Spurs can turn to seed of hope
top of group H and seeded in the last 16.
Mauricio Pochettino would rather try to secure those here and take the foot off the pedal completely against Apoel next month, so will look to fi eld as strong a team as is sensible given the current fl urry of fi xtures.
Long- term absentees Toby Alderweireld and Victor Wanyama are the only two that he has left behind but, with Kane suffering problems before the international week and taken off with 15 minutes to go at the Emirates on Saturday, Pochettino, right, may use it as a chance to rest him completely.
He said that he intends to name his starting XI today after assessing the players’ mood as much as anything during their fi nal training session at Dortmund’s being Westfalenstadion yesterday evening. Most of the players will be chomping at the bit following that reversal three days ago and certainly Eriksen is no exception.
“We have another game straight away, you don’t have a lot of time to rethink or redo anything, you just go with the fl ow, you have to take all the positive things with you into Tuesday,” he said. “You can win some, you can lose some and of course you don’t want to lose the derby because we know what it means to everyone.
“But I still think we should be feeling confi dent going into the rest of the season. It’s probably good that we have a game so quickly afterwards and you can have a bit of revenge, you can show the world that you are a bit better than what you saw last Saturday. “The players spoke about it after the game and at training and so forth. There has not been any team meeting, you can’t call it a crisis after you lose one game.” Tottenham are not the only ones looking to Dortmund for improvement. Their north London rivals announced yesterday that they had secured the services of Dortmund’s highly acclaimed chief scout Sven Mislintat to fi ll the same role at the Emirates. The 45- year- old is crediting for discovering such gems as Robert Lewandowski, Pierre- Emerick Aubameyang, Shinji Kagawa and Ousmane Dembele and will start work in England in the next couple of weeks.
“We would have liked to keep him,” said Dortmund’s head of communications, Sascha Fligge.
“He helped and improved scouting at the club, made it more professional. We have a very good relationship with him and because of what he achieved, we decided this morning that we would release him.”
Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said: “Identifying and developing talent is a core part of our philosophy and Sven has an outstanding track record over many years. We look forward to him taking our existing recruitment approach forwards.”