Emerson Royal, Conte, Skipp nominated for February Premier League monthly awards

Look I know nobody wants to hear any good news right now after a stupid and bad loss to a Championship club in the FA Cup, but there actually is some. Spurs wingback Emerson Royal was nominated for February’s EA Sports Premier League Player of the Month award, and Antonio Conte (lol) was nominated for Manager of the Month. Meanwhile, Oliver Skipp’s first Premier League goal against Chelsea was nominated for Goal of the Month.

We’ll get to Conte, but first — whom amongst us would’ve thought that Emerson Royal would have gone from a player getting ironic cheers when being subbed off to one with the potential to receive a player of the month award? Me either. But he deserves it after three solid performances against Manchester City, West Ham, and Chelsea.

He’s up against some formidable competition this month though including Fulham keeper Bernd Leno and attacking midfielder Manor Solomon, Leicester striker Kelechi Iheanacho, United forward Marcus Rashford, and Villa striker Ollie Watkins.

Skipp was nominated for an award that Spurs might actually win! Skippy’s first ever Premier League goal was a beauty, a second ball blast that was tipped onto the crossbar by Kepa and in the net and that gave the lead to Spurs in their match against Chelsea this past weekend. There are a bunch of goals to choose from and you can watch them all here, but you’re all voting for Skippy, right?

And then there’s Manager of the Month. I’m sure there’s a rule somewhere that says a team can only nominate its actual manager for Manager of the Month, but it’s kind of grimly hilarious that Conte gets the nomination when Stellini was in charge of three of the four games and the only one in which Conte was present was the 4-1 loss at Leicester City. Now, Conte is a pretty magnanimous guy and I’m sure if he won the award he’d immediately give it to Stellini. Thankfully there isn’t much chance of that because he’s up against United manager Erik Ten Hag and Fulham’s Marco Silva, both of whom went undefeated in February.

The timing of these announcements couldn’t be worse of course, but it does reflect a pretty darned good month in the life of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. As fans, we shouldn’t lose sight of that fact, even if we currently want to burn the stadium down into a small pile of calx with the cleansing fire of our collective incandescent rage.