Momentum important for Mousa

Our resurgent home form means we go into Sunday’s match against Cardiff City in buoyant mood, according to Mousa Dembele.

We maintained a 100 per cent record at White Hart Lane in February, following up on the 1-0 Premier League win over Everton with Thursday night’s comeback victory against FC Dnipro to reach the last 16 of the Europa League.

And after the latter performance clouded the memory of last weekend’s disappointment at Norwich, battling midfielder Mousa says we’re ready for the challenge of Cardiff on Sunday afternoon.

“It’s a very important game,” he said. “It’s the right time for us to get them at home after our recent results at White Hart Lane and I think everybody is very happy and maybe a bit more confident after the Dnipro win. We hope now that we can see off Cardiff correctly and professionally.”

Our Europa League triumph was very much to the forefront of Mousa’s mind when assessing the state of play ahead of the clash with the Bluebirds – and he reiterated how much it means for us to have made progress in the competition.

“It was an important thing for us to beat Dnipro,” he said. “Some people say that for English teams, the Europa League is not so important. But for us I think it’s very important. We want to achieve something this year and making progress in Europe is a big help.”

Christian Eriksen started our magnificent comeback with his 56th minute free-kick and it was that breakthrough, coupled with a disallowed Roberto Soldado strike a couple of minutes beforehand, that proved the catalyst for us to go on and overturn the 2-0 aggregate deficit.

“Maybe that gave us more confidence that we could score,” Mousa said, recalling Roberto’s effort which was chalked off for off-side and Christian’s subsequent strike. “If you can score one goal then you know you’re going to score the second one. That’s typical in football. Everybody knows that once you score one goal the other team is going to be scared and they’re going to panic, so that’s something positive for us of course.

“It wasn’t that easy after their goal. We needed to score three and it was a case of everything or nothing. We gave everything, we went forward, we made good runs and in the end Christian’s goal was inspirational for us.”