Football

Tottenham vs Ajax: Dutch upstarts win a tense Champions League semi-final built on shifting sands



One of the great appeals of following football is its cyclical nature. If you get beaten one week, there’s always another game the next. If you have a nightmare season, there’s always another year to put things right. If you accidentally hire David Moyes, well: not to worry. Someone else will take him off your hands at some point.

But there comes a point, when you get to the rarefied air at the very peaks of the game, where it doesn’t work like that any more. When you get to the sort of stages where dynasties are built and legacies decided and empires rise and fall, quite often the chances don’t keep coming. Sometimes, there isn’t another year. Sometimes, this is all you have.

Ajax know this better than anyone. After this season ends, the only time this team will ever play together again will be in one of those legends’ games you occasionally see on Eurosport. Frenkie de Jong is already off to Barcelona. Matthijs de Ligt will go, too. David Neres and Hakim Ziyech already have the superclubs of Europe circling around them.

They know, as they have always known, that there is no next year. This is the one that has to count.

Is there a next year for Tottenham? Intuitively, you’d like to think so. Their success has been built on an evergreen defiance of gravity: the era that keeps giving. Mauricio Pochettino keeps talking about the foundations being put in place, the legacy of the new stadium, the golden future that will sustain them for decades to come. But there are no guarantees in this game. The Spurs team of 1961-62 probably didn’t think it would take another 57 years for them to reach another European Cup semi-final either. So: is this it? Was that it?

On the bones of the old White Hart Lane, Spurs ran into a very familiar malaise: the curse of the semi-final. There are very few teams that can match them for tripping up with the final hurdle in sight. For Ajax in 2019 read the eight FA Cup semi-finals since 1993, against teams as varied in pedigree as Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal and Avram Grant’s Portsmouth.

Here, again, they were schooled under the lights by a team who ran faster, passed more crisply, tackled harder and defended better. Their only saving grace is that they still have 90 minutes in Amsterdam to put it right.

There was a moment in the first half that seemed to encapsulate the pattern of the game. To a roar from the crowd, Danny Rose set Dele Alli clear on the left, carrying the ball to the left of the penalty area. But within instants, a swarm of black shirts was upon him, blotting his vision, blocking his options. With Fernando Llorente lumbering around the penalty area with all the grace of a drunk trying to find his way out of an airing cupboard, and no other options of promise, Dele was forced to lay the ball back to Victor Wanyama. Who, under pressure, was forced to lay it back to Davinson Sanchez.

Spurs could not recover from their slow start (AFP)

And so, about seven seconds after Dele was carving up the left flank, the ball was back at the feet of Hugo Lloris, who upon receiving the ball once more found himself beset by Ajax shirts.

Tottenham were already behind by that point, of course. And yet it could have been so much worse for them. With no clear outlet in midfield and only Llorente up front, the waves and waves of Ajax attacks were already beginning to crash against the shore long before van der Beek popped up to the goal that would prove to be the winner.

Somewhere in between Jan Vertonghen getting his nose smashed open and van der Beek missing a golden opportunity to put Ajax 2-0 up, Spurs seemed to give themselves a little wriggle. No, they decided, this wasn’t on. This wasn’t good enough for a Champions League home semi-final. This wasn’t seizing the moment, this was shirking from it. And it was quite hard to remember the last team to win the European Cup without a midfield.

Moussa Sissoko made a difference in the second-half (AFP)

So Pochettino switched things around. Vertonghen’s injury gave him the chance to bring on Moussa Sissoko in the centre. But most importantly of all, Tottenham realised they were the villains of this piece, and began to play accordingly. In these new rules of engagement, the ugly punt up the flanks would be a virtue, not a vice. The salty arm-grapple would be their best friend. Tottenham met Ajax’s team of teen heart-throbs with action-hero grit.

It stemmed the tide, and had they taken one of the meagre chances that fell their way either side of half time it might even have offered them a way back into the game. But it wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough against a team as well-drilled and slick and streetwise as this Ajax team, not without their two best strikers and their best defender. The paucity of Tottenham’s options on the bench – Kyle Walker-Peters, Oliver Skipp, Juan Foyth – told the story of a team with little left to give.

Is this how it ends, then? With a tired, half-strength team getting battered at home by a side ranked 20th in the Fifa club rankings? It’s not how they would have dreamed it, to be sure. But that’s the thing about these games: you don’t get to pick and choose when you play them. And unless Tottenham can delve deep next week – deeper than they’ve ever delved before – then this night could well end up stinging for some time yet.



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