Well, Manchester United: here’s your Wembley of the North. Several years ahead of schedule, and perhaps not quite as envisaged in the architects’ drawings, but note-perfect in most other respects. A retail temple with a football concession attached; a shrine to wasted money; a ground where the noise barely rises above a disgruntled murmur, and where Tottenham Hotspur feel pleasantly at home.
Afterwards Erik ten Hag tried to maintain some semblance of dignity, like a plumber calmly filling out his invoice even as brown water sloshes around his knees. After all, this is not simply a job but an office, and even in moments of decay a certain carriage is demanded.
“Is there a fire drill?” the Tottenham fans gleefully asked as Old Trafford slowly emptied. There wasn’t. But the real thing is beginning to feel dangerously close.
There is of course a whole industrial complex built around the idea of United being in crisis. Acid-tongued pundits, YouTube provocateurs, salty influencers, 24-hour news channels: everyone has to put food on the table. Every defeat is somehow the worst ever, every bad performance somehow the most disgraceful in living memory, every setback parsed and deconstructed as evidence of some essential species sickness, one that can only truly be cured with some more ritual bloodletting, a three-minute viral rant from Gary Neville and maybe a little more unsourced dressingroom gossip.
The more prosaic truth is that United are still an imperfect, evolving side who here were ambushed by an early goal, a slightly harsh red card and a highly unconventional opponent. If anything this was evidence for withholding judgement rather than expediting it: a kind of unicorn game played under unique circumstances, against a maverick team resembling nobody else in the Premier League right now.
For Ange Postecoglou, this may well have been the most impressive win of his Spurs tenure. Not simply because of the magnitude of the opponent, the weight of history, the late withdrawal of Son Heung-min, but because this was a game they willed and bent into their own weird shape.
United did not simply turn up dazed and disintegrated; in large part they were rendered that way by a dazzling first-half performance that forced them to doubt everything. Take the starting line-up, which on the face of things felt like a system inspired by the Garth Crooks “team of the week” on the BBC website: heavy in forwards and almost entirely devoid of midfield cover, with Rodrigo Bentancur the sole shield behind James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski, and then a front three ahead of them.
It either felt like a monumental gamble or a monumental ruse, and in a way it turned out to be both. The pattern was established in the opening seconds. Joshua Zirkzee and Bruno Fernandes formed a barrier in front of Bentancur, preventing Spurs from building up through him. And so Guglielmo Vicario, Micky van de Ven and Christian Romero simply rotated the ball aimlessly among themselves, while United congratulated themselves on a containing job well done. Hey, it took you a decade and seven different coaches, but you finally learned to press!
But in fact United were stepping into a carefully laid trap. Because while United were pressing and squeezing, while the crowd were beginning to get interested, Tottenham were quietly amassing numbers on the flanks. On the left, Timo Werner stayed high with Maddison and Destiny Udogie in attendance. On the right, Pedro Porro formed another battalion with Brennan Johnson and Kulusevski. The aim: to funnel the ball quickly up the wing, burgle the second ball and break at pace.
As ever with Postecoglou’s Spurs, this is a thrilling high-wire act. Lose the ball and more than half your team is basically out of position. Two minutes in, such a situation left Marcus Rashford galloping clear with Alejandro Garnacho ahead of him. One misunderstanding and one outstanding run later, Van de Ven was squaring the ball for Johnson to score.
This is how stupidly fine the margins are, how random the breaks. But the reward is being able to set the terms of combat. United were shaken after that, clutching at shadows, whatever plan they had blown to shreds. Tottenham picked them off at will in the second half, and if Werner had shaken his unfortunate habit of missing one-on-ones the scoreline might even have been genuinely seismic.
But there was so much here to love, from the first-half ornamentation of Maddison to the second-half orchestration of Kulusevski, from the energy of the tireless Dom Solanke up front to the effervescence of the unfairly-maligned Johnson alongside him, the sense of improvement, the sense of a plan surreally coming together.
And of course this is the way Spurs must play, the only way they can play. Order is not their friend. Logic is not their friend. Order means seventh place in perpetuity and constantly getting pecked away by richer rivals. Logic dictates that Postecoglou should still be coaching in the AFC Champions League.
But the madness, the fervour, the cult vibes, the high line: perhaps this is how they turn the tables on the casino. It won’t always work. But when it does, it will feel suspiciously like salvation. – Guardian
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