Mystery solved! It’s a slow news day at Tottenham Hotspur-land, as the team spent most of the day flying to and getting settled in Hungary ahead of tomorrow’s Europa League match against Hungarian champions Ferencvaros.
But the big mystery of the day was what the hell was Sergio Reguilon doing on the plane? It caused a bunch of kerfluffled feathers (if I may mix a metaphor? I may!) from stupid people online misreading UEFA regulations and suggesting he had replaced Destiny Udogie in Spurs’ Europa League side (sidenote: he can’t) and getting preemptively mad at Ange Postecoglou on Djed Spence’s behalf.
Well, it turns out that Reggie was there for a good reason, according to Big Ange — he’s a traffic cone. Postecoglou explained in his press conference that Reggie went to Hungary, along with a couple of unnamed academy kids, to fill out the training roster to make sure they had enough bodies. And that’s all it was.
“He’s a Spurs player, mate. I mean, we’ve got a training session so it’s a balance that we need 20 players for training, that’s what we do for match day minus one. It didn’t make sense to bring someone like Radu [Dragusin, suspended] or a couple of guys who have got injuries because we won’t get back until late on Thursday.
“We’ve brought a couple of young guys in. The academy played last night and we didn’t want to disrupt that, but we brought a couple of young guys and Reguilon to make sure our training is really good today. Squad-wise, from the weekend Destiny hasn’t travelled. It’s nothing significant, his injury but again it didn’t make sense to bring him over if he wasn’t going to play. Radu is suspended and Sonny is back in London doing rehab, but the rest of the squad plus the young players have travelled.”
So it’s not a conspiracy, and everyone can put their purple and yellow glasses back in the box. Reggie’s just being a good teammate, and if he can’t (or won’t) play at least he can help train the guys that will.
Elsewhere, Ange said there are no new concerns in the side and that Dominic Solanke is fit and available to play against Ferencvaros, though that doesn’t mean that he will. I’m pretty sure I saw BIG WILLY LANKS in the boarding-the-plane video Spurs posted earlier on social media, and although both Cuti Romero and Micky van de Ven made the trip to Hungary, Ange said that it’s very likely that 18-year old Archie Gray will feature somewhere in the back line… even central defender.
“No, I think Archie can play centre-back. He’s obviously played full-back, played midfield, played probably left-back. He’s a pretty versatile player and that’s one of the reasons we were really excited to bring him to the club. He takes in information well and with Radu being suspended and Destiny out, we’ll definitely need him at the back. We’ve got a couple of different options about where we use him, but I’d be comfortable using him in any of those areas.”
Ferencvaros dropped their first match in the Europa League group stage, falling 2-1 at Anderlecht September 25. They currently lead the Hungarian League, which isn’t surprising as they’ve won the league the past five seasons. The match kicks off at 12:45 p.m. ET / 5:45 p.m. BST, and is televised on TNT 1 in the UK. It’s streamed, as usual, on Paramount+ in USA.
