The Athletic

Hello, I'm

Hello everyone, I'm Danny Kelly, and this is The View from the Lane, the athletics, Topham-Hotspur podcast. Welcome one, welcome all. I'm joined today by the athletics Charlie Eccleshare and Jack Pitt Brook, making a welcome return to the show after Sojourn in the United States, more about which a little

later in the podcast. Charlie, you wrote the game against Norwich yesterday, 3-0. James

last week on the podcast said he would be happy to settle for 1-0. How excited should we be?

Well, I mean, I think we were gently and deservedly mocked for saying that, you know, with a couple of wins,

spurs are right on the top fours' tail, because we've been saying that it feels like

much of the last year and then inevitably they haven't then won those games.

So I think the fact they have won these games, they've won them comfortably, to put themselves,

what is it, two points off fourth with a game in hand, that's a really,

really positive week. You know, we talked about it being an important week that they had to win

these games and they have done with minimum fuss and before Thursday they hadn't won a game

by a greater margin than one goal in the league this season. So to have won a couple pretty

comfortably is very welcome. Yeah, I mean, you find yourself in the almost inhuman position of cheering on Chelsea

against West Ham, only for West Ham who are an actual decent team to go and spoil everything,

because Spurs would have been fourth this weekend if Chelsea had hung up at the London Stadium,

but they weren't good enough to do that.

That's the truth of it.

Looking at the raw statistics, three in years in any win the Premier League, I normally say is really good thing to get. But I'd always excluded at the moment Newcastle and Norwich who are not very good teams from that, Jack. And what worried me slightly, and I'm allowed to have worries after a three-nil win, you know, yeah, yeah, right, good. But let's look at the downside. 45% possession against the worst team in the league at home. You're not going to win a lot of Premier League games with that stat. I think you can win Premier League games with less than 50% possession if you've got, you know, if you're good at attacking efficiently when you do have the ball. And Tottenham certainly got players, you know, like Kane and Son, who are obviously

very good at doing that.

I do think they play better against Brentford. You know, I've got to caveat this by saying, I watch both games on television. I wasn't at the ground fried of them. But if you look at the XG, so I think Tottenham won the not, just looking at the opt-to-stats for XG. Tottenham won the Norwich game 1.5 to 1.3, but they won the Brentford game 2.2 to 0.4, so by a much, much bigger margin. And you can see, you know, I think Pookie had a few half chances yesterday. One really good chance, very early on. Really good chance. Whereas I thought Brentford was really probably the most complete and dominant performance that

Tottenham put in all season against frankly a better team than Norwich.

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