Tottenham Exact Revenge on Leicester City

Tottenham Hotspur win 2-0 over Leicester City and advance into the fourth round of the FA Cup against Colchester United.

Since the opening minute of the game, despite the slow pace, Tottenham dominated Leicester in the first half. And while the score was 1-0 at the break, Mauricio Pochettino and his entire coaching staff found a weak spot in Leicester’s defense after Ben Chilwell and Demarai Gray were starting again in the FA Cup.

With both 19-year-olds in Claudio Ranieri’s starting lineup, the plan was to go after both Gray and Chilwell with a plethora of attacks coming from Kyle Walker, Nacer Chadli, Érik Lamela, Christian Eriksen and Son Heung-min in the first half alone. It may have taken 39 minutes to get the game’s first goal, but once Tottenham got the goal, it was fully deserved after taking the Foxes out of the game early and often.

Prior to this latest meeting between Leicester and Tottenham, their third match against one another in the past 10 days. The first two games this month featured a difficult Leicester defense to break down. It also showed that Claudio Ranieri’s defense is mostly parking the bus to set up their counterattacking offense.

Meaning that Tottenham found it hard to dribble up the middle of the pitch and had to use width and space on the flanks to do their damage during this game. That’s how the first goal was scored, and after the match became more open in the second half, with Spurs’ main attack coming from the right, they flipped it to the other side for a few possessions and got their second goal.

Obviously, having Leicester try to play more offensively helped out as well because they needed an equalizer to remain in this game. But, doing that ultimately cost their team in the end when Nacer Chadli doubled Tottenham’s win, because their defense were prioritizing on their attack as opposed to defending.

Now leading up to this game, Mauricio Pochettino made seven changes to his lineup with the biggest change being the inclusion of Nabil Bentaleb — who started and finished the full 90 minutes. The Argentine manager recently said that the Algerian midfielder would get a chance to play this season. And he delivered on his words.

And while it wasn’t a perfect game, Bentaleb did have a couple of miscues, he was solid enough. Hopefully the 21-year-old can build on his performance so that he can get further appearances in the FA Cup and potentially in the Europa League.

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So with that being said, and the game ending in a 2-0 victory for Tottenham. There are a couple of things to take note of about this win.

First of all, this is Spurs’ first victory over the Foxes this season after drawing twice and losing once. Secondly, Tottenham got to exact revenge on their two losses against Leicester in two different competitions.

The first one was payback for losing a heartbreaker at home in the Premier League just seven days ago. And the other game, was another heartbreaking defeat against the Foxes in last year’s FA Cup in the fourth round, which was also at White Hart Lane.

So, after four total meetings across two competitions, it’s finally time to say goodbye to Leicester City and not having to face them any more for the rest of the season. Each fixture, while entertaining, was also frustrating to watch as Tottenham had difficulty trying to unlock Leicester’s defense. It will be interesting to see where the Foxes go from here and how they will do moving forward.

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Speaking of moving forward, let’s look ahead to Tottenham’s next two games.

The first one is against Crystal Palace in Selhurst Park which is a very difficult place to play even though their home record doesn’t show it this campaign in the Premier League: a 4W-2D-5L record. Also with an earlier loss to Tottenham in the reverse fixture back in September, Alan Pardew will be reminding his team about that game.

And finally, Spurs’ fourth round opponent in the FA Cup, will be against Colchester United. On paper, this should be an easy matchup and Tottenham will no doubt be heavy favorites. But like Mauricio Pochettino always stresses: “In football, anything can happen.”. So it’s best to take things one game at a time. That means worry about Crystal Palace first and then the FA Cup.