Pape Matar Sarr and Oliver Skipp stood tall in Milan – but Spurs’ star names were anonymous

Tottenham Hotspur’s midfield duo started the night with 58 minutes of Champions League experience and zero starts in the competition between them.

They ended the evening with a combined 238 minutes under their belt, plenty of new admirers and wisdom beyond their combined 42 years on this planet.

When Rodrigo Bentancur tore the ACL in his left knee against Leicester City on Saturday, the immediate thought which entered the heads of the majority of Spurs supporters will have been a swear word. The second musing might well have been, ‘What on earth is the state of our midfield going to be in Milan?’.

If so, they need not have worried.

So competent and mature were the performances of Pape Matar Sarr , 20, and 22-year-old Oliver Skipp, if they did not vanquish the need for Bentancur, his fellow injured midfielder Yves Bissouma and the suspended Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, at the very least they filled a sizeable hole on an important night for the club.

Sarr in particular caught the eye. Like the team around him, he made a tepid, nervy start, but then grew in maturity and confidence. By the 20-minute mark he was angrily demanding the ball from team-mates, or chastising them for not giving it to him.

By this point, Sarr was playing better against AC Milan at San Siro than he had against League One side Portsmouth in a third round FA Cup tie last month.

He sprayed passes about, won tackles to start attacks, took players on, kept calm when surrounded by two or even three opponents, covered the mistakes of others and demanded more from his team-mates. When he advanced from midfield and had limited options, he stretched his arms out wide, asking for movement.

Sarr didn’t just display his talent here, he imposed his personality on a big game, on a big stage, in front of 70,000 extremely passionate Italians desperate for him to fail.

Nobody on the pitch touched the ball more than Sarr (77 times), nobody had more shots from open play than his three, nobody played more accurate long passes than his five and he was joint-second among all players involved for tackles won (five).

As his touch map below shows, Sarr did not sit in and dig a trench. He helped push the team on in attack as well as protecting the defence.

Alongside him, Skipp, although two years his senior, played the junior role in this partnership, but was no less important.

If Sarr was the macho dog-handler, Skipp was his faithful whippet, sniffing out danger.

He ran incessantly, he cut out passes, he did the running and recycling job, moving the ball briskly with no frills. His 92 per cent pass accuracy was only bettered on the night by Milan centre-back Simon Kjaer, which reflects his minimalist approach, one that helped Spurs maintain control for decent spells of the game.

There is a lot of positivity in this article and rightly so, given the inexperience of two players who are fourth and fifth in head coach Antonio Conte’s midfield pecking order.

And it is a positive that Skipp, Sarr and to a lesser extent goalkeeper Fraser Forster (who did all that was asked of him standing in for the injured Hugo Lloris) shone so brightly and brought some of the stability and normality Conte had called for pre-match.

It was just a shame the midfield pairing’s vastly more experienced team-mates did not meet the standards.

Dejan Kulusevski gave a second anonymous performance in four days, Cristian Romero was beaten on a couple of occasions (including for the only goal) and earned his sixth booking in five games for yet another needlessly wild challenge, while Son Heung-min has effectively become an empty shirt.

Spurs offered a bit from set pieces, but aside from Eric Dier’s free header from a late Ivan Perisic corner they created barely anything of note against an average Milan side. For a last-16 Champions League tie, the quality on show from both sides was vacuously poor.

At least in this first-leg defeat there was a glimmer of what lies ahead for Tottenham.

“They showed the trust we have in them,” Conte said of his fledgling midfield duo.

“They repaid this. I’m really happy with their performance. To play in this way in the Champions League and to play in San Siro with this atmosphere was normally tough for important players.

“This type of performance makes me more relaxed for the future. We had to consider we’ll finish the season with only three midfielders (with Bentancur and Bissouma out). So to have this type of performance makes me more relaxed because I can count on them.

“It’s my task to show my players I really trust them, rely on them. We need to try and improve and be prepared for the Premier League, the FA Cup and the second game against Milan.

“They’ll be the future of Tottenham, but they’re now the present.”

Bissouma might return for the business end of the season but for now it is just Hojbjerg, Skipp and Sarr for a period of important fixtures over the next month including derbies against West Ham United and Chelsea, an FA Cup trip to a Sheffield United side currently second in the Championship and the second leg against Milan on March 8.

On last night’s evidence, that will not be much of a problem but as seems to be the case with Spurs right now, as one fire is put out, another rages elsewhere — namely their anonymous, misfiring forwards.

That is an issue for West Ham’s visit at the weekend, but in Italy on Valentine’s Day, the supporters found a new love.

Harry Kane versus Chelsea (2015), Dele Alli versus Manchester United (2016), Harry Winks versus Real Madrid (2017): it has been a good while since a Tottenham youngster put in a performance at the highest level that made you sit up and say ‘Wow’, but this was it: Sarr versus AC Milan (2023).

(Top photo: Giuseppe Maffia/NurPhoto via Getty Images)