Spurs and Antonio Conte frustrated in Champions League Frankfurt draw

Ed Sheeran played this stadium a couple of weeks ago, and so at least this was not the first time Deutsche Bank Park had been treated to an insipid mid-tempo performance that some people bafflingly insist is the work of a generational genius.

This was not the best of Tottenham, and frankly nor is it the best of Antonio Conte. The fundamentals were sound, the defence just about held tight and this was at least a major improvement on their derby collapse at the weekend.

But the sense of treading water is unmistakable, the feeling that everyone here, from Conte to Harry Kane to the supporters paying their hard-earned, is slowly getting older. What’s the point of all this? Where is this team going? Does it all just click at some stage? Or does it atrophy and drift, a club whose sole aim of existence is to keep the same players together so they can do this all again next year?

Indeed for all Tottenham’s superior quality there was a marked difference in vivacity between them and their opponents: Oliver Glasner’s brittle, brilliant little butterfly, the Europa League champions and still giddily accustoming themselves to nights like these, delights like these.

Indeed the quiet rise of Eintracht from Bundesliga relegation candidates in 2016 to Champions League material in 2022 is one of the lesser-evoked tales in European football, perhaps because there has been little linear or logical about it. Every time it felt like they were about to turn a corner, another limp run of form would come along. Every time they developed a star, someone else would pinch them. Maintaining their restless momentum despite losing the calibre of Luka Jovic, Sebastian Haller, Ante Rebic, André Silva and Filip Kostic in the last four summers has been