the season.
Stoke, yes Stoke City, yes Stoke City under Mark Hughes, never mind a banana skin Stoke City turned out to be a bacon sarnie for Pochettino and his Spurs side.
First time the Potters have done the top flight league double over Spurs, the heaviest defeat ever suffered at their hands those stats are bad enough but then you look at the league table and Spurs have conceded 53 goals, only Leicester, Newcastle and now relegated QPR have a worse record and they don’t have Lloris in goal.
Hugo was doing his best but even he was at fault for Stoke’s second. It was another defensive omnishambles that followed ten minutes after the first omnishambles.
First up Bentaleb, getting another free pass, heads back – hell he’s even back heading it now – to no one, well to no Spurs player. A free cross as Vlad is covering left-back instead of Vertonghen who does though head the cross over to of all people that scumbag that is Charlie Adam, who heads it in while Dier is doing I don’t know what.
The whole back line was strange. Yes Verts has to cover as left-back with Davies out and Rose coming back from injury and I know Dier has put some decent crosses in from right-back of late but putting Vlad on the left of the central pair seemed strange.
Vlad doesn’t get much love. Certainly doesn’t get the Bentaleb free pass, yes he had a shocker two clumsy challenges, clumsy and needless in a way, that both saw yellow and him departing just five minutes after the break. But can we expect a player to be on it when he barely gets a look in? Playing regularly in a settled back four who knows what we could get from him.
Though Vlad might have done himself some good if he’d have made those cards count. Say going through Adam’s knee.
Anyway by the time he departed Stoke had doubled their lead. A diagonal from the left saw Lloris come out and clatter into Dier, leaving the ball for N’Zonzi a pretty much open goal. Dier getting the blame here when in reality Lloris didn’t need to be running into him.
In a situation like that Spurs would desperately require the third or they would be hanging on for dear life in the closing minutes. Stoke didn’t need but they scored it all the same.
It was just so, so easy for them all afternoon. Spurs may have had more of the ball but they did little to nothing with it. Lamela tried – isn’t that the benchmark, away to Stoke – Eriksen did little, Kane was anonymous when he wasn’t being greedy. Mason is shot and Bentaleb was no doubt bossing the game according to his fanboys. Though being brushed off the ball like a piece of lint by Adams was not unexpected to some.
This season is dying a slow, embarrassing, ugly death. The end cannot come soon enough. Hell as was Tweeted this isn’t Ed Miliband awful as this lot would even be beaten by the Lib Dems.
Being done by Sherwood and Mark Hughes, the latter twice in one season, that’s not good, not good at all.