If you’ve somehow managed to miss the opening eight months of the Premier League season you could have picked up a pretty decent precis of the action so far just by watching Sunday’s games at the Stadium of Light and White Hart Lane. Basically it’s been like that all along.
Leicester City have scored lots of breakaway goals and played like a proper team. It’s been emotional. People have cried. The usual heavyweights have ranged from poor to bafflingly dreadful.
And beyond that Tottenham Hotspur have been the most watchable, most promising, most intriguing team in the league this season. All issues of sentiment, underdoggery and fairytale glee aside, it is an achievement that deserves at least a slice of the adulation being lavished on the champions-elect.
This is not to suggest Leicester are unworthy league winners. The table is never wrong.
Leicester have been the most consistent team by some way, seven points clear and not so much sprinting for the line as already off on one of those helmet-doffing, high-fiving home-run trundles around the baseball diamond, waving to the crowd, taking the cheers, ball safely spiralling off above the bleachers into the blue.
Even in the second half of the season after Christmas Leicester have dropped fewer points than their nearest challengers. They beat Spurs 1-0 at White Hart Lane in January, and deservedly so. For Claudio Ranieri’s team this has been both a wonderful story and a purely sporting triumph of teamwork, talent and unblinking focus.
Still, one achievement should not diminish another and Spurs have been by so many other measures the most compelling team in the Premier League, the most layered, all the while remaining the only Premier League team (fairytale Foxes included) to run a profit on transfer spending over the past five years.
Against Manchester United on Sunday they started poorly. Dele Alli made a lovely run for his goal but otherwise he was largely absent. Harry Kane ragged Chris Smalling about once or twice but touched the ball only 33 times, a rare lack of involvement for an unusually assertive No9. The full-backs were muted, Kyle Walker bothered at times by the high-class menace of Anthony Martial.
And yet even on an off-day Tottenham were hugely enthralling in the periods where the pistons began to fire. By the time the goal rush arrived in the final 20 minutes Mauricio Pochettino’s team had begun to swarm in that familiar way, every passing angle, every pocket of space choked off.
This isn’t so much the old push-and-run Spurs as push-and-run-and-snipe-and-hustle, albeit in a controlled kind of way. The idea Tottenham will inevitably tire themselves out before the season’s end has always been based on a slight misunderstanding. This isn’t simply covering every blade of grass, Carlton Palmer-style. There is no blur of perpetual motion here.
Spurs’ defensive movements are instead minutely drilled, with every shift of position among the opposition a cue for some interlocking reshuffle of the pieces, energy not so much wasted as put to synchronised good use. Often Eric Dier and Mousa Dembele will stand still, waiting for the play to arrange itself around them.
There are some interesting similarities between the league’s top two. Both have a simple set of methods based around teamwork and quick, accurate passing. Both are genuine collectives, the role of each player equally weighted, without favourites or luxuries or glitzy passengers.
But Spurs simply have more depth to their game. They are a team who can score all kinds of goal, can play with the ball or on the break, for whom eight players have scored three or more goals in the league this season. Spurs have scored more goals than anyone else while conceding fewer. Their starting outfield players were, on average, almost four years younger than Leicester’s equivalent on Sunday. Ranieri’s men will be hugely impressive champions but there is another gear to come in this Tottenham team.
Or at least, there should be. If there is reason to celebrate Spurs excellence, even as the season dwindles into a race for second place, it is the simple fact that such progress is precarious. This weekend Alex Ferguson gave an interview to Sky Sports, apparently at his own behest, in which he lavished praise on Pochettino's work. It is hard to see any obvious reason, beyond the really obvious, why Ferguson would choose to do this. Pochettino is an ambitious manager. He will be hugely in demand now, as will Tottenham's best players. There is a shelf life to any rising team these days. Money will not allow this to go on unchecked for ever.
Not that there is reason to think anyone’s leaving just yet. This Spurs team can look forward to another title challenge next season, with plenty of flux among the usual heavyweights and the new champions facing a different set of challenges, not least the demands of running a midweek team as well. Spurs dropped seven points this season after Europa League fixtures, the exact extent of Leicester’s lead at the top.
By the end against United, Tottenham were lolling about at White Hart Lane like drunken lords, no doubt thrilled by the sense of their own power in that three-goal burst but still aware that for this season the race may be done. For the most captivating of second-placers the challenge now is simply to make their excellence count in more tangible ways.
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