I didn’t fancy travelling down to White Hart Lane for the game on Tuesday. Instead, I thought I’d stay at home, set my wallet on fire and jump up and down barefoot on some Lego for two hours. For those who were bonkers enough to go, I salute you.
It was your typical Wigan Athletic Barclays Premier League 2011/12 performance, terrible first-half followed by ‘alright’ second-half, with a few of those moments towards the end where your about to leap out of your chair, but mid-leap, you realise Connor Sammon has just somersaulted over the ball, legs akimbo, when it would have been easier to stand still, catch the ball on the back of his neck and do ‘the worm’ into the back of the net with the ball nestled delicately in-between his shoulder blades. But we’re used to that, aren’t we?
I have absolutely no idea what we were expecting to happen in the first-half, we sat back, didn’t press at all and just allowed Spurs to attack. We might have been able to hold out if Ronnie Stam didn’t keep drifting off somewhere allowing Bale and Assou-Ekotto to have the run of the whole left side of the field. I was half-expecting the groundsman to come on and start grazing sheep on it they had that much room. This meant Boyce was constantly stuck in a 2-on-1, until Stam decided to finish chatting to Van Der Vaart in the centre-circle and saunter over to help him out.
The blame for Bale’s first could be put at the feet of debutant Beausejour, but to be fair to him, I don’t think any other Wigan player would have defended it any better. Tottenham’s second was a quality strike by Modric into the bottom corner after the ball had landed directly at his feet from a failed clearance. The goal was met with much sorrow from the Wigan faithful behind me in the pub. The person who had spent most of the half bellowing out every single thought that popped into his brain – usually ending in ‘4-4-2’, wailed out and began shouting obscenities as though he’d just received a ransom note for the safe return of his family, personally signed by Maynor Figueroa
Stam was much better in the second-half, mainly because Spurs had gone into ‘relax mode’ and he didn’t have much defending to do. We actually created quite a few chances, and after McArthurs goal, we could have easily scored at least one more (Rodallega would have buried that Sammon chance). Other things happened but I`d had five pints by this time and had lost interest. It didn’t matter anyway, the damage was already done in the first-half, which gave us little chance to get anything from the game.
If we are going to stay up, it looks like we will have to go on a run of some sort, preferably a winning one and it’s going to have to start on Saturday against Everton. Lose that game and I think we’ll just have to quietly pack up our belongings and shuffle out via the fire escape.
Teams
Spurs: Friedel; Walker (Sandro, 70), Kaboul, King, Assou-Ekotto, Parker, Van Der Vaart (Livermore, 30), Modric, Kranjcar, Bale, Adebayor (Lancaster, 79)
Subs: Cudicini, Dawson, Rose, Pienaar
Latics: Al-Habsi; Boyce, Caldwell, Figueroa, Stam, Beausejour, Watson (Crusat, 87), McCarthy, Gomez (McArthur, 70), Moses, Di Santo (Sammon, 74)
Subs: Pollitt, Gohouri, Jones, Rodallega
Latics and Proud
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I really hope we aint shuffling!