Truly terrible half except for the goals. Outplayed by a poor Newcastle team for most of the half, Sanchez back in total brain fart mode and the rest not much better. Gifted them a goal then they returned the favour and though Kane took the 2nd well I think the keeper should save it. Gonna need to be much better in the 2nd half otherwise we can forget about 4th place, but we all knew that anyway.
That said, we had some great moments in attack, Ndombele has been key to it but we need to show more to kill the game off.
I'd like to switch to a 4-2-3-1 at half-time and sub off Vinicius and Lo Celso, but I don't think I trust any of our midfield options. Might be better to get Son and Bale on and go 4-4-2 with Moura up with Kane. Try to force them back. Our fullbacks haven't been involved at all going forward and Reguilon doesn't look right, to me. Might be the shape ****ing him up, though.
This really is why the whole “Sanchez will get better” debate is more or less dead nowadays. He’s been here for too many years and played plenty of games, the brainfarts shouldn’t still be a regular occurrence like they are. For a while I wanted to believe he’ll come good but we really did just piss £40m away on the Colombian Titus Bramble/ Federico Fazio. Starting to believe we’re paying the price for having an excellent CB pairing for 4 or so years. Now it’s our turn to just watch idiocy in the position. Spurs just aren’t meant to have nice things for too long.
This is where we miss Alderweireld, in my opinion. He's not at the same level physically any more, but he helps organise things.
If that was our bad half, good, we came out of it with our noses in front. If that was our good half, god help us.
This is the thing with our squad today: on paper going 4231 works, as Lucas has been useful when playing as a No10 lately as he's pushing players back through the middle - the problem is who comes on for (presumably) Vini? Son's coming off an injury so we shouldn't be chucking him back into the team at the first opportunity, while Lamela is an option and he could shut down that flank with a couple of clatterings to see if they're so brave afterwards - but if he gets booked after oen clattering it would effectively be a wasted sub So, Regi as a LW with Bale at LB anyone? :::EDIT::: Of course we subbed Sonny on by the time I finished typing that...