STEVENAGE 0 TOTTENHAM 0:HARRY REDKNAPP could only roll his eyes when he was informed, an hour or so after the final whistle, that the man spearheading the English Football Association's search for a new England manager, David Bernstein, had been among the crowd.
“I bet he was impressed with the football I served up,” he said, voice heavy with sarcasm. “I can just see him thinking: ‘who is this geezer’?”
The truth, as Redknapp conceded, was that it was rare to see Spurs so poor at keeping the ball and lacking so much imagination in telling areas.
Stevenage had been their equals for long spells, and it was just a shame for the team from Hertfordshire that they did not have more of a cutting edge themselves. A touch more cleverness around the penalty area and the team sixth in League One could conceivably have inflicted the same embarrassment on Spurs that Newcastle United suffered here last season.
Instead, this was a game with desperately few chances. Tottenham have seldom played with so little flair. Stevenage huffed and puffed but rarely offered the sense they could turn a sleeves-up kind of performance into the biggest shock of this season’s competition. Between them, they served up a pretty drab occasion. In fact, it was worse than that. This was a stinker.
Whether Stevenage will care about the lack of aesthetic quality is unlikely when they can look forward to a replay on March 7th. Their manager, Gary Smith, argued that they could go to White Hart Lane believing they can win. Spurs cannot be so moribund again. It is inconceivable they will be so short of ideas on their own ground.
Perhaps it was a little bit of complacency on their part. It is not every weekend they play at a ground where the ball goes over the stand twice in the opening quarter of an hour.
Or maybe we should just concentrate on giving credit to a Stevenage side demonstrating the competitive edge that gives them realistic aspirations of three successive promotions.
This was a team who chased everything. They were quick to the ball, robust in the challenge and had two centre-halves, Mark Roberts and Jon Ashton, and two battering-ram strikers, Darius Charles and Chris Beardsley, with the physique of backstreet bouncers. It is not a refined approach but it is a successful one.
“By the end, I was starting to think: ‘One mistake and we could be out of the cup if we’re not careful’,” Redknapp said. “One good set-play from them, and they’re good at set-plays, and we would have been in trouble.”
There were moments when the England manager-in-waiting had looked unimpressed from the touchline, frequently remonstrating with his players.
“It wasn’t our plan to play so much long ball but the pitch was awkward and the players just didn’t feel comfortable playing on that surface.”
Spurs will reflect on that moment, 10 minutes into the second half, when Louis Saha’s shot went in off his team-mate Scott Parker and was ruled out for offside. Saha’s shot would have gone in anyway, but perhaps this was the good fortune the home side deserved.
Otherwise the Premier League’s third-placed side threatened only sporadically, even if they could also look back at first-half moments when Michael Bostwick hacked away Michael Dawson’s goal-bound header and Mark Roberts appeared to pull back Saha inside the penalty area.
“You have to give credit to our players for disrupting their flow,” Smith said.
“I watched Spurs absolutely dismantle Newcastle in their last game and Scott Parker completely dictated everything on his own. But my players disrupted that, made challenges, unsettled them – and that’s all part of the game.”
They also had a couple of chances of their own, Joel Byrom shooting over just after the hour and then firing in another shot that the not altogether convincing Carlo Cudicini could only parry.
Yet Spurs were mostly untroubled on a day when the defender Ryan Nelsen was accommodated in a new 3-5-2 system that saw Gareth Bale playing centrally because Luka Modric was ill.
Benoit Assou-Ekotto was missing with a groin injury and Redknapp also reported that Emmanuel Adebayor had twisted his knee, making him a concern for Sunday’s game against Arsenal.
That, you suspect, will be a better day for Bernstein to drop by.
Guardian Service
