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Well, that sucked. Tottenham Hotspur blew a 1-goal lead at Vicarage Road and lost 2-1 to Watford thanks to two set piece strikes. That was bad enough, but Spurs also looked lackluster throughout much of the match, and didn’t even score from open play.
Good movies more often than not result in sequels that are usually not as good as the original film. This is almost a truism in Hollywood, unless a multiple-movie sequence is planned from the very beginning. That’s because sequels are generally cash-cows that are made to squeeze more and more juice out of the desiccated orange that is the original movie.
Tottenham’s loss to Watford is kind of like a bad sequel, and it comes, predictably enough, immediately after the fantastic 3-0 result over Manchester United at Old Trafford. So let’s take a look at some of the middling-to-bad movies that have come out over the years. Even the best of these sequels are still not very good. Here are your Tottenham Hotspur player ratings to the theme of bad movie sequels.
(Yes, had I won I probably would’ve done K-pop songs in tribute to Son Heung-Min’s big weekend, but that would’ve required me to actually, y’know, listen to K-pop.)
5 stars: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Nobody ever will look at Temple of Doom and say “This was better than Raiders of the Lost Ark.” And sure, technically it’s a prequel, but it was made after Raiders so it’s also a sequel, fight me. It was infinitely campier than Raiders, with a more... problematic... setting, an annoying sidekick, and a dose of slapstick comedy. And yet, it’s still distinctly Indiana Jones, and worth watching because of that. It’s also the best bad sequel I could think of.
Alas, no Tottenham players were anywhere close to Temple of Doom level. Which is kind of sad, really.
4 stars: Sharknado 2: The Second One
Sharknado was designed to be bad, and that’s probably why it was such a hit — the premise is ridiculous, but it’s done in such an earnestly campy and awful way that it hits all the right buttons. There’s absolutely no way that a sequel could recapture that, and Sharknado 2... doesn’t. It’s like if you took the original Sharknado and ran it through Google Translate to Mandarin before reverse translating it back to English. But it’s still a tornado made of sharks, and that’s something.
Jan Vertonghen: You can say a lot about what went wrong with Tottenham on Sunday, but for the most part the defense wasn’t one of them, and Jan was the best of the defenders at Vicarage Road. Solid and dependable, he didn’t allow Watford to score from open play and shut down a lot of chances.
Lucas Moura: By far the most dangerous Spurs attacker on Sunday, even if he was a touch wasteful. Still, if Spurs were going to get a goal from open play you’d have thought it would’ve been Lucas to get it.
3.5 stars: The Matrix Reloaded
I can’t tell you how excited I was to see this movie, and how disappointed I was with it when I left the theater. Incredible how the Wachowskis could take something as electrifying as the original Matrix and somehow make it... boring. It was overindulgent, long, moralistic, and dull, but still seemed to capture a bit of the spirit that made the Matrix such an amazing film. But it still wasn’t very good. Astoundingly, Matrix 3 was even worse.
Toby Alderweireld: Take what I said about Jan and apply it to Toby, but with one minor caveat: he mistimed his jump on Watford’s second goal. That’s a pretty nit-picky thing to criticize him for in what was otherwise a very good performance, but it did cost us the game. Sorry, Toby.
Davinson Sanchez: Had a number of good defensive moves and cut-outs but still finds himself turned or beaten a little too often for my liking. Got manhandled a couple times by Troy Deeney, which is pretty easy to do, to be fair.
3 stars: Jaws 2
Continuing on the shark theme (this might have just been a “Player Ratings to the Theme of Bad Shark Movie Sequels” imo), Jaws 2 was awful. The original Jaws was a hit, so the studio fast-tracked another version that was basically the same film as the first, but directed by the guy who made “Santa Claus: The Movie.” Nobody wanted to watch this when they could’ve just watched the original Jaws again.
Michel Vorm: Could do nothing regarding Watford’s two set piece goals, and did fine other than one occasion where he somehow sliced a goal kick out for a corner. Hard to point to anything he did that was egregiously bad, though.
Harry Kane: A disappointingly quiet match for Kane, who spent so much time trying to be an outlet for Lucas that he stopped looking for his own shot. Put a header high that he normally buries (normally as in, y’know, last week). On the one play in the second half if he passes square to Lucas instead of straight at the defender, Spurs get a result.
Dele Alli: Some will want to rate him lower, but he was one of the few creative outlets for Spurs in this match, even if he did tend to dribble the ball too much instead of shooting or looking for the killer pass.
2.5 stars: Speed 2: Cruise Control
“So, George, I got a great pitch. Let’s take Speed, which was fun and fast and had speeding busses and Sandra Bullock, and put it... get this, it’s gold... ON THE WATER. With BOATS, George. Wait, we can’t get Keanu? What about Diet Keanu, you know, that guy with the face, the one who was in the Lost Boys? Jason Patric? Yeah, sure, whatever. And Willem Defoe can chew some scenery, he can be, IDK, inspired by Dennis Hopper or something. Audiences will eat it up, trust me.”
Christian Eriksen: He was there. Had a few shots from distance that didn’t trouble Ben Foster. A very strangely meh start to the season for our Danish Delight.
Kieran Trippier: The better of the two fullbacks on the day, but that’s not saying much. Found a lot of space, but did very little with it.
2 stars: Cars 2
I always found the original Cars to be kind of charming, a sort of animated “Doc Hollywood” with talking automobiles. It probably also helped that I watched about a billion times because children. Cars 2 takes everything that was at least semi-good about the original and chucks it, instead focusing the story on Larry the Cable Guy and an absurd James Bond-esque spy caper in Europe. It’s bad, folks. Real bad.
Mousa Dembele: I blame Pochettino for this as much as I do Moose, but he is just not good at the 6. Never looked comfortable in midfield, and should’ve been subbed off 20 minutes before he actually was.
Fernando Llorente: What exactly does he DO?
Ben Davies: Awful. When you play three at the back you rely on the fullbacks to push forward and actually do stuff from wide positions. Davies was terrible going forward and didn’t contribute much in defense, either.
1 star: Highlander 2
There can be only one! Except there can’t because we’re going to ret-con the crap out of everything that made the first movie awesome and replace it with aliens, an ozone layer hole, and corporate terrorists. Not only the worst sequel, but quite possibly the worst movie ever made.
No Tottenham Hotspur players were as bad as Highlander 2.
Tom Carroll Memorial Non-Rating:
Harry Winks, Danny Rose