Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Yves Bissouma has been widely criticised for his display in the London club’s most recent game.
In the Premier League this weekend, Spurs took on Brighton and Hove Albion away from home as they looked to recover from their defeat in the north London derby.
Tottenham got off to a good start as they took the lead through Harry Kane and held onto it at the half-time break despite coming under plenty of pressure from the Seagulls.
However, Bissouma – who played 70 minutes of the game – didn’t seem to have the best of performances. Indeed, in the live blog for football.london, Alasdair Gold slammed the player for one incident in particular.
He wrote: “Yves Bissouma has struggled at times to pick up the pace of the game on his old stamping ground and to pick up another needless early yellow card, as he did on his other start at West Ham, means he is unnecessarily on a tightrope. That could lead to [Antonio] Conte turning to Oliver Skipp sooner rather than later in the second half.”
TIF Thoughts on Yves Bissouma and Tottenham…
As well as Gold noting that poor tackle that saw Bissouma pick up a yellow card, Dan Kilpatrick had similar thoughts about the challenge when writing for the Evening Standard.
He wrote: “Bissouma with a naughty challenge on [Alexis] Mac Allister and rightly joins Kane in the book. A needless tackle deservedly punished.”
Journalist Andy Naylor also dubbed the challenge as ‘poor’, while football writer Andrew Gaffney called it both ‘silly’ and ‘naive’.
Beyond his yellow card, though, the midfielder also lost the ball seven times, only won the ball twice and failed with one out of two long balls (via SofaScore).
With that in mind, it’s no shock that Antonio Conte opted to bench Bissouma after 70 minutes. All in all, it was not the ideal return to Brighton for the man who played 124 times for the Seagulls, which may be surprising given his Premier League experience.