The Athletic

Newcastle at home,

Palace away, Wolves away, Fullham at home, Arsenal away, Newcastle away, and now Manchester United at home.

Anyone who says that 2-0 is the most dangerous leading football should watch Tottenham trying to defend when they're one goal up in the first half.

My name's Jack Bitbrook. You're listening to The Review from the Lane podcast. I'm joined as always by James Moore.

Tottenham have just lost again. 3- at home to manchester united in a game where i didn't think they were great in the first half but there was some promising glimmers i think james and then it all fell apart again yeah i mean i think you'd say if they played the same way they're in the first half in the second half i don't think you could walk away from that game with too many complaints, really. I mean, like you say, they weren't incredible, but they weren't bad, let's put it that way. But yeah, the second half is we've kind of become accustomed to, it just seemed like I just completely lost like any interest, any focus, any confidence that they had that they'd kind of built up through the first half. And they were just so meek in

the second half. It was kind of like, it was almost like they were waiting to lose the game. And

you've kind of written earlier this season or in the last couple of months that the players

are coming away from training sessions thinking all they're getting told

is what can possibly go wrong rather than being given the solutions to the problems.

And that just kind of, like every game you've watched and said, more or less,

you've seen that to kind of come to fruition.

It's this, you know, they're kind of, I'd say relatively fortunate for that first goal to be disallowed by VAR. I wasn't surprised that got disallowed because, you know, you put a hand in someone's face, as we've seen literally almost a million times in the last sort of decade. You're probably going to get called up on that. So the fuss around that, I think is absolutely nonsense. So, yeah, despite that, I kind of still think it was a little bit fortunate for that goal

to be disallowed because that wasn't really a factor in the goal going into the back of the net, if you see what I mean. And they then managed to score a good goal. You know, they should be, now that's kind of, what, the 40th minute or whatever, they're going into half-time. They should be confident. They should be thinking, right, okay, let's keep

it solid, work hard, trying to keep the ball as well as we can. You know, I think they

had more possession of the ball in the first. should be confident. They should be thinking, right, okay, let's keep it solid, work hard, trying to keep the

ball as well as we can. You know, I think they had more possession of the role in the first half of Manchester United, didn't know, 50, 50, 52%. They had 56% of the ball up until they scored the goal, which is like not, not hugely important in the scheme of things, but does show that they were playing a slightly different game from normal. And I thought it worked.

You know, with LaSeltso,

they had this,

rather than Lucas is the 10,

they pushed out, Lucas out onto the right, brought LaSeltso into the middle. So we got the proper NHL midfield, which we've barely seen this season because of Lucas's fitness issues. And it took Marino until February to move in Domblay away from the 10 position. But we got the midfield that we wanted to see. And no, I thought Spurses' execution in that first half, James, was not great. But I thought the idea was there to try and keep the ball in United's half and try and press high United at times. And they also scored that beautiful goal, didn't they?

Which was the kind of, you know,

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