Tottenham v Liverpool: Carabao Cup semi-final, first leg – live | Carabao Cup

Sky: Bentancur still in Spurs dressing-room

Anyone fancy joining my new virtual cinema club?

“I can’t be the only person who’s emailed you to wittily suggest that Liverpool’s problems must be caused by the ball,” writes Alan Terlep. “Seriously, I’d love to hear Slot say post- game, ‘we didn’t control the ball. We need to do better, there’s no excuse for sloppiness.’”

Talking of which, here’s some half-time reading.

Half time: Tottenham 0-0 Liverpool

45+11 min Gakpo plays a quick square pass to Jota, whose snapshot from 12 yards is blocked, I think by Bergvall.

45+10 min Liverpool won’t want half-time because a goal is coming, or would be if the referee wasn’t about to blow his whistle.

45+9 min Son’s long cross from the left is headed straight at Alisson by Bergvall, 15 yards out. Even Mick Harford would have struggled to generate the necessary power on that header.

45+7 min Liverpool have come to life at the end of the first half. Mac Allister shapes a pass out to Gakpo, who cuts inside in familiar style before curling over the bar from the edge of the area. He’s looked so good this past month or so.

45+6 min “This is a dull match,” writes our bleedin’ obvious correspondent Richard Slassor. “I’m missing The Repair Shop for this?”

45+4 min Jota poked the ball through to Gakpo, who ran from inside his own half to within 25 yards of goal before crashed a low shot that moved awkwardly and was saved at the second attempt by Kinsky. It threatened to slither under him but he had plenty of time to grab the loose ball.

No second yellow card for Bissouma, which on reflection is fair enough. But he took a risk.

45+4 min Bergvall curls a good pass out to Johnson, whose shot from the edge of the area is blocked at source. Jota is then flattened by Bissouma, who might have a problem when the ball goes dead.

45+3 min Liverpool are having their best spell of the half, which admittedly isn’t saying that much. But there has been a greater snap to their passing. Gakpo charges past Porro near the byline and pokes a cross back towards Salah, 15 yards from goal. Mac Allister gets in his way for a second and Salah shoots high over the bar with his right foot. Tough chance anyway.

45+1 min “Re: the sloppiness on display this far, the misplaced passes and dodge control,” begins Neil Hattersley, “this game has had a bit of a feel of the Sunday leagues matches I used to play on fields with waterlogged flanks and a mixture of sun baked mud and sand dune in the middle. No one could predict how the ball would bounce or run… glory days.”

It’s funny you say that because a few of the players look hungover as well. _{(Legal disclaimer: they’re not actually hungover, or drunk, or impaired in anything other than their passing.)}

45 min There will be 11 minutes of added time, the majority for the injury to Rodrigo Bentancur.

43 min Jota sparks a Liverpool break with a stylish run in the Spurs half. Salah and Gakpo are also involved before Tsimikas’s low cross towards Jones is cleared well by the sliding Bergvall. Good defending.

42 min Endo’s crossfield pass goes straight out of play. The first half in miniature.

39 min Kulusevski, on the left touchline, curves an imaginative pass around the defence towards Son. The distances are a bit too tight, even for Kulusevski, and Alisson beats Son to the ball.

38 min Liverpool’s first-half performance in the league game on this ground was arguably their best of the season. They’ve been nowhere near that standard so far, with a strange sloppiness and lack of precision in attack.

37 min Jota turns dangerously 25 yards from goal but Bissouma lunges to make an important tackle. Quite a brave one too because had he got it wrong he might have received a second yellow card.

35 min It’s been a stop-start first half, literally and figuratively. Alisson’s excellent early save from Dragusin was the closest we’ve come to a goal.

33 min: Chance for Liverpool. Tsimikas’s curling free-kick is met by Mac Allister, 10 yards out, but he has to jump backwards to meet it and can only head straight at Kinsky. Not an easy chance.

32 min Jota, such a clever, slippery player, escapes Bissouma 30 yards from goal and is bundled over. A clear yellow card.

30 min: Liverpool substitution Endo replaces Quanash, who is able to walk off the field. It might be a calf injury.

29 min Wataru Endo, usually a holding midfield player, is getting ready to replace Quansah. Liverpool do have Ibrahima Konate on the bench but he has only just returned from injury so they don’t want to risk him with effectively 75 minutes of the game remaining.

28 min Jarell Quansah is down and needs treatment. Liverpool are already short of centre-halves so they could do without losing Quansah.

27 min Spurs are ahead all on the underlying numbers, though there isn’t much in it. It’s an improvement on the league game in December, though; at this stage of that match they were lucky to be only 1-0 down.

25 min We’ll let you know as soon as there is any official word on Rodrigo Bentancur’s injury.

23 min Spurs have been the better team in the first 23 minutes (well, 14 because of the injury). But Salah gives them a warning with a first-time effort from 20 yards that goes not far wide. He cut inside from the right, lent the ball to Gakpo and then whipped a shot back across goal. Kinsky had it covered.

21 min Spurs win the ball on the halfway line and break at pace. Eventually Son beats Bradley with a stepover and drives a low cross that is slightly behind Solanke, six yards out at the near post. He tries to improvise but clips the ball off his right leg and behind for a goalkick.

18 min Kinsky waits for a long ball forward to bounce into the penalty area and is almost robbed by Jota. He seemed pretty relaxed about the whole thing so let’s assume it was the equivalent of a good leave outside off stump even though the ball just missed the stumps.

17 min “As a Liverpool fan, I’ll take 0-0 today, hoping and believing we will finish the job at home,” says Espen Bommen. “The prize for a 0-0 is just too tempting.”

Did I say I’d watch Speed 2: Cruise Control every night for a year if this ends 0-0? I’ve no idea why it would auto-correct to that from ‘Premier League Years 1995-96’.

16 min Play resumes with another corner, which is collected with ease by Alisson.

15 min: Spurs substitution After a delay of almost 10 minutes, Rodrigo Bentancur is replaced by Brennan Johnson. He’ll go to the right wing with Kulusevski moving into midfield.

12 min Bentancur has been moved carefully onto a stretcher. We haven’t seen a replay of the incident yet and it’s hard to know what the injury might be; I don’t really want to speculate at this stage.

11 min Bentancur is still down and surely won’t be able to continue. The body language of the players suggests the situation, while obviously serious, isn’t life-threatening. That’s a strange and unpleasant thing to type but we all remember the scenes in Copenhagen and also at White Hart Lane when Fabrice Muamba collapsed.

9 min As for that Alisson save, the corner from the right was missed by Bentancur and then turned back towards goal. Dragusin, maybe eight yards out, adjusted his feet to sidefoot a low, first-time shot that was saved really smartly to his right by Alisson.

8 min Bentancur stooped to try to head the corner, fell face down on the pitch and then didn’t move. He’s being treated and there is a stretcher ready. The Spurs players are chatting amongst themselves, which is a relatively good sign, though there is still plenty of concern. Brennan Johnson is preparing to come on.

7 min The corner leads to Alisson making a fine save from Dragusin, but there is real concern over Rodrigo Bentancur, who is flat out on the turf.

6 min Spurs have started well and are winning the ball in some good positions. Another iffy pass out of defence eventually leads to Van Dijk – who wasn’t at fault – conceding a corner. He turns round and shakes his head wearily. He’s not angry, just disappointed.

4 min A dodgy square pass from Tsimikas goes to Solanke in the area. Van Dijk forces him away from goal, Solanke tries to find Kulusevski and the ball is eventually lumped clear.

3 min Salah sprays an early diagonal pass over the top to Gakpo, who cuts inside with purpose but then runs into a crowd of recovering Spurs defenders.

2 min “I misread that Spurs signing rumour Simon Syphus as Sisyphus, the unlucky lad in Greek mythology condemned to push a rock up hill, only to fail over and over again,” begins Paul Griffin. “Eternally in fact. It’s a crying shame there is no parallel with Simon Sisyphus’s new club, or we could concoct a tortured gag about his predicament. Or perhaps the torture ends tonight…”

THAT WAS THE GAG. SIMON SYPHUS. SI SYPHUS. And yes I know it doesn’t work phonetically and on reflection I should have given a nod to Sissy Spacek but my brain isn’t what it was, and it wasn’t much in the first place.

1 min Peep peep! Spurs kick off from right to left as we watch.

The second leg will be played at Anfield on Thursday 6 February, 2029, largely because of the Champions League parking its tanks on the Carabao lawn. The first leg is about to begin.

“A night at the opera!” is the subject of Matthew Lever’s email. Hauling that metaphorical ship further uphill, here’s (Timo) Werner Herzog on following Spurs. Possibly.”

“Fitzcarraldo was a very fine film, didn’t need to read the subtitles to understand the plot,” says Jeremy Boyce. “Unlike Tottenham these days. I would think of Ange and Tottenham more like Klaus’s daughter, Natasha, in Paris, Texas. Some much-needed excellent aesthetics and increased pulse rate following a long period of desertic drought.”

“Fitzcarraldo was one of the coolest movies I ever saw on the big screen,” writes Joe Pearson, “especially when you knew beforehand all the craziness that went into getting it filmed. The only other visual spectacle of that time that I can compare it to is Kurosawa’s Kagemusha. Brilliant!”

Aren’t writers supposed to make the readers feel uneducated rather than the other way round?

A reminder of the teams

Tottenham Hotspur (4-3-3) Kinsky; Pedro Porro, Dragusin, Gray, Spence; Bergvall, Bentancur, Bissouma; Kulusevski, Solanke, Son.
Substitutes: Austin, Dorrington, Johnson, Lankshear, Moore, Olusesi, Reguilon, Werner, Yang Min-hyuk.

Liverpool (4-3-3) Alisson; Bradley, Quansah, Van Dijk, Tsimikas; Jones, Gravenberch, Mac Allister; Salah, Jota, Gakpo.
Substitutes: Kelleher, Endo, Konate, Diaz, Nunez, Chiesa, Elliott, Robertson, Alexander-Arnold.

Referee Stuart Attwell.

“Everybody knows that Father Ted: Speed 3 was the real sequel (and one that you could actually watch for a year),” writes Justin Kavanagh. “ When Father Dougal takes over Pat Mustard’s milk round, and finds out that the booby-trapped vehicle cannot drop below 4 miles an hour, the drama is unbearable. A bit like Ange taking over from Ryan Mason, careering the team toward doom, with no alternative means of stopping it. I don’t think Spurs have a prayer tonight.”

They should have started the game very early in the morning and put Pat Mustard at centre-back.

“I’m not usually one to cut any of the Big Six some slack (even with PSR most of them have got more brass na wit, as they might say in Yorkshire),” begins Richard Hirst, “but you look at the strength of the two benches and you feel just a little bit of sympathy for Ange.”

Yeah but look at the strength of Spurs’ treatment room.

“Spurs’ new young goalie will have a busy debut against my Reds anyway so we shouldn’t load another burden on him by giving him a funny but wrong name,” writes Ernst Draxl. “It’s Antonin Kinsky.”

Thanks, those have been changed now. They were typos (it’s been a while) rather than attempts at hilarity.

Read Arne Slot on contracts and quadruples

All the players are fit at the moment but if we drop points when we have injuries, people say it is because you have injuries. If Mo [Salah] misses a penalty against [Real] Madrid he is distracted by his contract situation. If Trent [Alexander-Arnold] has not his best performance [against Manchester United] he is distracted by the contract situation.

If they play really well nobody tells me: ‘That’s because they have a contract situation.’ We always try to find arguments but nine out of 10 times the best argument is the quality of the team you face or the gameplan the other team has.

“I would rate Basic Instinct 2 as the worst sequel (and totally unnecessary too) but I agree Speed 2 was terrible,” writes Krishnamoorthy V. “Even Dafoe could not save it.”

Do you realise how hard I’m fighting to resist the lure of the J key right now.

If you do this quiz your life will be better (for about 120 seconds)

Ange Postecoglou on Son Heung-min

We are a team that is very disrupted, that is not playing with a fluency that it can play with. We’re asking players to play in positions that they are totally unfamiliar with. But when we’re at our best, I still think you’ll see Sonny’s return – in terms of his ability to score goals and be really effective for us. He’s going through a tough trot but we’re going through a tough trot. That goes hand in hand.

From the archive: classic Spurs v Liverpool matches

So, then, the Titanic. That went down a month after Tom Mason and Ernie Newman had given Tottenham a 2-1 victory at Anfield on 16 March 1912. Who’d have thought it would take the Lilywhites another 73 years to record their next win at Liverpool? And that – this is eerie – they would record it on exactly the same day of the year?

Garth Crooks was the hero for Peter Shreeves’s side, who had designs on the championship. Reigning champions Liverpool had been playing erratically all season, with Kevin MacDonald – a good player, just not a great one – no replacement for the departed Graeme Souness.

This result – Crooks scoring the winner with 19 minutes to go, following up a Micky Hazard shot which had been spilled by Bruce Grobbelaar – was celebrated wildly by Spurs. Partly because of the lifting of the historical millstone the players were allowed to keep their shirts as souvenirs, at a time when such practices were rarer, but mainly because it looked like being the symbolic catalyst to win the title.

“The name of the new Spurs goalie is strongly reminiscent of the late German acting firebrand Klaus Kinski,” notes Sandr- Peter Oh. “Come to think of it, managing Spurs must feel a little like trying to drag a ship over a mountain while listening to opera.”

In other news, Spurs have reportedly agreed a deal for MK Dons’ teenage defender Simon Syphus.

Team news: Kinsky makes Spurs debut

Preamble