Spurs resemble a pile of sticks leaning against a wall and the rampaging Moisés Caicedo was happy to dismantle them
Sitting through this tightly stitched but still oddly shapeless game of football, you kept thinking: what does this remind me of? The trapped energy, the collisions. The sense of something always but never really happening.
Oh yes. Watching the full 90 minutes of Chelsea’s narrow but still comfortable 1-0 defeat of Tottenham was like staring at one of those hypnotic drunken city centre brawls that appear on social media from time to time, where nothing ever really seems to start or stop, where the whole thing is just a kind of tortured flailing, but one that must also be pored over endlessly in the comments.
A man in a red hoodie is doing air kung fu kicks. Haymakers are being thrown at no one in particular. Someone falls through a fire door. Yellow-jacketed man tries to break it up, wanders off, comes back waving a bin lid. It is undeniably mesmerising. Energy of some kind is definitely being expended. But you can’t help thinking if only someone could actually land a blow, just one, they could put the whole thing to bed pretty quickly.
It was fitting it should be Moisés Caicedo who provided that moment of incision at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Not just because he was the best player on the pitch, but because this was also a game that might have been designed just to showcase his own extreme skillset, the king of broken play, the Maradona of the crash tackle.
