Tottenham 1 Aston Villa 2: Another early Spurs exit, Emery's depth delivers and Richarlison's injury
Jack-Pitt Brooke, Elias Burke and Conor O'Neill analyse the key talking points from Aston Villa's FA Cup third-round win at Tottenham
Following a dispiriting period that produced just one win in six Premier League games, an FA Cup third-round tie against Aston Villa offered Tottenham Hotspur a chance to breathe new life into their campaign.
A cup run last season — all the way to glory in the Europa League — rescued a dismal 2024-25 campaign. So could they use this match to inject some impetus into Thomas Frank’s first year in charge?
Unfortunately for Spurs and their head coach, they came up against a Villa side which had won 12 of their previous 14 games in all competitions and which have designs on finishing this campaign with a trophy of their own.
Emi Buendia put the visitors ahead with a powerful drive at the end of a well-worked team move and Morgan Rogers doubled their advantage in first-half stoppage time.
That might have broken the home team, but Spurs actually dominated for long periods in the second half and showed the kind of fight that will have heartened Frank.
Wilson Odobert’s excellent low finish after 54 minutes prompted a long period of Spurs pressure but they could not find a way through against a resilient Villa side, who held on to reach the fourth round. To add to Tottenham’s problems, forward Richarlison limped off with an injury early in the first half.
Jack-Pitt Brooke, Elias Burke and Conor O’Neill analyse the key talking points from the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
What happened to Spurs’ love affair with the FA Cup?
There are many different ways to show Spurs’ decline in recent years, but one of the clearest is in the FA Cup.
Tottenham used to be synonymous with this competition, but they have not won it since 1991. Under Harry Redknapp and Mauricio Pochettino, they would often reach semi-finals but then fail at the penultimate hurdle. Now they do not even do that.
Tottenham have not gone beyond the fifth round of the FA Cup since 2018, a quite remarkably poor record for one of the bigger teams in the country. But in the past seven seasons before this one, all of their exits were in the fourth or fifth round. This is the first third-round exit since 2014, when Tim Sherwood was in charge.
Spurs desperately needed a cup run this year. They are already out of the League Cup, they are going nowhere in the Premier League and the serious end of the Champions League will be beyond them. This would have been their only route to excitement, their only chance to compete for something and try to rebuild some of that much-needed unity between players, fans and coach.
Now that must wait for another year.
Jack Pitt-Brooke
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