What crisis? Spurs shut out the noise to blow Villa away

A memorable second half from Tottenham Hotspur, borne out of a memorable message from Ange Postecoglou. “I keep saying to the players, if I was a racehorse, I’d have blinkers.”

- MIGUEL DELANEY

The point that Postecoglou was making was to block everything out and just go for it – and his team duly hit a pace that Aston Villa couldn’t reach. The entire second half was a manifestation of the manager’s ideal. It was a whirlwind that Aston Villa got caught up in, as the control that Unai Emery attempted to assert in the first half was simply blown away. Spurs, by the end, were good value for a 4-1 victory. They’d kept going, attempting to play the football that Villa wouldn’t.

This isn’t to criticise Emery. His first-half tactics looked right for the situation, and the squad is obviously being tested to a deeper degree with the greater intensity of the Champions League.

It’s also why talk of a title challenge was hasty, but then you could say the same for pressure on Postecoglou. The Spurs manager’s comments are arguably even more relevant in that context. His side have endured a lot of noise, but that has been in keeping with the wider Premier League narrative.

This has been a strange season so far, where no one except Liverpool and Nottingham Forest have really been seizing opportunities. All others have looked fallible, to more pronounced degrees than normal. Hence you look at the table and there’s a Spurs team supposedly recently in crisis that are actually in the relatively OK position of seventh.

Something like this is admittedly said every season – that it’ll be lower points this year, that it’s open, that Manchester City look off it – and then tends to self-correct. Even allowing for that, though, these early games have had a lot of margin for error. Very little seems to be a guarantee.