It’s that time of the year for the wheels to completely fall off Spurs’ season. An FA Cup semi-final looms against Manchester United. Despite the fact that the game is going to be played at Wembley – our temporary home stadium for the season will mean nothing. We have lost the same amount of games at Wembley this season as we have in the rest of our away games.
United may not have been playing spectacular football this season, but they have been grinding out results nonetheless. In a one off game, Mourinho is more than capable of putting a game plan together to win. I fully expect this to be the case this weekend, and the last chance for us to win a trophy this season will vanish into the ether. We will look to stretch our record of successive FA Cup semi-final defeats from seven to eight.
An insipid performance at Brighton in midweek points the way for how the season will finish, there are four games left, Watford, West Brom, Newcastle and Leicester, three of them at Wembley. Four more draws beckon as the season limps to the end. It will give us enough points to finish above Arsenal for the second consecutive season, but it won’t be enough to prevent Chelsea finishing fourth and taking that final Champions League spot.
To top the season’s disappointing finish off, Arsenal, spurred on (pun intended) by wanting to give their long term outstanding manager Arsene Wenger a fitting send-off, will win the Europa League, and therefore claim their place in next season’s Champions League as well.
Even with all that, a fifth placed finish, semi-final of the FA Cup, and getting through the group stage of the Champions League was a lot better than I expected at the start of the season. I thought that playing every game as an away game, and playing so many teams at Wembley, giving them a big boost in motivation would see us struggle more than normal.
At the start of the season I predicted we would finish seventh (I expected Everton to do a lot better after their summer spending spree), get knocked out in the first round of both domestic cups (at least we obliged in the Carabao cup), and not make it through the group stage of the Champions League – even before we drew Real Madrid and Dortmund.
We will struggle to keep all of the squad we have together, and another hard season follows, as although we will have a home stadium, it will be brand new and take some getting used to. It will still be shit to get to, only it will be worse than usual as instead of 36k people trying to get there, it will be 62k. On the same poor transport links, at the same time. Late arrivals will be the norm and the atmosphere will suffer. As will Spurs unfortunately.
I hope I’m wrong though.