Key events
The players are in the tunnel! Football just three and a bit minutes away, by my watch.
Potentially handy knowledge: three members of the Frankfurt line-up are a booking away from missing the second leg: star forward Hugo Ekitike, captain Robin Coch, and Eliyes Skhiri, plus the substitute Niels Nkounkou. Tottenham’s Lucas Bergvall, plus the substitute Yves Bissouma, are in the same boat.
“The way he’s thinking football, the way he was playing football with his teams. I’m very proud of him,” says Dino Toppmöller, the Frankfurt manager, of his dad, Klaus. Dino was named after Dino Zoff, the legendary Italy goalkeeper, who notably was once extremely grumpy with me on the phone. To be fair, I’d be pretty grumpy if I had to speak to myself in Italian, I’m rubbish at speaking Italian.
The teams!
The protagonists in tonight’s drama will be the following:
Tottenham Hotspur: Vicario, Porro, Romero, Van de Ven, Udogie, Bergvall, Bentancur, Maddison, Johnson, Solanke, Son. Subs: Austin, Whiteman, Bissouma, Richarlison, Tel, Gray, Spence, Odobert, Sarr, Davies, Moore.
Eintracht Frankfurt: Santos, Kristensen, Koch, Theate, Brown, Skhiri, Tuta, Gotze, Larsson, Bahoya, Ekitike. Subs: Grahl, Siljevic, Amenda, Chaibi, Wahi, Dahoud, Uzun, Chandler, Nkounkou, Batshuayi, Collins, Fenyo.
Referee: Szymon Marciniak (Poland).
Hello world!
Perhaps we are not quite at the pointy end of this competition – hence this match between a team that has lost four of their last six league games and one that has lost only three – but this is an intriguing tie, between a Spurs side struggling against what their manager, Ange Postecoglue, called in the build-up “glass-half-empty rhetoric” and an Eintracht Frankfurt team that lost only two of their first 19 games this season in all competitions, followed by nine of 22 since (second in the Bundesliga at the start of December and within grasping distance of Bayern Munich, they would be ninth in a table that started then with only just over half as many points as the leaders).
“Anything you achieve in life usually comes with a struggle. Certainly, everything I have achieved in my life has come with a struggle from a professional perspective,” Postecoglou said, emphasising his “burning ambition, desire and determination” to claim this trophy. “This is just another struggle, but never through this struggle have I lost the will to fight for what I think is the right thing to do and I’ll continue to do that.”
Postecoglou described an “alternate universe [where] everything Tottenham does is negative”. Well, they are 14th in the league. But like all the teams remaining in this competition they know that however poor this campaign has become, victory in the Europa League final in Bilbao next month, and the reward of a place in the Champions League, would turn things around pretty sharpish. What I’m hoping is that this leads to a certain amount of desperation, because in football desperation can make things quite fun quite quickly.
Anyway, and most importantly, welcome!