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Hello, welcome to the latest edition of Libero, the podcast that's about the most important of the least important thing, as Pep Gradio once wrote back in 2006 in his El-Pais column.

I'm here. in 2006 in his El-Pais column.

I'm here with Jack Pitt Brook of the, of the, oh, I was going to say, of the independent. It's been a long time since you've been with the independent.

Not anymore. Not anymore. 2019. And Miguel Delaney, who actually is of the independent

and has been since, what, 2016, big

old, is that right? Yeah, 2017, yeah. You were around, he was around as a freelancer before them. Oh, that's true, that's true. But my testimonial would be next January. Okay, well, we look forward to that. We don't have testimonials anymore, do you? Well, you can do, he's doing something for charity, is that what you can do? Yeah, yeah. Okay, right. Yeah, I'm John Bruin, often of the Guardian. Everything's the same pretty much in my little town. Now, chaps, how do I find you? Miguel, you're at the North London Derby. Jack, you weren't. Neither was I. No football for me this weekend. It's great.

Thoughts on the Derby, Miguel?

It was one where I went in expecting all the story to be able to Arsenal, angst and the title race.

And by the end, such was the chasm between the teams.

It felt like the story became, could Spurs actually go down

here? I was alarmed by the second half. I've been under the impression all season, even as

Spurs fans were rightly criticizing Thomas Frank, that it's not that it's not that much of an issue

because they've got too much quality to go down in the modern game. And now I doubt that. I think it's a different sort of season. It's very competitive. And it's a different situation now. Like regardless of the quality they've got, this is now, this feels like something psychological with Spurs, almost the kind of the mirror of what Arsenal have with the title race or its opposite in some ways. And I wouldn't be that confident for them.

Yeah, it's a really bad combination, isn't it?

Where the players are not that good in general, they've got, for the second season in

row, a horrific injury crisis which knocks out like a whole football team's worth of players,

leaves them with only kind of 11 or 12 players fit.

There's not really much by way of individual, like individual quality, like match winning individual quality. They haven't

really had since, well, since Canaan's son left. And the players they do have are probably,

how many individual match winners do they have who are currently fit, like arguably only, only Siemens, I think, really. Plus, on top of that, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not being defensively well organized, I don't think. They're not hard to play against. They don't look like they have a lot of unity, spirit, fight between them. You put all those things together and it's a pretty toxic combination,

right? I think that I suspect they probably, I would probably bet on them somehow scraping,

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