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Half time: Tottenham Hotspur 1-1 Eintracht Frankfurt
45+1 mins: The referee plays all of two seconds’ stoppage time. 1-1 in goals, 2-2 in shots on target, thanks to that last-moment Eintracht effort, and encouragement for both teams.
45 mins: Eintracht’s best chance since the goal ends with a shooting chance for Ekitike, 16 yards out and on his left foot, but his finish is feeble and Vicario saves.
43 mins: In the third of the quarter-final games being played currently Rangers remain at 0-0 against tournament favourites Athletic Bilbao, but Robin Propper has been sent off (just 13 minutes into the game, indeed).
41 mins: “Any idea if ‘Eintracht’ really translates as ‘harmony’ as Google Translate claims?” asks Joshua Reynolds. In the context of a football team name I believe it is roughly the same as the English “United”.
38 mins: A brief period where nothing much happens at all. There’ll be another one of those in about seven minutes.
35 mins: Eintracht have a spell, but Spurs stay resolute on the edge of their area and eventually the spell breaks rather than the defence.
33 mins: Another Spurs corner is headed away. Lyon have taken a 1-0 lead over Manchester United in their game at the venue Uefa are calling the OL Stadium.
32 mins: “Those are tremendous colours Frankfurt are wearing, Simon. Classic,” writes Simon McMahon, who I believe may be Dundee-based and not coincidentally biased towards orange-shirted, black-shorted sides. “We stayed there last summer during the Euros, while watching Scotland in the knockouts, and the people were great, so I’m rooting for them tonight. Sorry Ange.”
30 mins: Son attempts a completely ludicrous shot from way out on the left, which misses by an absolute mile. The game is being played at a really high pace, and I don’t think either side can claim to be in any kind of control, but Spurs have done most of the attacking since Eintracht’s early goal.
GOAL! Tottenham 1-1 Eintracht Frankfurt (Porro, 26 mins)
Maddison finds space in the area and Solanke finds him in it. He gets to the byline, pulls back to Porro, and the marauding full-back scores with a left-foot backheel flick!
23 mins: “Is the Frankfurt’s Gotze the same Mario Gotze of World Cup final scorer fame?” wonders William Lane. The very same. “He’s one of those players that was always younger than you thought and all of sudden was at the end of their career with a bunch of medals without seeming to have done an awful lot (one of the upsides of playing for Bayern I suppose). Interested to know how he’s doing nowadays? Is he still the tidy attacking midfielder of old or has he fallen back to a deeper playmaking role?” Who’s saying he’s at the end of his career? The lad is only 32! Still generally playing in a No10ish role, I believe. Author of this classy goal in this very competition:
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20 mins: Spurs win, and waste, another corner. They are, though, having a decent spell.
18 mins: Spurs go close, twice, kind of! First Solanke’s pull-back finds Son, but Tuta does brilliantly to poke the ball away from him, then Solanke crosses towards the back post, where Theate this time does well to win it, and anyway it turns out that Solanke was just offside.
15 mins: Spurs have a corner now, but Son curls it onto the head of the defender level with the near post.
12 mins: A shot on target from Spurs, as Solanke reaches Son’s cross first, but his flicked header is miserably feeble and Kauã Santos picks it up.
11 mins: A long crossfield pass from Porro to Son, and an absolutely phenomenal first touch from the Korean, earns a very handy chance to cross the ball from the left, but the keeper claims it.
10 mins: Two corners in quick succession for the visitors, but they can’t make anything of either of them.
8 mins: The goal came from Maddison unnecessarily trying to take on his man in midfield and losing the ball. Within 10 seconds it was in the back of the net.
GOAL! Tottenham 0-1 Eintracht Frankfurt (Ekitike, 6 mins)
That is just great forward play! Everyone knows what’s coming when Ekitike gets the ball on the left flank, but nobody was stopping him as he cut inside Porro and from 25 yards speared a low shot into the far corner.
4 mins: A pretty wild first few minutes, but Spurs have sensibly slowed the pace down with a long spell of not-very-adventurous possession.
2 mins: Chelsea have already wrapped up a handy away win in the first leg of their Conference League quarter-final. Here’s a report:
1 min: Eintracht get the ball rolling.
In fact they aren’t.
Victory for Spurs in the pre-match coin toss! I’m not sure it’s exclamation-mark-worthy either. Looks like they’re going to kick off.
The players are in the tunnel! Football just three and a bit minutes away, by my watch.
Potentially handy knowledge: three members of the Frankfurt line-up are a booking away from missing the second leg: star forward Hugo Ekitike, captain Robin Coch, and Eliyes Skhiri, plus the substitute Niels Nkounkou. Tottenham’s Lucas Bergvall, plus the substitute Yves Bissouma, are in the same boat.
“The way he’s thinking football, the way he was playing football with his teams. I’m very proud of him,” says Dino Toppmöller, the Frankfurt manager, of his dad, Klaus. Dino was named after Dino Zoff, the legendary Italy goalkeeper, who notably was once extremely grumpy with me on the phone. To be fair, I’d be pretty grumpy if I had to speak to myself in Italian, I’m rubbish at speaking Italian.
The teams!
The protagonists in tonight’s drama will be the following:
Tottenham Hotspur: Vicario, Porro, Romero, Van de Ven, Udogie, Bergvall, Bentancur, Maddison, Johnson, Solanke, Son. Subs: Austin, Whiteman, Bissouma, Richarlison, Tel, Gray, Spence, Odobert, Sarr, Davies, Moore.
Eintracht Frankfurt: Santos, Kristensen, Koch, Theate, Brown, Skhiri, Tuta, Gotze, Larsson, Bahoya, Ekitike. Subs: Grahl, Siljevic, Amenda, Chaibi, Wahi, Dahoud, Uzun, Chandler, Nkounkou, Batshuayi, Collins, Fenyo.
Referee: Szymon Marciniak (Poland).
Hello world!
Perhaps we are not quite at the pointy end of this competition – hence this match between a team that has lost four of their last six league games and one that has lost only three – but this is an intriguing tie, between a Spurs side struggling against what their manager, Ange Postecoglue, called in the build-up “glass-half-empty rhetoric” and an Eintracht Frankfurt team that lost only two of their first 19 games this season in all competitions, followed by nine of 22 since (second in the Bundesliga at the start of December and within grasping distance of Bayern Munich, they would be ninth in a table that started then with only just over half as many points as the leaders).
“Anything you achieve in life usually comes with a struggle. Certainly, everything I have achieved in my life has come with a struggle from a professional perspective,” Postecoglou said, emphasising his “burning ambition, desire and determination” to claim this trophy. “This is just another struggle, but never through this struggle have I lost the will to fight for what I think is the right thing to do and I’ll continue to do that.”
Postecoglou described an “alternate universe [where] everything Tottenham does is negative”. Well, they are 14th in the league. But like all the teams remaining in this competition they know that however poor this campaign has become, victory in the Europa League final in Bilbao next month, and the reward of a place in the Champions League, would turn things around pretty sharpish. What I’m hoping is that this leads to a certain amount of desperation, because in football desperation can make things quite fun quite quickly.
Anyway, and most importantly, welcome!
