About this time last season, those of us that watch the Barclay's Premier League were witnessing the curious case of Blackpool, newly promoted from the Championship and still hanging around the top half of the table come the festive period. Well, we all know how that turned out, unfortunately for the Tangerines.
This season all three of the promoted squads have done alright. QPR has the money a their disposal to try to buy the players to stay up. Swansea has been junk on the road but in very good form at home in Wales. Norwich has played pretty much everybody tough and has garnered my respect as an EPL fan.
This match against Tottenham was always going to be tough though. You'd really be hard pressed to find an EPL side in better form coming than Spurs, and they certainly flexed their muscles against the Canaries, or at least Gareth Bale did. To say that the Spurs really controlled the match would not really be an understatement, they had the possession and the chances.
Norwich fought hard, but really had a hard time getting chances from what possession they did get. Their best chance of the first half came on 16 minutes as David Fox smacked a line drive on goal, only to be easily corralled by Brad Friedel.
The two sides emerged from the half time break still level at nil-nil. That's when Gareth Bale took over. His first goal came on 55 minutes as he took a ball from Adebayor in the center of the area and slotted it home to give Spurs the 0-1 lead. Then in the 67th minute, he put the final nail in the coffin, breaking away after a through ball from Modric and outrunning everyone on the pitch. He beat the 'keeper and put in the back of the Canary net to make it 0-2.
That was more than enough for Spurs. Norwich just could not fashion a real quality chance to save their lives and Tottenham held on for the 0-2 win, giving them an even bigger hold on one of the Champions League spots.
No comments:
Post a Comment