Spurs go to Wolves on Wednesday night seeking to reverse the December result at White Hart Lane. Kevin Doyle’s winner that day was the last time we conceded in the league at home, a good record but one lost at the moment in the angst about what’s going on at the other end. The 0-0 against Villa on Saturday typified many of our performances this season in that despite playing well enough to win the game, we couldn’t nick the goal we deserved. Wolves never built on their win over us. They’re in 19th place, level on points with West Ham. They’ve won only three of their 12 home games this season whilst scoring just nine goals, the same amount we tallied in one game of course. Their last league win was on December 20th when they beat Burnley.
What’s Harry going to do about the lack of goals? On paper this looks like a good game in which to reintroduce Gudjohnsen to the Premier League and let us all see what he’s got in the tank but that’ll entirely depend on how fit he is. The same goes for Pavlyuchenko. Ideally, following his efforts against Leeds, Pav will follow on down the path to rehabilitation recently furrowed by David Bentley but again, this is reliant on fitness, both physical and mental in his case.
Kranjcar is the top goalscorer in midfield with six but he’s not currently in Redknapp’s first choice eleven and doesn’t have a history of being a prolific scorer anyway. Bentley, Jenas and Modric are intermittent with their netfinders whilst Huddlestone’s radar is often set too high or wide to trouble opposing keepers. So at the moment the pressure is still on Defoe to produce the goods and the goals.
Early team news indicates that King, Assou-Ekotto, Lennon and of course Woodgate and Cudicini are still out. Bassong should come in for Ledley unless Redknapp thinks Kaboul needs an outing.
Pedro Mendes’ favourite man in black Mark Clattenburg is the man in charge in the middle, well as much ‘in charge’ as he ever is.
Mick McCarthy will no doubt take the pragmatic approach, defence will be the best form of defence in his book, and so we can probably expect to witness the latest in what’s turning out to be a long line of sieges. That shouldn’t stop us though. It’ll be tight but we should bag a very welcome three points.
By MF
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