LAST week’s clash between Chelsea and Tottenham was a great game of football.
Two heavyweights, two world- class managers not backing down and not giving an inch.
You can tell how good it was because we are still talking about it a week later.
Watching Thomas Tuchel and Antonio Conte go at it on the touchline, that’s what you want as a player.
It pumps you up.
In my career I have only ever seen that sort of stuff go on in the tunnel where the managers are being separated by stewards.
READ MORE IN FOOTBALL
FREE BETS AND SIGN UP DEALS – BEST NEW CUSTOMER OFFERS
But it was a common sight in my non-league days, coaches frothing at the mouth squaring up to each other. Wherever it happens, there is not much you can do.
You can’t dive in and have a roll-around with them, that’s not how it works any more.
But, on the bus home or in the group chats, a lot of players will be talking and it will be, ‘Did you see what the gaffer did?’ and, ‘He’s up for it’.
Sometimes, things like that are required.
Most read in Football
The players will now realise that if their manager wants to win that much, so do they.
You want to be working for a manager who is giving everything to the cause.
That only comes from pure passion.
For them, even at the full-time whistle, that game was not over and it won’t be over until the season ends.
They have a few weeks off and then they will be back at each other again.
It is competitive nature. That is what high, elite-level sport is, getting at each other and demanding the best. Once you do that, you figure out who is who.
They don’t let standards drop and their teams are a reflection of them.
I wouldn’t say they don’t like each other. They are just two completely different characters.
I think there is a huge amount of respect but they are both battling currently to be the best of the rest. They’ve got a mini competition between themselves in terms of who will finish behind Manchester City and Liverpool. The winner probably gets third.
I also don’t think anything that happened after the game required a ban, even the scrap at full-time after the handshake but the FA did, which is frustrating.
We get too caught up in public image and how the game looks and what is considered to be fair and unfair. At some point competitiveness will come out.
We are all told to shake hands and be really nice after a defeat, or after you concede a last- minute goal but it’s not realistic.
You cannot expect them to be happy, especially after how they had been going at each other on the sidelines.
If you asked me to pick who will finish in the top four based on that, I have to say Chelsea.
Let people be themselves. We scream out for characters and the Premier League enjoys the spoils of that and then they get banned because it is not prim and proper but football is not prim and proper.
It is a working-class game. That happens up and down the country on the sidelines every week, managers getting into spats and arguments.
As for the match itself, I felt like it was bigger for Tottenham than it was for Chelsea but in many ways the Blues were the better and more dominant team.
If you asked me to pick who will finish in the top four based on that, I have to say Chelsea.
I learned more about them in that game than Spurs.
ERIK WILL NOT FIND QUICK FIX
I THOUGHT Brentford did a really good job of getting at Manchester United and forcing them into mistakes, and there is no reason why Erik ten Hag’s future should not be in doubt if they lose again to Liverpool.
It is not just the defeats, it is the manner of the defeats. But, at the same time, I feel sorry for Ten Hag.
The previous boss Ralf Rangnick suggested this team, this squad, this club needed open-heart surgery to sort things out, and that is still the case.
Structurally, there is so much wrong there, and now Ten Hag, coming from a well-organised ship that was Ajax, has been dropped into this.
He must be trying to change so much behind closed doors that we probably cannot comprehend it.
This will take time — but how much time does a manager get in these circumstances given this start to the season?
We must not forget, however, that Arsenal were bottom this time last season and all the talk was Mikel Arteta has to go. Fast forward 12 months and now they are one of the most exciting teams to watch.
It is a process, and you cannot just throw a few quid at it and fix it.
The one I feel sorry for the most is Lisandro Martinez, as much as I personally would have loved to have played up against him with his lack of height.
At 5ft 9in, you will always have problems in the Premier League at centre-back, especially against a team like Brentford, and he is not used to English football.
But United didn’t lose that game 4-0 because of Martinez. It was because they were losing the ball in transition.
Martinez needs a fair crack at the whip, and getting subbed at half- time won’t help, but at the same time, you’re at Man United. He must have known what was coming.
I think he is better suited to playing in a three so he gets more protection, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Ten Hag goes that way against Liverpool on Monday.
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
