Tottenham Hotspurs’ trip to Real Madrid in the Champions League on Tuesday has the potential to be a massive turning point in the psychology of the club’s young players.
Mauricio Pochettino’s Spurs have failed to get over the line in the past two Premier League seasons, finishing third behind Leicester and Arsenal in 2015/16 and second to Chelsea in 2016/17.
This season has got off to a stuttering start for them domestically as they struggle to get used to playing their ‘home’ games at Wembley, while their new stadium on the site of the old White Hart Lane is under construction.
That said they are still third in the Premier League, five points off leaders Manchester City, and come into this glamour trip to the Santiago Bernabeu having buried the Wembley curse, with their first ‘home’ win of the season against Bournemouth on Saturday.
What they really need now is a confidence boost to not only fix their short-term foibles, but also reinforce the long-term belief that they can finally get over the line domestically, to win their first English league title in 57 years.
They have been the most exciting English side for the past two seasons now and their star players Harry Kane and Dele Alli form the backbone of the current England side. What they need is just a tad more consistency and more of a killer edge against their title rivals and that will come with experiences such as these.
If any English club can pull off an upset over Real Madrid at the moment it would be Spurs. And this is possibly the best time to play the Spaniards with Zinedine Zidane’s side having got off to a slow start in La Liga, where they are currently third behind Barcelona and Valencia.
There’s also the big brother factor. Real Madrid is not only a massive club by comparison, but it has also poached two of Spurs’ best players in recent times, Luka Modric in 2012 and Gareth Bale in 2013.
Victory or an admirable result against Real would be a good barometer of where they are as a club, while also enabling them to get over their Bale-Modric hangover, and the inferiority complex that tells them they’ll never succeed if they are always forced to sell their best players.
Not only would it be a boon domestically, with them able to return with more confidence in the Premier League where homes ties await against Liverpool and Manchester United up next — but it would also set them up perfectly for their first Champions League group qualification in six years.
The last time they got out the group was in 2010/11 under Harry Redknapp, armed with Bale and Modric, where they got famous victories over Inter and AC Milan before incidentally crashing out to Real Madrid 5-0 on aggregate in the quarter-finals.
Bar two near misses in the Premier League of late that was widely regarded to be Spurs’ pinnacle at least on the continent, and it would be good to see how far they’ve come on since then with this latest test. Hopefully, for Tottenham’s sake, history doesn’t repeat itself though with the game becoming a scouting opportunity for Real to check out and poach the London club’s latest offerings in Kane and Alli.
