Habib Beye Watch at Tottenham

Habib Beye played the full game at centre half as Newcastle slipped further into the relegation mire with a miserable performance at White Heart Lane.

Newcastle mixed and matched formations and personnel throughout the ninety minutes but Spurs should have turned their dominance into goals and been out of sight by the last half hour. Instead, some heroic defending from the Mags and some procrastination in front of goal from Spurs gave Newcastle the opportunity to give the hosts a real scare over the last 15 mins.

The 3 - 5 - 2 formation used at Stoke quickly became 5 - 3- 2 with Duff in particular pinned down at left back as Spurs dominated. The Tottenham team had so much time on the ball that Huddlestone looked good spraying balls all over the pitch and drawing good saves from Harper with shots from distance. Lennon was dangerous all afternoon although Duff did well against him for the most part. The 3 central defenders for Newcastle all took turns to keep us in the match. First S.Taylor cutout a pass to Bent then Bassong and Beye both flung themselves to prevent shots in the box.

Newcastle offered very little going forward. Carrol and Owen were anonymous and service to the front two was limited. This partnership produced even less when Newcastle changed to 4 - 3 - 3 in the wake of S.Taylor's withdrawal. It was only with the introduction of Martins and Viduka that we looked a threat. Viduka did what Shola and Carrol have failed to do over recent weeks and held the ball up, knitting attacks together by retaining possession. This allowed Martins, Duff, Owen, Nolan and Jonas to make more purposeful attacking runs. Alan Smith also made an impact, breaking up play and providing some sensible passes to get things moving forward; more than Noland and Butt had done all game.

As Gazza has said in the press today. If we play like we did for the last 20 minutes, we've got a chance. The concern is that we may not have the players fit to play like that again. We need 3 home wins on the bounce to give ourselves a chance. Bearing in mind we only have 4 home wins so far, the size of the mountain is obvious. All we can do is hope there are 2 other teams worse than us in the run in.

Habib Beye Roundup.

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SkySports = 6
SkySports Player Rater = 5.7