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da 888casino: Football.London’s Tottenham Hotspur correspondent Alasdair Gold has revealed what every Spurs fan is dreading: Andros Townsend scoring the first goal at the club’s new stadium.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium will officially open on Wednesday, with Crystal Palace the first visitors in the Premier League.
What’s the word?
Townsend, of course, spent seven years at Spurs, making 93 appearances for the club.
He scored 11 goals and laid on 15 assists for the club during his spell, which was regularly interrupted by loan moves to the likes of Leyton Orient, Millwall and QPR.
However, he moved on after a row with Mauricio Pochettino in 2015, joining Newcastle United in January 2016. He joined Palace in the summer of the same year after the Magpies’ relegation and has since become a first-team regular.
And Gold, like many Spurs fans, is fearful of the ex-Spurs star coming back to haunt the club as the curtain is raised.
Asked if Townsend scoring the first goal was inevitable, Gold told Football FanCast: “That’s what everyone’s dreading isn’t it? Cutting in on his right foot and banging it in, that would be so horrific, it really would. It’d be the worst way to kick off the new stadium. You’d hope not.
“Pochettino has made this big deal about how the stadium will give a special energy to the team, a bit like White Hart Lane in its final year. Even the Under-18s. You could just tell there was a buzz about them, I know they’re young kids playing on a big stage but the crowd kind of carried them along and they never really had that at Wembley.
“It’s a bigger capacity but it never really felt like home. It was a big cavernous stadium, towards the end, the numbers were dropping and dropping.
“You’d think, with Spurs back here, it’s going to be packed. It was carnage, people trying to get tickets. It’s going to be so noisy and it’ll be so hyped up, you’d think that would get Spurs there because, yes, an Andros Townsend 1-0 winner would be a horrific way to open the stadium.”
Spursy
That term, Spursy, follows every Tottenham team and it seems more prevalent than ever now.
After their bitterly disappointing 2-1 loss to Liverpool, in which Hugo Lloris and Toby Alderweireld somehow conspired to score a farcical own goal, all attention turns to the new stadium.
Townsend is perhaps the archetypal former Spurs player; he rarely showed up when at the club but did enjoy the odd purple patch, characterised by a few goals from long range.
And, now at Palace, the fear, of course, is that he shrugs off the attention of Danny Rose at left-back and lets rip from range. With Lloris in goal, as long as it’s on target, it should go in.
It wouldn’t so much be deflating for Spurs fans as simply inevitable.
Those at the stadium had better hope that Gold’s nightmare doesn’t come true!