Tottenham 1-4 Arsenal: Match Review

Well that was icky.

I'm not going to get too worked up over it, though. I said before the match that we shouldn't take this too seriously, and now that we've lost, I'm towing the same line. I would have told you to not read too much into it if we lost. It's the Carling Cup, and we played kids and reserves.

So, what did we learn tonight? Nothing we didn't already know, really.

We already knew that Jake Livermore wasn't as good as any of the midfielders that Arsenal played today. We already knew that Steven Caulker was talented and lacked big game experience. We already knew that Sebastien Bassong was prone to really bad errors. We already knew that Andrey Arshavin was really good. We already knew that Giovani Dos Santos' confidence and toughness is questionable. 

What happened today was that the slightly better team barely won. The scoreline of 4-1 is flattering, but the game went to extra time for a reason, and that reason was that Spurs played well enough to get there.The scoreline was merely the result of Caulker and Bassong collapsing under pressure, something that was hardly surprising. The collective reaction from Spurs fans didn't seem to be one of panic or utter dismay. It was more like "well, that sucked."

We have bigger fish to fry. Not bigger than Arsenal, of course, but bigger than the Carling Cup. I'm happy we're out of it, our players need to be rested for league and Champions League games. Second place in our Champions League group and top seven in the league is going to require one hell of a fight. We don't need our players to be tired because of the damn Carling Cup.

The best news that came out of this game was probably that Sandro was a massive wrecking ball. He's like Palacios, only he doesn't give the ball away constantly. He should move up the pecking order, ahead of Palacios, based on today (and his play at Internacional).

Speaking of Palacios, what the hell happened to him? Remember when he was our best player?  Jesus tap dancing Christ. I'm not going any further into this, because it's inexplicable. I have no idea why he suddenly sucks and it's really aggravating.

Thanks to the lineup we picked today, we should have Crouch, Bale, Huddlestone, Modric, van der Vaart, and King all healthy for the match against West Ham on the weekend. We've kind of met our quota for points dropped in easy fixtures, so we'd do well to not screw up royally and just beat the piss out of a crappy West Ham team. This is inherently more important than the stupid ass Mickey Mouse Cup.