Spurs’ sorry exit
Alli apologises after Germans snuff out Champions League hopes
In the summer of 2009, when Jose Mourinho was preparing to embark on his most recent Champions League title-winning season with Inter Milan, a small village football club outside Leipzig were acquired by a major drinks manufacturer and embarked on a journey of their own from the fifth tier of German football.
A decade is a long time in modern football, when reputations can be made or lost, and so it must have felt for the current Tottenham Hotspur manager as he spent 90-plus helpless minutes on the touchline watching his Champions League season being crushed. For Mourinho, 10 years on since his second title in this competition, this was defeat without much honour, a round-of-16 whimper, the kind he would have once been contemptuous of in other clubs.
It was decided early, with two goals in 21 minutes from the RB Leipzig captain Marcel Sabitzer in this, the 10th season of one of the most remarkable rises in the history of modern European football, at the club funded by the energy drink empire, Red Bull. Its marquee club is now in the last eight of Europe’s premier competition, which is some achievement given that the original timescale for the transformation of the humble village side of SSV Markranstadt into a Bundesliga force was eight years.
RB Leipzig march on, and Spurs progress to who knows where. They are without a win in six games, including an FA Cup exit, and having talked down their prospects all week, Mourinho got a performance he, above all, could not have been surprised with. His goalkeeper Hugo Lloris looked vulnerable, but anyone might have done playing behind a defence as helplessly exposed as this one, behind an attack that was predictably ineffective.
Emil Forsberg, on for Sabitzer with seven minutes remaining, added the third. Last season’s finalists may well be labouring under the season’s biggest injury crisis, but they were flat and uninspired and, worst of all for Mourinho, looked like a team without a plan.
Later, Mourinho acknowledged there were issues in his team aside from the injury problems that have denied him so many key players, although he declined to elaborate on them. Rather he pointed out how many of the RB Leipzig substitutes would have been in his first team had he had them at his disposal, which was honest if nothing else, but unlikely to raise the spirits of a dressing room facing a buoyant Manchester United on Sunday.
For Julian Nagelsmann, the 32-year-old RB Leipzig manager, this was another slick performance that will have made his Premier League admirers consider their options. There is much that German football finds objectionable about RB Leipzig, but when one compares their financial might to their European peers, they are not even among the top 30 in terms of revenue. It is not simply money that has made them such a force.
Nagelsmann never looked like he was in any doubt about this outcome, a relaxed, cheerful figure before the game in a curious tan suit and blue shirt, who shared a jovial coronavirus-safe elbowbump greeting with Mourinho pre-match. Asked later whether the performance from Spurs had been more of a surprise for him than his own team, Nagelsmann embarked on a detailed analysis of the game. “I don’t want to say it’s easy,” he said. “That sounds kind of arrogant.”
But easy it certainly felt in those early stages, when Nagelsmann’s side probed at the weaknesses in Spurs. He would say later that his side were better in the first half of the first-leg win in London, although at home they were clinical.
Serge Aurier was caught out for both the opening goals, the first of which came down his side of the pitch. Timo Werner, recycling the ball after his shot had been blocked by Eric Dier, picked out the run of Sabitzer, arriving at the right time to ping a shot into the far corner.
It was not so well-aimed as to be unsaveable, but Lloris flapped an uncertain right hand at the ball and through it went. He was to do the same for Sabitzer’s second goal, when a pass out to the left wingback Angelino, on loan from Manchester City, dropped over the head of Aurier. From the cross, Sabitzer stole in to direct his header inside the near post, with Lloris again in the right place to save it, but seemingly unable to do so.
As Mourinho considered his options, there was no shock-tactic substitution open to him. He was stuck with this team, this shape and this performance.
Giovani Lo Celso got the first shot on target for the away team with around four minutes of the half remaining, one of only three in the whole game for Spurs. In attack Lucas Moura was dominated by the marvellous French 21-year-old Dayot Upamecano.
When Forsberg pounced on the loose ball to score a third in the closing stages, it felt like a fair reflection of the game. Nagelsmann had been forced into substituting impressive midfielder Nordi Mukiele, hit in the face with the ball.
There was a debut for the Spurs teenager Malachi Fagan-walcott in injury time, one day before he celebrates his 18th birthday, although there will be precious little celebration in his club. They have been well beaten and Mourinho is now on the longest losing streak of his managerial career with, as he confirmed later, no players expected back before that visit from United.