MAN CITY vs SPURS, Saturday February 19th, 17:30pm
Man City @ 2/7
Spurs @ 5/1
Draw @ 9/1
view odds
This weekend’s biggest fixture sees Antonio Conte’s Tottenham Hotspur take on Premier League leaders Manchester City in the 5:30pm kick-off on Saturday.
Despite being in a very promising position at the turn of the year, with Conte appearing to have waved his magic wand yet again – impressively transmogrifying Nuno Espírito Santo’s mid-table slouches into genuine top four contenders – a hat-trick of consecutive Premier League defeats has caused the enthusiasm level at Spurs to be sawn in half faster than the lovely Debbie McGee.
Antonio Conte’s tenure, all of a sudden, seems to be heading in only one rather familiar direction. Which suggests he thought he might be joining a different Tottenham Hotspur to the one everyone else has been watching for last few years. What was he thinking?
Perhaps what ultimately attracted Conte to the job was the seductive, slightly erotic whisperings of a mythical Tottenham Hotspur Stadium cheese room? Perhaps the man from Lecce believed there would finally be suitable facilities in London to store his beloved burrata and caciocavallo podolico?
Maybe Conte also hoped, deep-down, that after a long, successful, trophy-flecked tenure with the club, that the negozio di formaggi might be re-named in his honour? What better way to cap a life immersed in football than to have a cheese room named after you?
Sadly for Conte, almost as apocryphal as the Tottenham Hotspur cheese room is the Tottenham Hotspur transfer budget. The manager has publicly bemoaned the club’s player acquisition policy this week on Sky Sports Italia – the outlet du jour for disparaging remarks against your own club – wearily (but, as far as I can tell, accurately) pointing-out that by releasing four players and bringing in only two…the squad has been depleted.
Conte further opined that it will take ‘a lot of patience’ to achieve success with such an inexperienced and skeletal squad. One can only assume that in this instance he was referring to someone else’s ‘patience’, because the Italian, famously, was born with a marked deficit of the stuff.
Despite still having games in hand on most of their rivals, Conte’s already short fuse appears to have lost another few centimetres since mid-January. The internal frustration and boiling magma are rising ominously. There are also circulating reports of noticeable fumarolic activity.
Will it be on the touchline of the Etihad that Conte finally erupts; goes completely Dante’s Peak; becomes full, untrammelled Stromboli? It is without a doubt an intriguing and potentially combustible sub-plot.
Tottenham’s opponents, conversely, continue to make serene progress. Like an enormous light blue whale, they just keep moving inexorably forwards. In midweek they casually devoured much-hyped hipsters’ choice, Sporting Lisbon, as if they were mere microscopic plankton.
Spurs will do well to avoid doing a ‘Jonah’ too – finding themselves languishing inside the belly of the whale come Sunday morning.
The consequences of the spate of postponed games over the Christmas period are still yet to fully unwind for many clubs, but Liverpool will play two matches in this round of fixtures – against Norwich on Saturday afternoon, and Leeds on Wednesday evening – which will see them reach parity with Manchester City in terms of games played.
And if they win them both, which they should, it will also bring them closer to Manchester City on points.Is there a chance then, following this, that the champions elect could begin to feel something they haven’t felt for many, many months – a tiny bit of pressure? And is there also a chance that they may find themselves suddenly perturbed by this strange and unfamiliar sensation?
The answer is, most probably: no. But my words aren’t going to stop Jürgen Klopp. Who, like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, is consumed by his obsession with, and his pursuit of, the great whale.
‘Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee…’ Let’s hope, for Klopp’s sake, his quest ends better than Ahab’s…
