ROARING INTO THE FINAL
Miracle Pt II from Poch
Mauricio Pochettino was sobbing on the pitch, on his knees. Harry Kane was sprinting towards his team-mates, in defiance of a stricken ankle ligament.
The rest was silence. We were five minutes and 15 seconds into injury time and Tottenham, somehow, were going to the champions League final.
ajax players lay strewn around the pitch. Heartbroken, inconsolable. a vibrant, noisy Johan cruyff arena appeared to have been sucked into a black hole. How did this happen? How had they been denied?
With 35 minutes of the tie remaining, Tottenham trailed
3- 0. Like Liverpool trailed Barcelona but with less time to influence the match. And less chance, too, considering their firsthalf performance. It wasn’t good. They went a further two goals down and were not playing like a team who had revival in them.
Yet, from somewhere, it came. A second miracle. We might haveave to stop defining them as such,, really, when they happenn every night to English teamss in Europe.
Indeed, if one didn’t know better, it might be claimed that these narratives acrosss the last 48 hours were fixed,, or scripted. That they weree the product of a team of writers, - like Game of Thrones, or were choreographed, slam by brutal slam, like WWE.
Except no pen could producee drama like this. Not if it wass supposed to masquerade ass reality. Game of Thronesltd has dragdragons. These are men out there, flesh and blood. Yet there it all was. The return from the dead, the swing of Lucas Moura’s boot when all seemed destined to end in heroic failure. Moura’s hat-trick, completed withith virtuallyitll ththe llastt kikick k of the match. It truly was the most incredible Champions League moment since — er, the previous night.
Even Pochettino surrendered all composure, lost in the fantastic, following his celebrating substitutes on to the pitch, thinking better of it and falling to his knees.
Long after the locals had left the stadium, Tottenham players and staff were still milling around the turf, disbelieving, trying to take it all in. Moura, a match-winning hero as unlikely in his own way as Divock Origi for Liverpool on Tuesday, went over to collect his match ball which a team-mate had kicked teasingly across the pitch. It took him in front of the travelling fans, delirious in their celebrations.
Soon after Pochettino joined them, bowing down to the away end in worship, then turning to salute his staff in similar fashion.
Minutes later, the whole club was back on the pitch: players, staff, some still in green kit, others in tracksuits unused but no less valuable. Ajax groundsmen tended the other, empty half, forlornly picking at divots.
Here’s what you could have won, lads.
The fans never stopped believing, they will tell you, but they probably did. Three goals down and struggling to cope with Ajax’s counter-attacking, this wasn’t like Anfield on Tuesday, when Liverpool came ferociously out of the blocks.
Had Tottenham played again as they did in the first half, they would have lost.
So there will be another allEnglish Champions League final — the first since 2008 — between two teams that somehow came back from the dead. It would make more sense, really, if there was a Champions League writers’ room conjuring nights of exquisitely crafted drama. This Tottenham side looked to have expired in Europe so many times this season, yet in each game has risen again. Jon Snow’s resurrection had nothing on this. This truly was a tale of fire and ice. And the final will have its first new name since Chelsea 11 years ago, too.
And so the match. Tottenham came back into this game because in 204 seconds Moura scored twice. Then they won it, five minutes into injury time, because he scored again. In those slivers of time Ajax, so composed and impressive in the
first half, finally looked their tender age. They had deserved their two first-half goals and their three-goal advantage across the tie. They had made Tottenham look ordinary. Yet Pochettino has a way of reviving this team at halftime. He introduced Fernando Llorente for Victor Wanyama — and that changed it all.
First, the goals that took Tottenham to the brink. Ajax did not open the scoring with a 50-pass move, but a clever set-piece, and Tottenham looked soft defending it. The corner was won by Dusan Tadic, who couldn’t always get in the team at Southampton, but has scored 34 goals for Ajax this season — a renaissance like that of Mohamed Salah since departing Chelsea. He broke down the left flank and unleashed a shot which clipped the heel of Kieran Trippier and flipped up, forcing an excellent save from Hugo Lloris.
When it was whipped in, however, Tottenham were dozing. Matthijs de Ligt ran off Trippier — and if the full back was meant to be picking him up, it prompts the question why — and ended up outjumping Dele Alli by some margin, to steer his header past Lloris at the corner.
Optimists were quick to observe that the order for Tottenham had not changed — they still required two goals to progress, but that wasn’t the point. If there was one lesson from 24 hours earlier it was that cup football is often about momentum — and Tottenham had surrendered that within five minutes.
Worse followed before half-time and Tottenham were weak again. Not just Trippier this time but also Wanyama, both of whom seemed to be bullied off the ball by one man, Donny van de Beek. He fed Tadic on the left and continued his run, screaming for the ball, but Tadic instead cut it back inside to Hakim Ziyech. He weighed up the shot to achieve a better angle, and then left fly — a quite beautiful goal.
Maybe it was a simple misunderstanding. ‘We’ve got to go out and do what Liverpool did,’ Pochettino told his players. ‘Right-ho, boss,’ they replied, and promptly went 3-0 down on aggregate.
If that was what it took to shake them out of slumber, however, it did the trick. Tottenham were a different team with Llorente leading the line after half-time — and so were Ajax, sitting back and inviting their opponents on. Whether this was coach Erik ten Hag’s instruction, who knows, but it was a costly mistake.
Moura’s first two goals, minutes apart, came in the same period of the second half in which Georginio Wijnaldum undid Barcelona. For Tottenham’s opener, Alli played the through pass and Moura spotted the gap in Ajax’s ranks, haring through and slipping the ball smartly past goalkeeper Andre Onana.
For the second, Llorente should have scored but was somehow thwarted by Onana. Ajax’s goalkeeper is not their strong point however, and he then lost the ball before Moura turned and fired it in.
After that? Carnage. Ziyech hit a post for Ajax, masked man Jan Vertonghen hit the bar and then had the rebound turned off the line at the other end.
And then, just at the moment when all seemed lost, when Onana had been booked for time-wasting and Ajax were simply winding down precious seconds, Alli floated the ball in, Moura hit it sweetly from 18 yards and the impossible happened. Twice.
That’s showbiz. Or, more accurately, that’s football.