That’s just champion
There are some teams who come to the Bernabeu and suffer the kind of defeat that makes them reassess just what they thought they were, but Mauricio Pochettino’s Tottenham Hotspur players can say, at the very least, that they fought the greatest side in European football and lived to tell the tale.
At times it was enough just to compete with Real Madrid and come out with a draw – only the third time this club have failed to win a Champions League group game at home since Oct 2009 – but then there was another fleeting moment when it felt like it could have been much more. How close were Spurs to winning this game? About as close as the thickness of the seam on the glove of the Madrid goalkeeper Keylor Navas.
Time slowed down at the Bernabeu on 71 minutes when Harry Kane found himself in familiar territory with the ball at his feet and just the Madrid goalkeeper to beat. This was a moment when you expected Kane to do what Kane does, that being score the unlikely goals that win big games, but just for once on this occasion he could not squeeze it past the glove of Navas, who got enough on it to brush the ball wide.
Kane is not one to linger long on chances missed but even with the prospect of a corner for Spurs he spent longer than usual looking glassy-eyed with dismay and reflecting on the opportunity he had just passed up. There had been only been half-chances for him to score before then, a resounding header early on and then the Serge Aurier cross that flicked off Raphael Varane instead and gave Spurs the lead on 28 minutes.
Those last 20 minutes of the game were Spurs at their most comfortable, the point at which Madrid had fired their best shots and were running out of ways to break down a five-man defence. Earlier in the second half there had been two saves from Hugo Lloris that kept his team in the game, including a fairly miraculous stop from Karim Benzema. They withstood that period of pressure and against an opponent where there is no margin for error, Pochettino’s side kept hold of their point. Madrid had equalised at the end of the first half when Cristiano Ronaldo drilled a penalty past Lloris after Aurier had fouled Toni Kroos, a momentary brain-fade among a Spurs defence who were otherwise excellent. At times in that first half it would be right to say that Pochettino’s team were outplayed, but there is no shame in that against the greatest club side of the current era, at a ground where Spurs lost 4-0 in their only other visit during recent years.
In midfield, the young Englishman, Harry Winks completed 44 passes, not quite on a level with the maestros Luka Modric, Isco and Toni Kroos, but more than any other in a Spurs shirt and a good number on a night when his team were not seeing much of the ball.
There is no greater test currently than an evening facing the best midfield in the world and Gareth Southgate will surely feel that if Winks can hold his own in this company then he can do the same for England.
Afterwards, Pochettino did not try to disguise his delight at “competing” with the club at the top of the pile. He described his own team as one that was “still in construction” and there was an evident pride that his unexpected formation proved so difficult to break down. Among those five men in defence was Eric Dier in the centre and Jan Vertonghen in the role of left wing-back.
Anywhere else that would count as parking the bus but at the Bernabeu, against players this good, it is a necessary measure against the kind of evisceration that these double European champions can inflict upon an opponent. Without the suspended Dele Alli, as well as the likes of Victor Wanyama, Ben Davies and Mousa Dembele this counted as a triumph for Pochettino against a team who remorselessly seek out the weak points in their opposition.
It was Zinedine Zidane who faced a much sterner inquest afterwards with the locals wondering why his side had failed to break down Spurs and whether there was a danger that too many chances were going begging. Ronaldo hit the post with an early header from the cross of the 18-year-old Moroccan rightback, Achraf Hakimi, an academy-produced teenager with only two league appearances to his name and an uncommon level of composure to walk into the most famous team in the world.
It would be fair to say that Madrid had most of the ball in the first half so it was obliging of them to spend a tiny fraction of that possession scoring Spurs’s one goal for them. Varane’s own goal came from a rare, but direct, attack from the away team down the right wing, and a cross from Aurier that a defender of the Frenchman’s standing should have done better with.
With Kane making the run to the near post to get on the end of Aurier’s ball, the natural assumption was that the goal machine from Chingford had applied the final touch but on this occasion the job was done for him.
As a balance to his five-man defence, Pochettino picked two strikers, Kane and Fernando Llorente, and it was the latter whose pass made that second-half chance for the Englishman.
In midfield for Madrid, there are no group of players more blessed with the kind of mutual recognition of angles and space than Modric, Kroos, and Isco. It was the finishing that let Madrid down with Benzema guilty of the two worst misses, sweeping the rebound from Ronaldo’s header wide and later failing to beat Lloris from close range.
Pochettino described Lloris as one of the best goalkeepers in the world, having saved that header from Benzema and then pushing a Ronaldo torpedo over the bar when the No7 got down the right wing.
Then came Spurs’s chances, first Kane and then, latterly, Christian Eriksen, whose shot required another save from Navas. Pochettino brought on Danny Rose for Llorente in the later stages and played the left-back in a defensive midfield position, by which point Spurs looked like they would see this draw out successfully.