Tottenham Hotspur Vs. New York Red Bulls, 2012 Preseason: The Best Preview In The World

I just felt like pretending to be arrogant, there's probably someone in the world who has written a preview of Tottenham Hotspur vs. New York Red Bulls that's better than this one. I just moved all of my stuff out of my apartment yesterday and I can't move into my new apartment until the 5th of August, so I'm homeless. And by homeless, I mean I have my desktop packed up and I'm working on a crappy $300 laptop on my mom's couch. These aren't the best working conditions, y'all.

On Tuesday night, Spurs wrap up their preseason tour with a match against the Red Bulls, who are seriously coming into form. They've also just made a couple of moves, adding Tim Cahill and defender Babajide Ogunbiyi, though the latter player is not going to be available for this friendly.

Spurs didn't exactly look great in their 0-0 draw with Liverpool on Saturday, but their defense looked much more confident and organized than they did in the friendly against the LA Galaxy. Youngsters Andros Townsend and Tom Carroll delighted everyone again, and we got to see some good stuff out of Gareth Bale before Charlie Adam did Charlie Adam things. He's unlikely to start against Red Bulls, but should get some minutes. After the jump, a quote from Andre Villas-Boas on Bale, courtesy of CFC reader Mike Cunniff, who was kind enough to email me about what Villas-Boas said at training.

Said Villas-Boas, following Monday's training session:

"Well he had, obviously, light training which you saw this morning and I think he's going to have a scan now in the afternoon just to see if everything is okay. Hopefully if everything is okay, he'll be in conditions to play."

Villas-Boas continued to say that the plan was to get Bale some minutes, and Mike felt like AVB implied that Bale will not start.

That probably means that Andros Townsend and Aaron Lennon are going to start on the wings, which is fine with me. Gylfi Sigurdsson should start in front of a double pivot, while Rafael Van der Vaart could return and get some minutes off the bench. I'm really hoping to see Jake Livermore next to either Tom Huddlestone or Tom Carroll in the center, as we've seen way too much of Jermaine Jenas lately. That's not to say that Jenas has been poor, there just isn't a whole lot of benefit to playing him when Huddlestone and Carroll could be taking his minutes instead.

Harry Kane is obviously the team's only striker and should start. I'd say he's likely to go 90 minutes, but maybe the current situation will cause AVB to do a bit of experimenting with a false nine? Who knows. In the back, I'm hoping to see at least 45 continuous minutes of Jan Vertonghen and Younes Kaboul playing together, as always. We didn't get the benefit of seeing that against Liverpool.

Kickoff is at 7:05 p.m. local time, 12:05 a.m. UK. You can catch the game on ESPN2 in the USA and ESPN in the UK. It's also streaming live on ESPN3 in the States, Spurs TV Online in the UK, assuming you've purchased a One Hotspur membership. We should have a game thread with lineups up 45 minutes before the game, but I'm going out to dinner with the fam beforehand, so apologies if it's up a little late. It will, at the very least, be up in time for kickoff.