Harry Kane doubles up to sink Dinamo Zagreb and put Spurs in driving seat
On the day that Daniel Levy celebrated his 20th anniversary as the Tottenham chairman, it was perhaps inevitable that the lack of silverware on his watch would be highlighted. The return amounts to a single League Cup.
José Mourinho considers trophies as the “salt and pepper of football,” the essential seasoning, and so has Levy’s reign been bland? Hardly. Yet how everybody connected to the club craves something this season, very possibly in the Europa League.
Against the 21-times champions of
Croatia, Spurs took another step towards the dream. It has been a gruelling campaign and this was game No 45 for Mourinho and his players but they proved too strong for Dinamo Zagreb, moving to within touching distance of the quarter-finals.
Harry Kane was pictured with an ice pack on his knee after his 84thminute substitution but it was merely precautionary. He will surely be fit for Sunday’s derby at Arsenal, according to Mourinho. Kane could reflect, instead, on a decisive two-goal contribution that drove a fifth win on the spin in all competitions for his team and prompted the Dinamo manager, Zoran Mamic, to salute him as a “master of football.”
“Harry is that because he is very intelligent,” Mourinho said. “He scores goals but, as well as that, he understands every tip we give him in terms of his positioning and movement. He feels the spaces, he looks around and sees where other players are and he can affect the game. He is really a very good player.”
It was the first serious test of Spurs’s credentials in this competition, even if it felt strange that it had taken them 12 ties to reach it. Dinamo, who dropped down from the Champions League qualifying rounds last September, brought form in the shape of eight straight wins in all competitions and their technique and intensity was on show at the outset.
The evening could conceivably have followed a different course had Mislav Orsic, the Dinamo danger man, shot more cleanly after being inadvertently set through by Tanguy Ndombele’s loose back pass inside the first minute.
Davinson Sánchez gave chase but Orsic had a good look at Hugo Lloris’s goal. The finish was weak.
Spurs stabilised after a sloppy start, with Erik Lamela central to asserting them as a physical force. It was not an evening when they could simply weave their patterns; Dinamo were too aggressive for that. Lamela fought fire with fire; putting his foot in, hustling. There was also skill and directness from him. He had almost teed up Kane with a ball over the top and he set up the breakthrough goal.
Lamela was too strong for Lovro Majer in a 50-50 challenge and, when he spun away with the ball, his only thought was to run at the edge of the area. He swerved from left to right, moving away from Rasmus Lauritsen and throwing Kevin Theophile-Catherine before flicking a shot with the outside of his boot that came back off the inside of the post. Kane was on hand to roll the rebound into the empty net.
Spurs worked a few promising openings before the interval, leading to crosses from Serge Aurier and Ben Davies only for nothing to come of them, but they were on top, with Dinamo forced back into their defensive block. The visitors’ plan was to punch on the counter; Spurs dealt with their threat with a degree of comfort.
There was controversy early in the second half when Ndombele threw a stepover inside the area to panic Majer, who lunged at him. The Dinamo midfielder jammed his boot against Ndombele’s ankle, with no contact on the ball, before rather bundling into him. When Ndombele went down, it looked like a penalty. To Mourinho’s fury, the referee, Serdar Gozubuyuk, and his video assistant saw it differently.
Spurs advertised a second goal, with Kane volleying a Son Heung-min cross towards Dele Alli only for Dinamo to clear and they got it when TheophileCatherine miskicked an Aurier cross to Kane. Bad idea. Kane took one touch to kill the ball, another to roll it right to nick the space from Theophile-Catherine and a final one to ram home a low finish.
Gareth Bale, on as a sub, almost got on to a cross from another replacement, Steven Bergwijn, while Carlos Vinícius, who replaced Kane, shot straight at the goalkeeper, Dominik Livakovic. “A third goal would have fitted the reality of the game very well,” Mourinho said. “But as it is, we did not kill the tie so it’s still open.