Tottenham Hotspur are en route to Istanbul, Turkey ahead of Thursday’s Europa League match against Galatasaray. And as usual, Spurs’ social media team posted a video of players boarding the plane, giving us a bit of an idea of who we might expect to see play when the match kicks off.
There’s a good number of senior players traveling, including Ben Davies, Son Heung-Min, Fraser Forster (why you gotta do the camera like that, Fras?) Guglielmo Vicario, Mikey Moore, Archie Gray, James Maddison, Pape Sarr, and Radu Dragusin.
But while I’m pretty adept by now at recognizing player faces out of context of what’s happening on the pitch, there were some players in that video I didn’t recognize. Some quick gleaning of Spurs online sources reveal that Tottenham are bringing a bunch of youth academy and U21 players along with the first team, including Callum Olusesi, Alfie Dorrington, Dante Cassanova, and Luca Williams-Barnet — and those are just the ones we know of now.
Two players we know will NOT be on the plane are Cuti Romero, who has a strained toe ligament and is set to miss Spurs’ next two games before (apparently) reporting for Argentina duty, and Richarlison, who pulled his hamstring in Spurs’ 4-1 win over Aston Villa this past Sunday.
Now, Tottenham also brought a bunch of youth players to Hungary in Spurs’ win over Ferencvaros, and Ange Postecoglou later said they made the trip for training purposes and not because they were expected to play senior European minutes. But could things be different this time? Spurs are 3-0 in the Europa League group stage so far and Galatasaray away is almost certainly the trickiest fixture they’ll face thus far. Considering the minutes in the first team players’ legs already, it wouldn’t necessarily be a surprise if Big Ange decides to roll with a B-C team away in Europe, and some of the youngsters could be beneficiaries to that decision. It’d be a bit of a departure for Ange who famously wants to win every match, but who knows!
