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SOCCER: CHAMPIONS LEAGUE:WHEN A club exits the Champions League there is the tendency to search souls, conduct postmortems and reassess blueprints. For Tottenham Hotspur, who are not yet out of Europe’s elite competition but have surely seen the die cast following the 4-0 defeat at Real Madrid in the quarter-final first leg, the key is continuity.

Harry Redknapp, the manager, had excuses at his fingertips for Tuesday night’s thumping loss, chief among them the reckless 15th-minute dismissal of Peter Crouch. There was also Aaron Lennon’s last-minute sick note, which led to Jermaine Jenas’s hasty promotion to the starting line-up and, in the fourth minute, it was the latter who lost Emmanuel Adebayor for the opening goal.