Tottenham finally found a pulse in Europe on Wednesday night, beating Atletico Madrid 3-2 in north London. It was bold, frantic, and for Igor Tudor, it was overdue.
It was also not enough.
Over two legs, Diego Simeone’s side still walked away with the tie, advancing 7-5 on aggregate and sending Spurs out of the Champions League. The damage had been done earlier. This was a response, not a rescue.
Yet for a club staring down a relegation fight rather than a top-four push, this felt like more than a consolation prize. It followed a gritty 1-1 draw with Liverpool and, for the first time since Tudor replaced Thomas Frank, there was the sense of a team starting to move in the same direction as its head coach.
“The sensations are mixed,” Tudor told BBC Sport afterwards. “You don't like to not get through, but it was a very good performance.”
He lingered on the feeling inside the stadium. Not the scoreline. The connection.
“It was a beautiful sensation on the pitch with the fans who were really there together with the squad and the team from the first moment. Congratulations to the players. It is positive, commitment, lot of running, lots of good things.”
The word he kept coming back to was energy. Spurs have looked drained for weeks, dragged into a survival scrap that nobody at the club expected. Against Atletico, with their European campaign already hanging by a thread, they finally ran with purpose.
“The energy was really nice from the first moment and the fans recognised the team did everything from the first minute to the last and they were with us – beautiful, thanks,” Tudor said. “The players believed and you could see the performance at this moment is very important. In the last two games we have improved.”
That improvement now has to travel. Nottingham Forest await on Sunday in a game that matters far more to Tottenham’s future than any doomed late surge in Europe.
“It is an important game on Sunday but it will not decide anything yet, it will be decided over the last three games,” Tudor insisted. No drama, just a clear message: this is a run-in, not a one-off.
What made the win over Atletico more striking was the state of the squad. This was not a full-strength Spurs side flexing its muscles on a big night. It was a patched-up group running on fumes.
“Today we had 11 players and on the bench, just one player – Kevin Danso,” Tudor revealed. “Lucas Bergvall, Destiny Udogie and Conor Gallagher, the doctors said they could only play 20 minutes so you have 11 players and Danso. That makes the value of this performance even better. It was nice to take the victory and important for morale.”
Eleven fit players, one fully available substitute, three more restricted to short cameos. Against Simeone’s Atletico, that is usually a recipe for a slow suffocation. Instead, Spurs found a way to turn it into a statement of character.
This is still a team trapped in a fight it never planned for. The table says relegation battle, not European chase. Next season, there will be no Champions League, no Europa League, no Conference League. Just the grind of domestic football and the pressure to put this season’s chaos behind them.
Tudor, though, is already looking beyond the immediate escape act.
“Next year, no, it should be the year after that. Why not?” he said when asked about a return to European competition. “Winning a trophy last season gave the confidence to the players and it is totally different if you have experience in European competition.”
The realism is clear: survival first, rebuild next, Europe later. But there was no sense of defeat in his words, only a timeline.
Tottenham are out of the Champions League. Their season will not be defined by nights like this one, but by what happens over the next four league games. If this win was the night Tudor finally got Spurs running for him, Sunday at the City Ground will show whether they can keep running when the stakes are far more brutal.
