It is creeping towards midnight on Tuesday night as I write this, and the aftereffects of Atletico Madrid 5 – Tottenham Hotspur 2 are lingering in the air, two hours after the game finished. It wasn’t even, as Sid Lowe wrote in the Guardian, the scoreline that hurt, “it was how it happened, the opening period here quite possibly the stupidest, most absurd, most astonishing minutes of football you have ever seen”.
Changing your starting goalkeeper is always a ballsy call, regardless of how many Gaelic football managers have rolled the dice this season. What you certainly don’t need is for that new ‘keeper to then make two outrageous howlers in the first 14 minutes, either side of a second goal conceded due to a defensive omnishambles. That is not the return you’re hoping for.
Taking young Antonín Kinský off at that stage felt like a mercy, but even that was botched, as manager Igor Tudor studiously ignored the distraught young man as he trudged off the field, doubtless feeling as if his professional career was in tatters. Classy.
It was a truly astonishing performance from a team that somehow contrived to finish fourth out of 36 teams in the Champions League league phase this season. But then again, “this is the history of the Tottenham”, as the great Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini said after his Juventus team had knocked out a far, far better Spurs team than this one in the 2018 quarter-finals.
READ MORE
That is one of several deathless phrases about the club, none of them complimentary. There was Alex Ferguson once upon a time at Old Trafford, exhorting his Man United players not to worry about the threat posed by their north London visitors, “Lads, it’s Tottenham.”
Then there’s a more recent one, “Spursy”, which in its six letters seems to sum up generations of teams who flatter only to deceive, who follow up wins against the best teams in the world with bafflingly incoherent performances against terrible sides.
But Tuesday night was so far beyond any of these cliches, these insults robbed of their power through overuse. This opened up a whole new vista of torture and anguish. Relegation from the Premier League is now a distinct possibility, even a probability. If Spurs fans think it can’t get any worse than last Tuesday night, they are urged to think again. It can always get worse.
There is hardly a sports team in the world less Spursy than the Kilkenny hurlers. But the difference between that 0-35 to 0-17 hammering against Galway in Salthill last Saturday, and the standards that they’ve set themselves for the last 30 years is a far bigger chasm than that which exists between even the execrable levels Spurs hold themselves to, and Tuesday night’s defenestration.
Kilkenny’s performance, and the result, certainly came as a surprise to me, but that was as nothing compared to the surprise I got when I saw that this was their biggest defeat in league or championship since 1954; 1954! That is mind-blowing. Eighteen points is a fair trimming ... but it’s not 30 points either. Cork lost one half of hurling by 21 points last year, for example. Tipperary lost to Cork by 18 points in the Munster championship in 2024 and won the All-Ireland 15 months later.
Keeping standards as high as they’ve been in Kilkenny for the entirety of this century has been an extraordinary achievement. On Saturday, some Kilkenny players might have phoned it in for the last 15 minutes of a game that had already been long lost. This is a sporting fact of life for most teams. For Kilkenny, it is the most excruciating betrayal of everything they hold dear.
In Derek Lyng’s interview with RTÉ afterwards, his devastation was clear. He spared us the self-serving apologies to the fans, but the watching Kilkenny public would have been left in no doubt as to how much this one stung their team’s manager and by extension his dressingroom. It was anything but performative.
The history of Kilkenny, to borrow Chiellini’s phrase, is not just about winning, although obviously they’ve done plenty of that. It’s also about maxing out on the talent available. The last 10 years might have been an even more obvious example of that than the trophy-laden 15 years that preceded.
For the last decade, they have been nowhere near the level of the four-in-a-row team of the noughties (very few teams have). But they keep winning Leinster titles and are competitive in All-Ireland semi-finals. Were it not for the disputed red card that ended Richie Hogan’s involvement in the 2019 final, the wait since their All-Ireland might well be seven years, not 11.
What is the job of a manager and a dressingroom of players, at its most basic, if not to get everything you can out of each other, and let results take care of themselves. Kilkenny do that time and time and time again. They may not be loved, but they’re an incredibly admirable team. The idea that they would go to Salthill for the first round of the Leinster championship in five weeks and play as badly as they did last week is an affront to common sense, as well as to their own sense of self.
Spurs could do with someone taking it as personally as that.
