Despite a 6-0 defeat by Manchester City extending their run in the Premier League to one point from a possible nine, the mood of the players seemed buoyant on the impossibly green artificial grass of the Alfheim Stadium, bordered by banks of snow that had been cleared off the pitch.
Most of the banter seemed to be about the best accessories to keep out the blizzards that are forecast for later today but it was just any other group of players going about their business.
If ever they needed a reminder they missed out on the bright lights of the Champions League by the narrowest of margins last season, this was it.
Snow covered the streets as the team bus wended its way from the airport through the festively lit streets to their hotel looking out over the Barents Sea.
Tromso is no winter wonderland, however. A small part of a rocky archipelago on Norway’s northernmost coast, it is a land of black ice, slush and tons of grit – both metaphorically, in the doggedness of its weather-ravaged population to make the best of things, and physically, dumped by the ton on the roads to keep the city going against the odds.
However serious Tottenham’s predicament – they may have been thumped 6-0 at the weekend, but they are still three points ahead of their record-breaking tally from last season after 12 games – Spurs fans just need a little bit of that grit from their own people to see them through.
Having embarked upon this £100million project under Andre Villas-Boas they must give him a proper chance to establish a firm footing. That is what grit does, after all.
Last night, in his first public outing since leaving the Etihad Stadium after the 6-0 defeat, the Tottenham manager decided he would use a mixture of humility, smiles and bloody-minded defiance in his own bid to thaw the ice. Villas-Boas briefly floundered after Hugo Lloris’s head injury and began to show signs of the paranoid over-thinking that ultimately saw him unravel in his own rhetoric at Chelsea.
Yesterday, though, he was back on form, insisting things are different.
“I am immune right now,” he said. “I used to read a lot into situations like this. Into pressure points when I was at Chelsea. But not any more. I am very, very indifferent. I was not treated properly by people when I was at Chelsea and I got various opinion-makers and column-writers that wrote so many lies.
“The amount of things that I received when I was Chelsea manager was completely unfair and untrue. It comes with a high-profile job, I suppose.”
Villas-Boas is concentrating on fixing something he can do something about instead – enabling Spurs to score more goals in the Premier League.
Emmanuel Adebayor, Jermain Defoe and Harry Kane have been left at home, leaving the misfiring Roberto Soldado as the only main striker in the squad for Tromso. With Manchester United next up on Sunday, it could be a sign that he is already out in the cold – or being given one last chance.
The £26m summer signing was criticised after the City game for his lack of movement, but Villas-Boas said: “With the career and experience Soldado has, he does not need to receive lessons from anybody. We have to make sure we are creating enough situations for him so that he can be deadly.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment