Chelsea loanee Christian Pulisic faced Tottenham Hotspur last night for the third of what should be many, many more times, but found himself on the losing end of a rather disappointing 3-0 scoreline that featured a most unwelcome collapse from his Borussia Dortmund colleagues. After a solid scoreless first-half, Spurs found an early goal through Son in the second, but BVB were still sitting pretty enough for the second leg of this Round of 16 match-up ... until conceding twice more late on in the final ten minutes to effectively end the tie at the halfway point already.
Pulisic, evert the seasoned pro already at age 20, isn’t ready to give up quite yet however.
“This team’s never going to give up, especially going home. We’re confident we can score three goals. It’s not going to be easy — I’m not going to stand here and say we’re going to win — but we’re going to go out there, we’re going to fight and we believe. That’s all we can do.”
The young winger’s performance mostly mirrored the rest of his team’s, with a good first-half followed up by an increasingly worse second and undone by a few mistakes, though he was far from the worst player in yellow on the pitch, showing great work rate and some good touches (and a few poor and unlucky ones), winning several fouls but also failing to take advantage of a couple good opportunities. Still showed better than either of Mario Götze or Jadon Sancho, for what it was worth (which on the night was very little unfortunately).
While clearly disappointed, Pulisic’s positive attitude is nice to see, and it’s one that he maintains for Chelsea as well, though he’s obviously concentrating on his current predicament.
“Yes of course [I’m looking forward to playing in the Premier League]. Tottenham’s a great side. It’s good to play against great competition in any league, but I’m definitely looking forward to next season.
”[Chelsea] have had some tough results but I know they’re going to work it out. They’re a great team with great players, a good coach, so they’re going to figure everything out.”
-Christian Pulisic; source: ESPN
So say we all.
Here’s that nice move from Pulisic on Sanchez pic.twitter.com/EZZGiDZG9e
— Rob Usry (@RobUsry) February 13, 2019
Highlight of that half was undoubtedly Sancho spinning Davinson Sanchez 360 degrees with nothing more than body balance. Nasty. Pulisic has had some nice moments too
— Liam Twomey (@liam_twomey) February 13, 2019