Goal-den moment for Jan

Jan Vertonghen capped a memorable performance by achieving a personal milestone as we toppled Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League on Wednesday night.

‘Super Jan’ scored his first ‘proper' Champions League goal as we beat the Bundesliga leaders 3-0 in our Round of 16, first leg at Wembley.

Man of the Match Jan lined-up at left wing-back in our 3-4-1-2 system and produced one of his best displays in a Spurs shirt. He provided the cross for Heung-Min Son to crucially open the scoring at the start of the second half and then volleyed home for 2-0 with seven minutes remaining. Fernando Llorente soon made it 3-0 to send our fans home in raptures.

“I’ve scored in the qualifiers in the Champions League (for Ajax against Kiev in 2010) and I’ve scored in the Europa League (for Ajax and Spurs) but that was my first goal in the actual Champions League, so that was a great experience, especially at this stage, at Wembley and after such a great night,” reflected Jan. “We put in a big performance in the second half.”

Jan was on the end of Serge Aurier’s cross for the second goal, a similar strike to Sonny’s opener with both crosses delivered by our wing-backs.

It should come as no surprise, however, as Jan revealed: “It’s funny because myself and Serge spoke before the game and said that if you play with wing-backs you can score from each other’s crosses and that’s exactly what happened.

“Serge must have had our little chat in mind when he looked up and it was great to see, he looked up, saw me running and made a great cross. I just had to do what Sonny did for the first goal.”

Reflecting on the game as a whole, Jan, 31 and up to 47 European appearances for us – fourth-equal in the Club’s all-time list alongside Harry Kane – told us that the team felt there were more goals on offer as we started to get on top in the second half.

“We knew we would come up against a very good team, we played them last season and they have only improved compared to last season,” he added. “We saw that in the first half where they played very well and made it hard for us to press and 0-0 wasn’t too bad a result at half-time.

“We came out of the dressing room well and that first goal helped us. After, it’s 1-0 and what are we going to do at home? 1-0 in the first leg is a good result, they thought it was a good result as well so they dropped a bit and we were able to benefit from that.

“Maybe we expected them to press us a bit more at 1-0 down but they didn’t and that gave us the opportunity to keep on attacking and we had the energy to keep attacking, that’s what resulted in the second goal, we were able to get the ball high up the pitch. It’s a massive result for us.”