It was not how Antonio Conte had envisaged his return to Chelsea, the club where he enjoyed such success for two seasons before everything went bang, his departure marked by acrimony and a long-running legal case.
Everything had gone pretty smoothly and impressively for Conte on the domestic front since his arrival at Tottenham in early November but this was quite the unravelling, the only consolation being that his team are still just about alive ahead of the second leg of this Carabao Cup semi-final.
Spurs’s defending in the first half was almost impossibly bad. If Kai Havertz’s early opener owed much to their looseness, the second was entirely down to it, Japhet Tanganga’s attempted clearing header smacking into Ben Davies and flying in for a darkly comic own goal.
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- January 6, 2022
