Tottenham make classy Marine gift as Covid-19 protocols prevent players from swapping shirts

Tottenham may have ended Marine’s FA Cup dreams on Sunday, but there was plenty of goodwill between the two teams on Merseyside.

Marine play in the Northern Premier Division North West League and welcomed Spurs for the biggest mismatch in the competition's history, with 160 places between them in the footballing pyramid.

Despite such a chasm, Marine were not disgraced even though a strong Tottenham side eased to a 5-0 victory at the Marine Travel Arena.

But Marine still enjoyed a dream day and made enough money to safeguard their future for some time, selling over 30,000 virtual match tickets which supplemented a TV fee and prize money for reaching this round of the competition.

Marine manager Neil Young thanks Spurs fans after the game for buying thousands of tickets, and said that financial windfall could help save a club who do not know when their next game will be with their league currently suspended due to coronavirus.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 protocols denied Marine players the opportunity to swap shirts at full-time with the likes of Gareth Bale, Dele Alli and Vinicius - but the Premier League club make sure their opponents would not go home disappointed.

Following the game, Spurs wrote on Twitter: "The players are unable to swap shirts after the game due to COVID protocols, so we've provided @MarineAFC with a whole set of fresh match shirts as a souvenir of today's historic match".

"The run for me I am very proud of, you look at the teams we have played and we have beaten home and away," Young said. "It is past our wildest dreams to bring Tottenham to Marine. I wish we could have done more.

"The cup run has been a lifesaver for us financially for where we are in non-league. There has been no help for teams in step three and below.

"Hopefully we have made non-league proud, but we have just got to take the positives of the whole run and what it will do for our football club.

"This could be our last game of the season. I wanted to get all the lads in, we don't know what is coming next, and I just wanted to make sure we had a huddle and told them how well they have done."

Additional reporting by PA.

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