Tudor’s 17-minute experiment with Kinsky piles pressure on Spurs boss

Madrid – A Champions League debut is supposed to be a coronation; for Antonin Kinsky it became a calamity that lasted barely a quarter of an hour and may yet cost Igor Tudor his job.

The 22-year-old goalkeeper, preferred to regular No 1 Guglielmo Vicario for Tuesday’s last-16 first-leg at the Estadio Metropolitano, conceded twice inside the opening 17 minutes after slipping on a rain-slicked surface, allowing Antoine Griezmann and Julián Álvarez to roll the ball into an empty net. By the time Tudor hooked him for Vicario, Kinsky was face-down on the turf, the tie effectively gone and Tottenham’s season plunged into fresh crisis.

The final scoreline read 5-2 to Atlético Madrid, but the damage was done in those first traumatic minutes. Tudor, winless in four games since taking interim charge, defended his selection in the aftermath. “Before the game it was the right choice,” he insisted. “Toni is a very good goalkeeper. After this it is easy to say it was not the right decision.”

Yet the optics were brutal. Kinsky, who had featured only twice this season in the Carabao Cup, was left to trudge off alone while Vicario hurried on. Television cameras captured no handshake, no arm around the shoulder, no eye contact from the manager. “We don’t need to comment, it’s not a moment to speak too much,” Tudor told TNT Sports when pressed on the snub, later claiming he had spoken to the keeper privately.

Inside the ground, teammates were less reticent. João Palhinha and Conor Gallagher sprinted to console the distraught youngster, a scene Sky Sports News reporter Michael Bridge described as “the ultimate humiliation”. Former Premier League goalkeeper Lee Hendrie warned on Soccer Special: “We might not see that kid again. To throw him into a game like that was completely wrong.”

Analyst Kris Boyd was more scathing of Tudor. “Put an arm around Kinsky and say, ‘It is on me. I have called this wrong’. To ignore him is a disgrace. If you think Kinsky is the man to start the game why would you take him off?”

The parallels with Loris Karius’s 2018 Champions League final nightmare are inescapable: two catastrophic errors, a career derailed, a manager’s authority eroded. Karius never reclaimed Liverpool’s gloves; Kinsky’s Spurs future looks similarly precarious.

Tudor’s broader record offers little respite: four matches, four defeats, 14 goals conceded, only four scored. Tuesday’s loss made him the first Tottenham head coach to lose his opening four fixtures and extended the club’s losing streak to six straight games – a sequence unprecedented in their 142-year history.

Vicario, reinstated after the early change, produced several smart stops to keep the margin respectable and will surely retain the jersey for Sunday’s Premier League trip to Liverpool, live on Sky Sports. Spurs showed attacking flashes – they matched Atlético’s 11 shots and twice capitalised on Jan Oblak’s rare lapse – but defensive disintegration and tactical uncertainty remain the dominant themes.

Whether Tudor survives the week is unclear. Asked if he deserved to continue, the Croatian offered no answer. For now, the spotlight swings from a broken debutant to a manager whose gamble spectacularly backfired, leaving Tottenham’s season hanging by the thinnest of threads.