The Athletic

It was a difficult game from the start and today

we have seen the difference between the two teams

I think Chelsea showed to be much better than us.

Hello everybody, I'm Danny Kelly.

This is the Athletics View from the Lane podcast.

And with me today is the Athletics Charlie Eccleshire and James Moore.

It's a few hours and one troubled night's sleep since the first leg of the Carabal Cup

against Chelsea. And where the hell do we start? Listen, I've got a speech to make about it,

but I'd rather hear from our other correspondence. So James, you're the other Spurs fan on the firm.

That was god-awful.

Yeah, it really was.

I can't think, I mean, Spurs obviously have a fairly dismal record in semi-finals over the

last two decades or so three decades, actually.

But I can't think of one where they've played with so little kind of umph like you know they would have played you

know for example the one they won against Chelsea in 2002 20 years ago I think they went to

Stanford Bridge and Chelsea were not they weren't European champions at that point they were

a much better team than Spurs and Spurs were a lot worse than Spurs are now clearly and they went

there and lost that game to I think I think so. No, no, they are. They were. Yeah, they turned the century. We were bringing in free transfers from very old places. Yes. I accept that, yeah. And they lost that game two, one. And I seem to remember them kind of playing up to the level rather than kind of playing down. And that was the thing that really baffled me yesterday. And I suppose that's kind of carried over from the last two games. They haven't kind of gone through this kind of resurgence under Conte and kind of everything feeling so positive and suddenly everyone being really optimistic about what this season could be. It's just felt like the kind of winders has totally been knocked out of the club's sales really quickly. Yeah. And I know a lot of those shortcomings were kind of, you know, we were kind of papering over the cracks slightly with winds over Brentford and Norwich and whoever else. But against Liverpool and West Ham, two decent teams, that they played well and got positive results. And it kind of felt like that was quite a big step. But since then, it's just been so sluggish. I'd really, I mean, I don't want to kind of hammer Conte, but I was quite surprised that Hang on, I'm just trying. Don't want to hammer Conte. I'll be using that against you in a future day, I promise you.

Without die, though, I was just really surprised that, you know, that there's no natural

passer in that defensive three as they started. And then to not play winks in that situation

to me seemed crazy. Charlie, Charlie, let me say that your view in this as a neutral is

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