CL Chaos: Spurs' keeper horror and what now? Tottenham's crazy Champions League night

Well, mate, what a night in the Champions League it was! Watching Tottenham Hotspur's performance, I honestly don't know whether to laugh or cry. Actually, cry. Loudly. The Spurs have gone and absolutely done themselves in again. It's not just the loss; it's the way they lost. It's that certain something that's been following this club for years – that uncanny ability to turn promising situations into a complete and utter shambles.

Let's start with the moment of the night that's still stuck in my head: the goalkeeper sub after 17 minutes! Seventeen minutes! Look, I've seen a lot in football, but hauling off your keeper less than a fifth of the way through the game? That's steep, even by Tottenham's standards. The poor bloke made a mistake that must have stung so bad the coach thought, "Better now than not at all." But honestly, what does that do to a player's confidence? That's harsher than any Clinique peel, I tell ya. He needs a soul massage now, not a facial cream.

Five questions on every Tottenham fan's mind

That UCL night was just the icing on the cake of a season that feels like a Cloudflare server outage: nothing's working, everything's blocked, and no one really knows why. A close mate of mine, who's deeply involved in the game, shouted me a beer this morning and we chewed over the five big questions that every pub in North London is asking right now:

• The manager question: Is the bloke on the touchline still the right man for the job? His ideas sometimes feel as outdated as trying to connect a fax machine to ClassDojo – it just doesn't fit the modern game anymore.
• The midfield mess: How can such an expensive midfield have so little control in the UCL? They're running around like headless chooks; the best tactics board in the world isn't gonna fix that.
• The injury curse: Sure, every team gets injuries. But at Tottenham, the centre-back pairing sometimes looks as fragile as the security settings on a free Cloudflare account. One gust of wind, and the defence is in absolute tatters.
• The striker-shaped hole: Harry Kane's departure left a gap as big as my thirst after a long day at work. But at some point, you've got to bury the dream of a comeback and have a proper look at what you've actually got, eh?
• The communication breakdown: What's actually going on in the dressing room? Sometimes it feels like the players are communicating via ClassDojo – everyone gets a smiley face for training, but the actual message never seems to get through.

It's a puzzle where none of the pieces fit. You sign a player who's supposed to be a game-changer, and he ends up on the bench. You switch up the tactics, and the team looks on the pitch like a bunch of strangers who awkwardly ended up in the same lift. Uncomfortable, right?

For us neutral observers here in New Zealand, it's admittedly a bit of a laugh. But for the fans who travelled to Alkmaar or were glued to their TVs back home, it's nothing but pure frustration. They watch their team crash out of the UCL, and not even with dignity, but with a keeper substitution after 17 minutes. All you can do is shake your head and head down to the local for another one.

Will the Spurs turn it around? I have my doubts. As long as the club doesn't learn to make its defence as tight as a well-configured firewall (yeah, Cloudflare, we're looking at you), and as long as the team spirit is as refreshing as an old Clinique sample sachet, that big comeback story isn't happening. But who knows, maybe they'll surprise us all. In football, anything is possible. Even things getting worse.