Tottenham Hotspur’s season from hell continued on Tuesday when the team slumped to a 5-2 defeat to Atletico in the first leg of their Champions League Round of 16 tie.
The match saw inexperienced goalkeeper Antonin Kinsky subbed off in tears after only 17 minutes after conceding three goals in the match’s opening stages, including two as the direct result from his gaffes.
Spurs have now lost six straight matches for the first time in history and interim manager Igor Tudor moves to 0-4. The team has not won a league match since Dec. 28 and now sits in 16th on 29 points, only one clear of the relegation zone.
Speaking to Dutch outlet Ziggo Sport, Spurs centre-back Micky van de Ven called Tuesday’s match a nightmare.
“I’ll be completely honest with you, it’s actually a doomsday scenario, everything that could go wrong in the first 20 minutes went wrong,” the 24-year-old Netherlands defender said. “I can’t really say much more about it.”
Amid this dreadful run, van de Ven says he’s not even sure how to approach it anymore.
“You could just come out here and give the standard talk about how ‘We all need to stick together and work hard’, but right now we’re just taking blow after blow after blow,” the former Wolfsburg man said. “So it’s just really tough. And now we also have an important match this weekend [against Liverpool] that I won’t be able to play in because I’m suspended, of course [for a red card in Spurs’ 3-1 defeatto Crystal Palace on Mar. 5]. But yeah, it’s a really terrible period, I can tell you that. It’s really, really awful, man.”
Spurs are one of six teams to have competed in every Premier League season along with Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool and Manchester United. Tottenham was last relegated from the top flight in 1977.
