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Tottenham Hotspur vs. Swansea, player ratings: To the theme of '80s one-hit wonders

Get out your synthesizers!

Jamie McDonald

If this is your first foray into Cartilage Free Captain's player ratings posts this season, we're doing them to different themes. We've already rated players according to how they correspond to different pizza toppings and seasons of hit HBO television show The Wire. Today, we go in a slightly different direction.

I'm giving both Jermain Defoe and Sandro an incomplete. Neither had enough time on the pitch to do much of anything. With that said, this week's player ratings are done to the theme of ... one-hit wonders from the 1980s!

5 stars - "Tainted Love" by Soft Cell

This is the perfect one-hit wonder. It's an insanely catchy song with a fairly unique sound, but I don't really have any desire to hear more from Soft Cell. An album full of songs with a sound similar to "Tainted Love" would be boring. But for four minutes? Flawless.

Etienne Capoue - Holy crap, was this guy a bargain or what? He's a monster. The way he breaks up play and makes an intelligent pass to get the attack going on such a consistent basis is amazing.

Hugo Lloris - Always flawless.

Kyle Walker - How he's gone from deficient defender to star, I have no idea, but I like it.

Andros Townsend - So he had a few passes/decisions that I didn't like, but he won a penalty and another foul that should have been a penalty. That counts as a five-star performance for me.

4 stars - "Come On Eileen" by Dexys Midnight Runners

Basically everything from the '80s was outrageously cheesy, but this is probably the cheesiest song on this list. It's below "Tainted Love" because it's kind of impossible to take seriously, but above the others because of how perfectly it fits the genre. Also mad catchy.

Roberto Soldado - Scored the winner and had lots of very good hold-up play. He's a big improvement over Adebayor and Defoe up top. Now let's create some chances for him during the run of play.

Nacer Chadli - Another very solid performance from him. He looks much more comfortable than he did in his first game and previous friendlies.

Jan Vertonghen - Nothing great, but no errors. Did his job.

Michael Dawson - Same as above, though he had a couple of less than great clearances he should have done much better with. He had more great interceptions/passes to start attacks than Verts, so he gets on this level.

3 stars - "99 Luftballoons" by Nena

This is the most average '80s song ever. I have no great or bad things to say about it. As I looked through lists of '80s one-hit wonders, this was the only one that I did not like, but also did not annoy me in any way.

Danny Rose - Still looks a bit uncomfortable and had a couple of poor giveaways, but for the most part, he had a solid game. I'm slowly warming up to him being our left back.

Paulinho - Yes, his effort and his flashes of brilliance are great, but he's still making crap decisions in the final third.

Mousa Dembele - He did his job defensively and didn't commit any bad giveaways, but he only had a couple of passes that seriously advanced attacks. With Capoue in the game, he needed to take more risks. He did a very good job of just sitting deep and playing safe passes given his role in our first game, but he was too conservative for his role in this game.

2 stars - "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin

I was actually very happy and worry-free until your shitty song came on the radio.

Gylfi Sigurdsson - Ugh, Siggy, I want to love you so much. You have so much talent and have had so many nice flashes of brilliance. But holy crap, it's been a rough three games. Spurs' ability to keep the ball, win back the ball and create scoring chances all seriously diminished when Siggy came on for Dembele, even though Dembele didn't have a great game. It was really obvious, almost instantly, and it didn't get better.

1 star - "Mickey" by Toni Basil

This is definitely one of the 10 worst pieces of Western pop music ever recorded. God help us if the aliens find this. They'll assume there's no intelligent life on this planet and just nuke us.

None of our players are as shitty as "Mickey".

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