The Athletic

Hello and welcome to The View from the Lane, our Tottenham Hotspur podcast from The Athletic.

My name's Jack Pitbrook.

I'm hosting today because Danny Kelly is getting married.

Best of luck, Danny.

So I'm joined by the old gang, Charlie Eccleshare and James Moore.

Now, Charlie, this evening, you were meant to be going to Tottenham Hotspur against Ren in the

European Conference League, but that game won't be happening.

It's been a very fast-moving story, but can you tell us what happened, what happened yesterday

and how did we get here?

Yeah, well, I mean, the sense from about Tuesday was always that the Brighton game probably wouldn't happen

because the Premier League kind of take things on a case-by-case basis and looking at precedents.

Given the numbers we were hearing coming out of Tottenham, at that point it was up to seven first-team players had tested positive.

Given that last season, you know, games had been cancelled when teams had had as many as six in fullham against spurs in fact that looked like that was probably going to happen but the expectation was always that this conference league game would go ahead because uafer have stricter tighter and more defined rules saying that as long as a team has 13 players on the A list

for the Europa Conference League, then the game has to go ahead unless they don't have any

keepers from that 13.

And that threshold wasn't at that point.

It didn't seem to be that close to being met.

Anyway, on Wednesday, there were more positives.

And I think just hearing, I mean, Antonio Conte's press conference was pretty striking.

I mean, it was quite an experience because he was visibly just really upset and scared.

You know, I mean, it took it from the realm of us totting up the numbers as to how many players they had available to actually thinking,

...