Spurs & Milan will both have all to play for in the second leg of their Champions League tie, but that doesn’t mean that either of them will win it this year.
To be absolutely clear, the week and a half immediately prior to their Champions League match with AC Milan was a point of Peak Spurs in a season during which they’ve been out-Spursing themselves with increasing regularity.
Goalkeeper and captain Hugo Lloris picked up an injury that will see him miss at least the next month, while Yves Bissouma, Ryan Sessegnon and Rodrigo Bentancur also picked up injuries, the recovery time for which will be measured in months or weeks rather than days. Even Antonio Conte’s gallbladder gave up the ghost.
And in the middle of all this, they managed an extremely Tottenhamish 1-0 win against Manchester City with Conte absent, a result which only makes sense when you remember that they lost their next match 4-1 to Leicester City in what may rank as one of their worst performances of the last five years. Spurs that! Bring on the Champions League knockout stages!
Milan went into the game in the same position – fifth – in Serie A that Spurs, were in the Premier League, but their season has been somewhat different.
They’ve only lost five league games whereas Spurs have lost eight, and while Spurs are two points adrift of fourth-placed Newcastle United having played a game more, Milan are separated from third place on goal difference only and second by just three, though their league position does also carry the asterisk of Juventus’s fifteen-point deduction, without which they’d be in a position lower.
And 2023 had started pretty badly for them. Having ended last season as the Serie A winners – their first league title in eleven years – their title defence has primarily consisted of watching in disbelief as Napoli flew clear at the top of the season, but an edgy 1-0 win against Torino in their previous game was their first in Serie A since the January 4th, a run which took in two draws followed three successive defeats. And those defeats were pretty bad, a 4-0 loss at Lazio, a 5-2 home defeat by Sassuolo and a 1-0 reversal in the Milan derby.
The San Siro – okay, the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza – is soon to be torn down, but while it remains a daunting venue to visit, this Milan team is nowhere near the calibre that most amongst us of the middle-aged dad persuasion will recall from Football Italia in the 1990s. For all of Spurs’ Spursiness, their…
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