It’s been a fair while since Middlesbrough and Tottenham last met. In fact, no senior players from that time are left at Tottenham since we picked up a 4-0 victory at White Hart Lane in March 2009.
That was a good day but it’s not always been that easy. Back in 2003 Spurs were battered by Boro and lost by 5 goals to 1. We were so bad on that day that even Massimo Maccarone scored against us! We’d had another bad day about 6 months before that when we were beaten 3-0 at the Lane with Maccarone scoring twice (I bet he loved playing against our tight-knit defence of Ben Thatcher, Christian Ziege, Dean Richards and Goran Bunjevcevic).
Overall though, our head to head record against Boro isn’t too bad. We’ve won 28 of the 79 games we’ve played against them and drew another 20. With 31 wins, Middlesbrough are ahead of us but a good performance today can see us take a step closer to parity with them and when you consider the start to the season that both sides have had, you wouldn’t bet against it.
With only 5 league games played so far it’s perhaps too soon to be looking at the stats in too much detail but so far Boro are looking pretty average. They’re in mid-table, have scored an average amount of goals and conceded an average amount of goals. They’re yet to win at home and have only picked up all 3 points on one occasion when they beat Sunderland by 2 goals to 1.
Spurs are doing much better. We’re third in the league, have the best defence in the league with only 2 goals conceded, scored 5 goals on the road (mostly thanks to Stoke) and although we haven’t looked outstanding yet, we’ve been hard to beat which is a good sign this early in the season.
We are going to need to keep an eye on Stuani and Negredo, both of whom have looked dangerous this season. We’re also going to have to overcome a defence that seems to have a number of quite highly rated players in it even if they have leaked a few goals this season.
How well we do will come down to a number of factors. For a start, fitness is going to be an issue. Will Dier, Dembele or Danny Rose start? If so, just how fit are they? If they don’t start then who comes in? We’ve already got Vincent Janssen stepping in for the unfortunate Harry Kane, we don’t want too much disruption in the side as it is bound to have an effect.
I’m going into this one quietly confident. We’re not as strong as I’d like to have been but there seems a good feeling around the club, certainly helped by a rash of new contracts being signed, and we need to get every point we can. This season will see more clubs than usual fighting it out for a Champions League spot and if you listen to Kyle Walker, we want to be in the conversation when it comes to title talk.
3 points from this game would certainly help in that respect.
COYS!
