Away Five Oh! Tottenham Hotspur 5, Newcastle United 0.

February 12th, 2012 | 52 Comments |

For Newcastle United, this was a day to forget – started poorly, defended poorly, played poorly” Those words uttered by Sir Alan Shearer just about summed up this game for us. To be fair, Alan equally poured lavish praise on the performance of Tottenham Hotspur, who started well, attacked incisively with pace and skill, and pretty much outplayed us in every department.

We can have no complaints. This was not a game where the score flattered to deceive, in fact it could have been a lot worse. Yes it might have been different if Tiote had been sitting in front of the defence, if Cabaye had been available to manufacture some bullets for our Senegal strike force to fire, if Ryan Taylor had been there to put the free kick over the wall, if Steven Taylor had been in defence.

Sadly, that’s all ifs and buts. The truth is that the 11 men we sent out to play this game just weren’t at the races. Alan Pardew took the blame for getting his formation wrong, but how many of us before the game didn’t want to see both Ba and Cisse up front in our favoured 4-4-2 formation? Personally I expected Tottenham to score, especially against the defence we had out and without Tiote to protect it. So in my book we needed some potency up front. And looking at the players actually available to Pardew, there wasn’t a great deal of scope to change things in a way which would have produced an improvement. (more…)