This was a game of snapshots. Moments.
Really, it could hardly have been anything else. Tottenham v Eintracht Frankfurt – 2025, post-Marmoush Frankfurt anyway – always promised to be great fun simply because neither team can remotely be relied upon to perform at the appropriate level for any real length of time.
And to be clearer than is absolutely necessary, when we say ‘real length of time’ we are measuring in minutes not games.
These are two teams whose best football looks utterly wonderful, and whose worst has you wondering just what on earth a team so fundamentally sh*t is even doing at the business end of a major European competition.
If we were pushed to differentiate this pair of entertaining but unreliable chancers, we’d say Tottenham have the better players but the smaller brains. That was certainly how it felt during this fun but curious 1-1 Europa League quarter-final first-leg draw that provides absolutely no certainty or possibly even any tangible clue about what these two unusual sides might do in the second.
This was nowhere near the worst of Tottenham. In the second half especially there was a great deal to like, and on another day they would be heading for a hostile return leg with at least a couple of goals’ breathing space.
Instead they must now go to Frankfurt and win. Somehow still, as it has all year long, their season remains teetering on a knife-edge, with only two possible and wildly divergent possible outcomes. This time next week it could (and realistically probably will) be all over and the recriminations and fallout that will define their summer can begin in earnest. But on tonight’s evidence it really could see them two games against a Norwegian side away from a European final.
A 1-1 draw is, inevitably, a better result for the away team than the home team. Obvious point is obvious, but if you try and strip away the inherent and understandable miserabilism and fatalism currently consuming this football club it wouldn’t be hard to paint a very different picture. Spurs hit the woodwork twice in a three-minute spell in which Kaua Santos also needed every inch of his considerable wingspan to deny Heung-min Son.
If – and what a vast amount of weight that one poor little word is carrying there – Spurs can produce another performance anything like their second-half showing here a week from now there really is no good reason why the outcome can’t be in their favour.
And yet the same is so obviously true the other way. That’s what makes it so exciting, isn’t it?
Both teams had their moments in a game full of them.
A moment: Spurs, both revelling and wallowing yet again in their own wilful, stupid ignorance, find themselves apparently shocked and appalled five minutes into the game to discover the Bundesliga’s leading scorers of counter-attack goals counter-attacking and scoring a wonderful goal through Hugo Ekitike.
Another: the Tottenham right-back and one of the key villains in that early goal popping up at centre-forward, because reasons, to flick home a behind-the-leg equaliser with his weaker foot, also because reasons.
Moment number three: A simple pass out to the left in the final seconds of the first half that suddenly and inexplicably and dizzyingly easily left Frankfurt with a four-on-two overload.
Moment the fourth: James Maddison, in the most on-brand bit of James Maddisoning imaginable, getting himself caught offside attempting an irredeemably wanky corner routine to end a 10-minute spell in which Spurs had hit the crossbar twice and forced Santos into two good saves.
Moments. Ninety-three minutes of moments, with almost nothing coherent linking them together. The last moment had Micky van de Ven trying and failing to head home from a yard out when he really should have just thrust his head/thigh/penis towards the ball knowing any kind of half-decent contact with any of them meant a certain goal.
It really would have changed the entire mood of this tie, and perhaps this whole football club.
If Spurs were having a season of even halfway presentable competence, nothing would seem f*cked after the way this first leg panned out.
There is no real solution to that, though. Because halfway presentable competence is not what Spurs have produced this season. Spurs are what they are and they are where they are. It’s almost pointless to note that a team with any kind of confidence would know they have the beating of their opponent and resolve to make sure of it in the second leg. It’s true, but Spurs are simply not that side and won’t be a week from now either.
Spurs are a complicated blend. It is no more accurate to say the floundering possession-ceding shambles of the first 25 minutes defines Spurs than to say the often genuinely impressive attacking football of the second half does so. They are not one or the other. Spurs can be and are both very good and very sh*t, generally lurching from one to the other multiple times per match.
The key with Spurs is the ratio. This season, very obviously, that ratio has been shocking. If we were putting arbitrary numbers on it, and we absolutely are going to do precisely that, it’s probably somewhere around 85 per cent of their football being unforgivable witless sh*te, and 15 per cent absolutely wonderful feast-for-the-senses gorgeousness.
That ratio and Angeball’s insistence on having no middleground whatsoever with it is, very obviously, unsustainable across whole seasons, something Spurs have spent the longest time proving. Frankly, unnecessarily. We knew, guys. We knew.
But the good news is that none of that now matters. Spurs don’t have to be good enough often enough over a whole season. All that matters is what ratio of good to sh*t Spurs can summon up a week from now in Frankfurt against a team who will be wondering much the same about themselves.
Spurs now just need to be good enough in enough of the right moments. And that means they still have a chance.
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