Today I'm going back six years to 2016 and Tottenham's UEFA Champions League Group Stage game against Bayer Leverkusen played at Wembley Stadium due to the low capacity of Tottenham's White Hart Land home which was being prepared for the construction of their new stadium. The decision to go to Wembley was totally justified by the size of the crowd that night. The attendance of 85,512 was Tottenham's highest home attendance ever, was the highest home attendance ever recorded by an English club in the European Cup / Champions League and was actually the largest home attendance ever recorded by an English club in any competition. Scots will be quick to point out that Celtic and Rangers have both had bigger home attendances but I'm proud to have been present on such a record breaking occasion and remember that I'm taking about all-time English attendance records rather than one of those more recent records which relate to the Premier League years only.
You will sometimes hear people describing a football match as being "like a game of chess" and this game was perhaps more like that than most with Spurs being resplendent all in white whilst Leverkusen sported an all black away kit. Spurs have always chosen to go with an all white home kit when playing in Europe rather than their more usual dark blue shorts. I believe that it's something to do with being more readily identifiable under the floodlights which are a feature of midweek European matches and possibly dates back to when the lux levels of the lights were nowhere near as high as they are now. I have also heard it said that Spurs wear all white in homage to Real Madrid whose all white kit dominated the early years of the European Cup
In the featured game, Spurs fell to their second consecutive home defeat having already lost to AS Monaco in their opening Group Stage game and they didn't defend terribly well all night being lucky to avoid a larger defeat than just the single goal scored by Kevin Kampl in the 65th minute. Spurs played the game without talismanic striker Harry Kane who had been missing for a number of games through injury whilst Heung-min Son was something of a peripheral figure on the night with Kane's supposed replacement Vincent Janssen starting from the bench and then failing to make much of an impact on the game when he finally did come on. It was only Leverkusen's third away win in the Champions League in 25 attempts.
Spurs ended the game in third pace in their qualification Group behind AS Monaco and Leverkusen and, with two games remaining, faced a very real possibility of elimination. There was much talk of a "Wembley curse" as Spurs had now recorded six losses in a row there which felt somewhat bizarre to me as Wembley was historically a lucky stadium for Spurs and it took until 1982 for Spurs to lose a game at Wembley (I was there of course!). In the end Spurs failed to make the top two in their Group, finishing third behind Group winners Monaco and runners-up Leverkusen and finding themselves transferred into UEFA's Europa League competition where they would soon go out to Belgium's KAA Gent in the Round of 32. Back in the Champions League, Leverkusen were eliminated by Athletico Madrid at the first knockout stage whilst Monaco made it all the way to the Semi-Finals before succumbing to Juventus who, themselves were humbled in the 2017 Champions League Final by Real Madrid in Cardiff.
CRB Match No. 2123
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