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Y’all:
I repeat:
It’s here. It’s really friggin here.
And guess what? I’ll be in a car riding to the airport during the first half because everything is horrible beyond all belief or reason. (And so help me if I can’t find the game on anywhere at the airport.)
By the way, I can’t talk about Spurs and the Champions League without sharing this video:
In any event, I couldn’t participate in yesterday’s writer’s preview of the match, so here are some short responses to yesterday’s questions:
Should we be afraid of Monaco?
I’m of two minds on this one:
a) Monaco is a sturdy but unspectacular Ligue 1 side who we’ve beaten in the past. Combine that with the fact that Moose is back and we’ll have 85,000 screaming Spurs fans at Wembley and my response is “hell no we shouldn’t be afraid of them.”
b) Monaco is stout defensively. It’s a huge match. We’re Spurs. So, well...
My rational brain says “we’ve got this.” But I don’t trust my rational brain when it comes to things like this so I’m almost certainly way more freaked out by Monaco than I have any right to be.
Who starts for Spurs?
My guess is we see last season’s best XI but with Ben Davies in for the injured Danny Rose. I suppose we could see Son Heung-Min, Victor Wanyama, or Vincent Janssen, but I’d be very surprised if the starting XI is anything other than “last year’s best XI with Davies in for Rose.”
How will Wembley affect the style of play and atmosphere?
I’m kinda giddy at the thought of hearing 85,000 Spurs fans singing at Wembley. But the pitch size is something of a black box to me. My gut is that a larger pitch hurts us because we play a generally compact style anyway so we don’t stand to gain much from a larger pitch. Since a larger pitch can also make it harder to stay compact and squeeze the opposition, I worry that this hurts us. But I’m open to counter arguments on this point. If you have one, I’d love to hear it.
Score Prediction
NOPE. NOPE.
NOPE.
Not making predictions. If I predict a win and am right, I get nothing from that. If I’m wrong I will hate myself. If I pick a loss and am wrong I’m just a horrible person. If I pick a loss and am right I’m back to hating myself.
Here’s what I can predict: There is at least a 66% of me screaming extremely loudly in a public place. There is about an 80% chance that said public place will be an airport, which is... not my favorite.
There is about an 90% chance I will be a wreck all day and will not hear a word anyone says to me for the entire first half of the day. There is a 100% chance this result will determine my mood for at least the next two days.