Painful, predictable Spurs reach end game with Conte looking out of time

B efore this last-16 second leg, Son Heung-min had announced that Tottenham Hotspur intended to “make a statement” And so they did. That statement was: this is not a very good Tottenham Hotspur team. Rather this felt like a Spurs team reaching the end of something, without clarity or craft or any real sense of life; a team that is facing up now to another season of chasing another season of chasing another season of … well, what exactly?

There are good 0-0 draws. There are heroic exits, games where you chase the sun and come up short. This wasn’t any of those things. Instead, this was a night that seemed to raise some very basic questions about what Spurs are for, what this entity is intended to express.

A team that is just good enough has been built to play football that is just good enough, cashing in on the happy accident of a single home-grown world-class player, teasing its fans with the sense of standing quite near to other people’s success. And not just once, but year after year, following the same patterns.

What is the point of the rest of Spurs’ league season from here? A desperate push to finish fourth in order to do all this over again? What is the point of erecting this mimesis of an ambitious team? Who, exactly, is enjoying this, destined to look back on it all as the days of their lives? This is product. Stuff on a stage. They have a go-kart show here too apparently.

Needing to score to progress in this tie Spurs were terrible in the first half, a team playing through a muddle of sleepiness and heavy touches. They didn’t have a shot on target. They didn’t look like they actually wanted a shot on target.

With 37 minutes gone there was a 20-second game of seven-a-side head tennis across the halfway line,