Your modern day football fans all love to see bias in absolutely everything that has been written about association football and like clockwork they will sometimes be right. We are very, very, very biased in favor of Erik Lamela, the greatest sh*thouse the Premier League has ever seen and someone we miss terribly now that he is wasting away in Spain or such a football backwater rather than delighting us with his antics on the regular in good football, English football.
Whenever we’re feeling down – and while Blue Monday might be a load of old marketing gimmicks, there’s no denying that a gray day in January when Premier League games continue to be postponed is gloomy enough – we love to remember Erik the Magnificent and all the great and so often underestimated things he did for the game in this country.
Obviously the guys at FIFA feel the same way because they only went to award him the Puskas award for that extraordinary goal which thrilled us all and annoyed Alan Smith.
🚨🏆 FIFA #Puskas The price goes to @ErikLamela for his sensational goal for @SpursOfficial against Arsenal!
A strike worth calling #The best 🤩
— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) January 17, 2022
More than enough justification, I think you’ll agree (and I don’t care if you don’t, because bias) to pull out a top 10 of our favorite Lamela moments.
10) Have a navy blue Santa at his child’s Christmas party
At number 10 only to instantly highlight the kind of person we are dealing with here. There’s something joyful about a player – especially a foreigner – joining a club and becoming as absurdly obsessed with the club as the most hopelessly addicted fan. Lamela is one such player, instantly going completely COYS in that he wouldn’t allow a traditional red Santa at a kid’s party. There’s a little sparkle that tells you a lot about his antics on the pitch.
Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Erik Lamela makes sure Santa is dressed in blue instead of red because he’s so Spurs! 🥰💙#THFC #COYS pic.twitter.com/2MTRYGjkzj
– Last word on Spurs 🇮🇹 (@LastWordOnSpurs) December 25, 2019
9) The Burnley Water Bottle Mischief
Classic Lamela, this one, coming off the bench to help Spurs defend a shaky 1-0 lead both under Jose Mourinho’s reign of terror when they were visibly bad at doing so. Quickly and correctly identifying Burnley’s most likely route down the game, Lamela produces a fitting tackle on Dwight McNeil to let him know he’s there. Enough for most players, for mere mortals, but just the starter for the Machiavellian Lamela. When Burnley’s physio arrives on the scene, Lamela nonchalantly steals his water bottle. It really freaks me out that there are people who honestly think that winning a Carabao or whatever is somehow better and more important than that.
8) Call Jack Wilshere a pussy
North London derbies were the perfect canvas for an artist like Lamela. The heat and fire of the occasion ideal fodder for its brand of infuriating absurdities. With his true masterpiece still a few years away, sending Wilshere into a blind rage by hacking it and then saying “F*** you, pussy” was the kind of thing that makes you wonder what’s going on goes through the minds of those Spurs fans – and they always existed until the end – who never rated their best player of all time.
Look at his face, just look at his face.
Erik Lamela to Jack Wilshere:
“Fuck you p*ssy”.
God how can you not love that little Argentinian bastard. Knew exactly what he was doing, just look at the smile on his face.
😂👏🏻#THFC #COYS pic.twitter.com/f6Imz3y4Xk
— Ricky Sacks 🎙 (@RickySacks) February 10, 2018
7) Anthony Martial’s red card
It’s barely 15 months since Manchester United 1-6 Tottenham happened, but that already seems like an old and dubious story. Did it really happen? Impossible, surely. Too stupid. Lamela didn’t bother with such thrift as to join in the goal fun on this occasion, channeling all his energies into the shit. We’ll never know how decisive his actions were to the end result, but it’s safe to assume that “pretty bloody decisive” would be somewhere close. A bizarre play had already seen Spurs overturn an early deficit to lead 2-1 before Lamela’s 28th-minute masterpiece in which he would end up beating Martial so badly that the Frenchman simply had no other choice than to respond in the most minor way imaginable. That was all Lamela needed. He went down, Martial went away. As United struggled to come to terms with the stupidity of it all and the headers in red disappeared everywhere you looked, Spurs got a few more goals in the eight minutes that followed.
6) Yelling at Ajax fans
Alright, even we are willing to admit that Lamela has to take second place behind Lucas Moura in the history of Spurs’ most astonishing victory in recent times. But that doesn’t mean our hero didn’t play his part, shrewdly deciding that Lucas’ 96th-minute winner was the perfect time to start yelling at the heartbroken and dispirited Ajax fans. That only one of them moves to throw a bottle at him is frankly astonishing.
Lucas Moura v Ajax
“Ohhhh they did” pic.twitter.com/ju2jQpbhTI— George (@StokeyyG2) January 16, 2022
5) Last minute ball against Ajax
But even that wasn’t his last or even his best contribution to that memorable evening. It’s funny how memory can deceive; we see, naturally, this final and decisive goal all the time. The commentary even calls it “the last kick of the match”. But that was not the case. Despite the goal scored in the sixth minute of added time, there was what, at the time, seemed like an interminable period of play before the final whistle. Countless moments where Spurs had the time and the opportunity to do something more Spurs than any Spurs they had ever done before. So what did Lamela do? He just casually completed some of his trademark ball rolls at the edge of his own area as every Spurs fan on earth tried to process what had just happened and what could still happen. In those crazy times, Lamela stayed in his process and stuck to what he knew. These are the things that separate the good from the great.
4) Technically not scoring a hat-trick against Leicester
Strip away everything else and Lamela brings two things to a football game. First, he treats every match as if it were a World Cup final, and second, he brings pure chaotic energy. In a way, that perhaps makes him the perfect footballer for the final day of the league season, a day when logic and common sense traditionally go out the window and the real importance of a match is often inversely proportional to how entertaining it turns out. to be. He had already had a precedent in last-day madness, scoring that of Spurs’ 5-1 thrashing at already-relegated Newcastle to cede second place to Arsenal in 2016.
Spurs were already assured of a top-four finish by the time of the final game of 2017/18 against Leicester, but were still a little miffed to find themselves 3-1 down at the start of the second half at Wembley. Fifteen minutes later, Lamela had scored three to put Spurs 4-3. Of course, Leicester would go on to equalize for 4-4 and force Harry Kane to score the actual winner, and the joyless on the dubious goals panel would officially award the second of Lamela’s three goals to Chrstian Fuchs, but the real chiefs know what happened that day.
3) Getting his ass kicked by Virgil van Dijk
As difficult as it may be to fathom now, in the dark and distant past of early 2018, Liverpool and Spurs were direct rivals. The two were locked in a fight for Champions League qualification and Spurs arrived at Anfield in February in fifth place, two points behind their hosts in third. For a full appreciation of all that has changed in the four years since, Burnley were seventh.
It was a great game even before Lamela got involved in the final moments. Mo Salah gave Liverpool a third-minute lead which they held for 77 minutes. Then everything got silly. Victor Wanyama hit home a silly equalizer, before Harry Kane uncharacteristically missed a penalty. Salah then looked to have won the game for Liverpool with a very characteristic slalom run and an ingenious finish on Hugo Lloris in injury time. Enter Lamela, who picked up a touch from Van Dijk during an early pre-Colossus display at Liverpool and hit the ground running in his usual calm, undemonstrative fashion. Another penalty, and this time Kane got it right. The two would find themselves in the top four and then contest the Champions League final the following season.
2) The non-winner of Puskas Rabona against Asteras Tripolis
It takes a Lamela-level genius to steal the show in a Europa classic in which Harry Kane scores a hat-trick, then enters the net after Hugo Lloris is sent off and quickly slots in a consolation goal for the Greeks in his own net.
But Lamela did precisely that with such extraordinary purpose that at first glance on TV it looks like a glitch. Any lens that you have to instantly rewind just to figure out what happened is worth cherishing. That his later exploits allow for a debate over which Rabona was his best is a testament to the great man. This one, while undoubtedly in a low profile game, came from a greater distance and has an inherently pleasant trajectory it would have been deeply satisfying had it been produced by the ordinary, dreary kind of footballer who thinks using his right foot is a legitimate option.
1) Puskas Rabona winner against Arsenal
The very first goal awarded with the Puskas Award to be “just back”. Unbelievable it wasn’t Rabona’s best goal that Lamela has scored for Spurs. Judging by this, he might not even be in the top two for his career.
But it was quite special. The nutmeg on its way is a pure chef’s kiss. The fact that he arrived in what would ultimately be a pretty soft 2-1 NLD defeat makes him undeniably fitting as the last big moment of Lamela’s Spurs career, not least because he also managed to get himself kick out for, amazingly, the one and only time. during his eight years in England.
It should be noted that the Puskas criteria, an inevitably futile attempt to codify something as subjective as the size of a lens, contains the phrase “aesthetically significant”. It’s a perfect description of Lamela, a player who is far from the best and certainly not the most successful but who has brought so much to the sport.
And it proves once and for all that the decision to swap him for a member of Spain’s fifth-best Beatles tribute band – and send millions of pounds to Seville on top – is an act of extreme cultural vandalism that even the current government would balk. .
