Laying the ghost of 1983 was a scary experience

In 1983, the last Tottenham side with pretensions to greatness contrived to lose 4-1 at home to Burnley in a League Cup quarter-final despite taking the lead. So the perfect symmetry of beating them by the same scoreline, albeit one round closer to Wembley, after conceding the opener will have pleased those of us who spent that January 1983 evening tuned to Radio 2 longwave with a mounting sense of nausea.

All in all, you have to doubt Jermain Defoe remembers it as clearly as I do because he was three months old then and few if any baby-care experts ever advised listening to the late Bryon Butler and the even later Peter Jones as an antidote to colic.

The grown-up Defoe returned to White Hart Lane to such rapturous delight that it would be churlish to linger over the financial details involved.

There are those cynics, sad to report, who would wish to dwell on his sabbatical from the club, wondering what possessed chairman Daniel Levy to pay Portsmouth £16million to take the England striker back.

Let these mean-spirited swines say what they will. All I know is that this canny businessman justifiably prides himself on a knack for striking hard bargains in the transfer market and let's leave it at that.

For the first-half of this semi-final first leg, Spurs were so atrocious that you'd have been tempted to use the 1983 model Defoe as a tactical substitute, although whether in place of Aaron Lennon or the equally abysmal David Bentley - who was apparently ill - was anyone's guess.

With Lennon squandering countless golden opportunities to cross dangerously, it fell to his right-wing counterpart Chris Eagles to control the game for Burnley and his excellence deserved to create more than the solitary goal which, along with a chasm in class and commitment, separated the sides at the break.

At that stage Burnley, such a scourge to London's finest in this competition of late, seemed poised for their finest hour since winning the First Division title in 1960. Not that this is the highest of hurdles because in the intervening years they have achieved precisely nothing, unless you count the weird fact that Lleyton Hewitt was dyslexically named after their winger Leighton James. And you'd have to be Burnley superfan Alastair Campbell to spin that as a major trophy.

Campbell will no doubt have made the short trip from his Tufnell Park home last night and what wouldn't I have given for Sky to have trained one of their 7,972 cameras on his boat race for the 20 minutes following the interval.

Football knows no more destructive goal than one conceded in the opening moments of a second-half, as anyone in attendance at the Lane the infamous day Manchester United converted a 3-0 half-time deficit into a 5-3 victory will agree, and so it proved again. The moment Michael Dawson headed home a sloppily- defended 47th-minute corner, the competence and self-possession of the first-half vanished and the Championship side fell apart.

The only Burnley supporters who will have appreciated the subsequent dearth of any defensive command structure were members of the anarchist band Chumbawumba. Knocked down by the goalkeeping howler that gifted Spurs the lead, Burnley did not get up again and soon enough another brace of goals had put the tie beyond the redemptive powers of the plucky little clog-wearers.

And so, barring a disaster, Tottenham should march on to yet another League Cup Final. As Harry Redknapp understands, this means next to nothing.

Spurs have had more thumping home wins in League Cup semis against mightier opposition than Burnley (those twin 5-1 riots against Chelsea and Arsenal) and remained astoundingly poor in the less devalued competitions.

For Harry, his lads and more easily assuaged fans, a Wembley outing may offer a small and transient diversion from the grind of escaping the spectre of relegation, yet all one's sympathies were with a Burnley side that outplayed their hosts for 45 minutes and might have won this game had they protected their lead for just a few minutes longer.

Still, it was a delight to observe the return of Defoe on the touchlines and gratifying to lay that old ghost from 1983.

Best of all, needless to add, such an undeservedly-crushing defeat will have caused genuine distress to the fragile Alastair Campbell - and you would need a heart of granite not to shed a little tear of mirth about that.