The official Spurs website is full of reports from players looking back on the 2010-11 season and while there’s nothing that you wouldn’t expect them to be saying, it was interesting to see them comment on the pivotal tie of our season.
Rewind 12 months from today and we were looking forward to our first Champions League tie with some trepidation and we knew that there were some dangerous sides in the preliminary rounds. Therefore, when we drew Young Boys, supposedly the weakest team in the hat, maybe some Spurs’ fans breathed a complacent sigh of relief.
At 3-0 down in the first leg however, all that complacency had clearly vanished.
“It was a slow start, I don’t think anybody expected it,” said Gareth Bale.
“It was on an astro-turf pitch but in a way it gave us the kick up the bum we might have needed for the rest of the season. We grew from there, built from there and created our season as we did.”
After goals from Sebastien Bassong and Roman Pavlyuchenko pulled us back to 3-2, a Peter Crouch hat trick in a 4-0 home win put us through to the next round.
“The second leg was great for me,” added Peter Crouch.
“I remember before the game there were quite a few nerves, thinking we might not make the group stages, so to get an early goal, to get a hat-trick and get through was a dream come true – it was brilliant.”
Whether we would have been able to turn round a 3-0 reverse we’ll never know so Bassong’s goal was vital and maybe Pav’s strike was indeed, the ‘goal of the season’.
If we’d lost this game there would have been no Inter Milan, no AC Milan and no Real Madrid and our season as a whole would have been very different indeed.
great goal from pav in berne. i knew we’d go through after that.
at 3-0 down all i could think of was the stick goons, chavs and spammers would give us!
COYS