throwing a few bodies forward when opportunity knocks – but they’re also pulling 10 men back when Spurs have the ball.
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10 mins: A Spurs attack comes to an end when Tom Carroll chips the ball over the Qarabag defence, and straight out of play.
9 mins: Oooh! Sehic executes a lovely, if a little risky, turn in his own penalty area to befuddle a closing-down forward and give himself room to clear.
GOAL! Tottenham 0-1 Qarabag (Richard, 7 mins)
Richard sweeps the penalty, left-footed, low to his right, and though Lloris goes the right way it’s too good!
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Penalty to Qarabag!
Five and a bit minutes into his debut, Kieran Trippier gives away a penalty, tripping (Trippiering?) Agolli just inside the box.
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4 mins: Chance for Spurs! They raid down the right and work the ball to Son, but he didn’t shoot when he might have done, and then plays a poor pass to Lamela, allowing Sehic to rush out and claim the ball.
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2 mins: Shot! And it’s from Qarabag! Carroll gives the ball away in midfield and Reynaldo runs to the edge of the area before shooting across Lloris, but not with enough power to worry Lloris unduly.
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Peeeeeeeep!
1 min: Qarabag kick off and with not a little panic work the ball back to their keeper, who it turns out is clad entirely in green.
Kit-based update: Spurs all in white, Lloris all in yellow, Qarabag all in black, Sehic – their keeper – well, I’m not sure what he’s wearing.
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And with that, out come the players. I can’t really hear the new Europa League anthem, disappointingly.
Mauricio Pochettino speaks!
I think that always you try to put out the best team for every game. Tonight is an opportunity to see different players. I think we have ahead a lot of games in a short period and we need to give the option to play all players. We have injuries. You need to share the minutes because it’s not an easy period.
Still waiting for BTSport to turn their attention to Tottenham. They’re currently talking to Adam Lallana, who’s “very disappointed” that Liverpool couldn’t win in Bordeaux.
… and both matches have now finished, with no further scoring.
Elsewhere in Europe, it’s Ajax 2-2 Celtic (Celtic having led 1-0 and 2-1), and Bordeaux 1-1 Liverpool (Liverpool having led 1-0), both matches in stoppage time.
The players are warming up at White Hart Lane. And here’s some proof:
Kieran Trippier also makes his Spurs debut tonight, and not before time. A good performance and he should get another chance before long, Kyle Walker still being, well, Kyle Walker.
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Jan Vertonghen is up for it. Or up for cheering from his sofa, anyway.
Let's do this!!! #coys
— Jan Vertonghen (@Jan_Vertonghen) September 17, 2015
I’m intrigued by Joshgun Diniyev. The name Josh is a particularly unthreatening one, and it seems as if he has sought to add menace by arbitrarily inserting a bonus nasty noun at the end. Joshpunch. Joshwolf.
Either that, or Joshgun is a standard, ho-hum first name in Azerbaijan, which is possible.
The teams!
Here’s Uefa’s team sheet. Or a picture of it anyway. Interesting names include Kevin Wimmer, who makes his Tottenham debut.
Or, in textual form:
Tottenham Hotspur: Lloris, Trippier, Wimmer, Alderweireld, Rose, Lamela, Carroll, Dier, Alli, Townsend, Son. Subs: Vorm, Kane, Njie, Fazio, Onomah, Winks, Davies.
Qarabag: Sehic, Medvedev, Guseynov, Sadygov, Agolli, Ismayilov, Quintana, Garayev, Almeida, Tagiyev, Reynaldo. Subs: Veliyev, Michel, Gurbanov, Yunuszadze, El Jadeyaoui, Armenteros, Diniyev.
Referee: Adrien Jaccottet (Switzerland).
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Simon will be here soon enough. In the meantime, here’s his Europa League-related Fiver from a couple of hours ago. You can find the rest here:
So, readers – a question: what is the link between this season’s Big Vase, Swedish flat-pack pioneers Ikea and the 2009 German TV movie All You Need is Love – My Daughter-in-Law is a Man? No? All have commissioned theme tunes from German baton-twiddler Michael Kadelbach, with his latest offering set to be premiered before tonight’s games.
“Fans feature prominently,” report Uefa of the new composition, which was unavailable for the Fiver’s critical appraisal this afternoon but we are told features a “catchy, melodic theme” that “provides limitless energy and excitement” and “produces a ‘togetherness’ feeling”, all of which sounds both brilliant if true and extraordinarily unlikely. Anyway, those fans, Uefa continue, “provide the underlying rhythm through the sound of their hands clapping, aiming to provide true consistency between broadcast coverage and the live stadium experience”. Though, if that was really what they were after, they should probably have included a smattering of boos at half-time.
Uefa blowing the trumpet for their own tune (which may or may not feature trumpets, we wouldn’t know, though we wouldn’t be at all surprised) was perhaps a little over-the-top but wasn’t the only unlikely pre-kick-off claim.According to the Google translation of Qarabag’s news story reporting their team’s arrival in London on Wednesday ahead of tonight’s match against Spurs, the Azeri aces’ sojourn got off to an unpleasant start. “After a five-hour flight,” they report, “our team was laid to rest after dinner.”
Crikey. A tragedy, and one that places Tottenham’s own lasagne-gate furore of 2006 in some kind of context. Anyway, Qarabag’s bravehearts having somehow got over that, today Spurs hope they will be put to bed before half-time.
There’s no historical precedent to encourage such confidence, no Azeri club side ever having played a competitive game against an English team (though if you count friendlies 2011’s Barnet 1-0 Qabala doesn’t exactly provoke a lot of optimism for the away side). The ability of English footballers to clinically mastermind the failure of Azerbaijan’s top clubs was proven during Tony Adams’ 18-month spell in the country, during which he led the aforementioned Qabala to a humiliating eighth place in the Premyer Liqasi (as well as that friendly defeat at Barnet).
Qarabag, known as The Horsemen to their friends because of the two horses on their club crest (either that or they have two horses on their club crest because they’re known as the Horsemen, the Fiver can’t be entirely sure) and Qabala are the only Q-commencing teams in European competition this season. If this suggests a surfeit of imaginative Azeri nomenclators evidence to the contrary comes in the shape of the manager, Gurban Gurbanov (literally: Gurban son of Gurban) and midfielder Gara Garayev (literally: Gara who belongs to Gara), even if they no longer boast Muarem Muarem, the Macedonian mainstay of their midfield who moved to Eskisehirspor in Turkey over the summer.
The team’s star is the 26-year-old Brazilian Reynaldo, so good they only named him once, who if Tottenham are to be unexpectedly turned over is most likely to be the one Horseman of their apocalypse.
