Where our defence gets panto practice?
Picture: dsch

One moment of pathetic defending at the start, another at the end and glaring misses as we got agonisingly close to an equaliser. Business back to normal after our latest one-win-in-a-row sequence.

McShane’s naive and clumsy attempt at a clearance after less than two minutes, aided and abetted by colleagues unable to get the ball upfield or up into the stand, gave Spurs a dream start. When Murphy was presented with as good an opportunity in similar circumstances, his feeble response must have left most Sunderland fans resigned to the likelihood that this, yet again, would not be our away day.

Yet we went on to have further chances as we dominated the second half. Chopra’s spectacular miss – ball, not target – would have been comical had he still been playing for Newcastle, while Miller and Whitehead and probably others also missed when scoring would have been easier, in one or two cases even for me.

Pressing forward as relentlessly – and necessarily – as we did, we were inevitably vulnerable to breakaways. But Robbie Keane can scarcely have believed his luck. It wasn’t even a breakaway but a routine goalkeeper’s punt from his area to ours.

Nosworthy and Evans somehow missed the bounce and let him slip through, and a £9 million keeper marred a fine match with goalkeeping more in the £100,000 region. The ball was hit hard but straight; it still managed to squeeze beneath Craig Gordon’s diving body and Keane had his 100th Spurs goal to script.

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