No game is an island; every game is inevitably coloured by what has gone before. It is not quite five months since Tottenham last came north of the Arctic Circle and, for all that Thomas Frank insisted this is a “new situation”, that previous meeting with Bodø/Glimt in the semi-final of the Europa League can not but colour this one in the league phase of the Champions League.
There was an odd echo, too, in the buildup. Back then, the Glimt full-back Fredrik Sjøvold was dismissive of Tottenham’s pressing, which clearly riled Ange Postecoglou.
Bodø’s artificial pitch, inevitably, has drawn a lot of the attention, but Frank was determined to play down its significance. “It’s the same in Denmark, when I was coach for Brøndby, we were facing Nordjylland at that time. It was also a different surface. It’s the same today. It’s fine. They’re good here, they’re very good at home.
“There’s a lot of talk about the pitch. I rather want to praise the team, the Bodø team, and their coach, what they do. Because they do it quite consistently, home and away, the way they play.”
Frank turned down the opportunity to have his side train on the pitch. “If we have training here and we want to do a little bit of tactical work, with all due respect it would be a little bit more obvious what we would do. That’s the thing we like to keep for ourselves.
“If we train here, for how long we are allowed, 45 minutes? Is that going to make a difference? I know the surface is different. If you really want to get used to it, you need to train here day in, day out as Bodø do.”
Even at this short remove it is hard to fathom just how tense that game last season seemed at the time. Spurs led 3-1 from the first leg, but, largely because they conceded seven minutes from time when apparently in complete control, there was a fear they could somehow mess it up.
Tottenham’s history plus Angeball was a potent brew. Or rather the memory of Angeball, because Postecoglou had by then long since abandoned his ultra-attacking principles for something more orthodox and more effective. A scrappy game was settled by goals from Solanke and Pedro Porro in the space of six minutes midway through the second half. It was a functional way of winning, but it was the penultimate stage on the journey to triumph in Bilbao, so it stands as part of a glorious narrative.
For Frank, an away Champions League game against the same opponents simultaneously matters less and will probably be judged more harshly, but no team is ever going to rebound from finishing 17th in the Premier League directly to the sunlit uplands.
