Spurs deserved their first 1-0 Premier League win in almost 500 days and Djed Spence is a revelation. But Manchester United and Ruben Amorim are a shambles.
A ludicrous amount of water has submerged the bridge since Micky van de Ven put their ten men top with a hard-fought victory at Kenilworth Road in October 2023. Spurs had 15 shots that day; Mathys Tel, Dejan Kulusevski and Alejandro Garnacho had as many between them in north London.
The Brentford game at the start of the month was a far more narratively satisfying, back-to-basics narrow victory before Pape Matar Sarr’s sheen-applying late second goal. But when their pre-February league wins this season were by scores of 5-0, 4-0 (twice), 4-1 (twice), 3-0 and 3-1, Ange Postecoglou can and should embrace finding a little more calm in the usual chaos wherever he can.
These are far more stable foundations upon which to build and however valid his excuses were for this overall mess of a season, his long-term credentials can be judged properly the sooner they are removed from the equation.
Guglielmo Vicario was excellent on his return from a long-term lay-off. James Maddison missed just three weeks before his goalscoring comeback but that absence was sorely felt, despite the protestations of Roy Keane. Brennan Johnson was back and bright, as was Wilson Odobert. Destiny Udogie simply making the bench was a boost.
Postecoglou could have handled a great many aspects of this injury crisis better but now Spurs are hopefully on the other side, it is easier to see the benefits. The squad spirit is undeniably stronger for having come through it and certain players embraced a chance to step up which would have taken far longer to present itself, if indeed it ever did at all.
Djed Spence was excellent. Lucas Bergvall, too. Their stock has risen through this crisitunity. It was the first time in 17 games that 18-year-old Archie Gray did not start; his introduction in the 78th minute with the game still finely poised shows how he and others have carried the club through the wreckage to earn Postecoglou’s unwavering faith.
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Having cobbled together a vaguely respectable XI of internationals signed for a combined £400m or so, the Portuguese named a bench containing Victor Lindelof and eight teenagers yet to make their first-team debut. That remains the case for seven of them and Chido Obi-Martin might not feel particularly enriched by the experience of three stoppage-time minutes in which he did not have a single touch.
How a manager uses his substitutions feels like an archetypal complaint supporters incorrectly believe is unique to them but this did seem like a particularly egregious example of a coach acting neither quickly nor decisively enough to alter the game with their changes.
Tyler Fredricson is older than Tel; Sekou Kone was born a month before Gray. While judging readiness by something as binary as age asthose young Spurs players came to the club with the sort of senior career minutes that Manchester United bench could not boast, Amorim – still steadfast in his insistence upon a deeply flawed system – had the chance to change something and actively rejected it.
What did he and Harry Amass talk about for 90 minutes? Did he sit at the front of the bus next to Ayden Heaven or the back alongside Jack Moorhouse? What is a Elyh Harrison? How tempting must it have been to chuck him on as an auxiliary striker for a bit? Was ostracising and loaning out Marcus Rashford really the best idea, especially without a replacement? Was Antony actually the only thing stopping Manchester United from collapsing in on itself?
Joshua Zirkzee braved a first start as the 10 since a Newcastle game which a) genuinely felt like the immediate end of his nascent Manchester United career and b) Gary Neville could not help but reference every three minutes while bemoaning Amorim’s setup. The Dutchman was actually quite decent but the way he presses centrally meant Bruno Fernandes was pulled to the right to cover and Casemiro was thus exposed as a one-man midfield who at one point injured himself getting booked in the Spurs half.
Mazraoui was clearly asked to Do A Job on Maddison but the forward’s movement and rotations were difficult to track and the uncertainty in that defence was palpable, never more so than for the goal.
But it translated further forward too. Harry Maguire did exceptionally well at one stage to read and intercept a Spence pass in the first half before embarking on one of his rampaging runs, before laying the ball off to Rasmus Hojlund on the right to cross to no-one in the centre. No-one is sure of their role in any phase of the game at any given time and it is painfully evident.
It could have been prevented at about five different points with a modicum of awareness or positioning before Maddison followed up Bergvall’s saved shot, having ghosted between the justifiably distracted Dorgu and the inexplicably dormant De Ligt.
While it is often easier to blame the players, the deployment of Amorim’s back three felt like a specific part of the problem. It does not necessarily make a backline stronger to fill defensive areas with more players for teammates to pass the responsibility to when actual leadership is so scarce. No-one wanted to take control of the situation so Spurs did.
It shouldn’t, of course, and the current crackdown on celebration ‘mockery’ is a phenomenal, unimprovable dose of legislative Premier League nonsense.
But fair play to Maddison, who played well and capped a fine game off with a sublime slide tackle on Hojlund to thwart a possible counter-attack shortly before he was taken off. For a player denounced by many to be too fairweather and flashy, that was a show of welcome physicality.
Fernandes and Hojlund combined more fluently in the first half to create Manchester United’s best chance of the game, but the latter’s off-the-ball run to provide space for Alejandro Garnacho to shoot was wasted.
Garnacho remains a more alluring player in idea than reality. He gets into some wonderful positions and much of that cannot be coached, but nor can decision-making and game intelligence, of which he is blessed with neither.
That effort was abysmal but it also seems to be the only one he is consistently capable of: opening up his body to try and curl into the far corner. When Zirkzee played him in midway through the second half Garnacho shot straight at Vicario when even the vague notion of direction might have beaten him, and while one low drive forced a better save from the Spurs keeper, his final ball was almost non-existent.
Dorgu might also want a word about why his tireless overlapping runs were frequently ignored by the Argentinean, whose immediate instinct to shoot whatever the circumstances would suit a more attacking team but doesn’t half uncover this side’s defects going forward. They should seriously consider a summer sale if the chances arises again.
But he does look awfully laboured at times and it adds to the sense he lacks a little urgency. Around the hour mark, when Garnacho drew a decent save from Vicario with that drilled shot, Zirkzee was stood about five yards offside wondering how Kevin Danso had just headed Fernandes’ cross clear. Had he been more alert then the Dutchman could have been in position to convert when Vicario parried, just as Maddison had earlier at the same end.
When Mazraoui’s cross did reach him a few minutes later, Zirkzee headed wide when unmarked about eight yards out. It might be a thought to nail him down to one position and go from there; it probably shouldn’t be centre-forward.
It is fundamentally hilarious when Premier League footballers look nothing of the sort and that was a fine 30 seconds for it from two of the best comedy acts around.
That was in the 64th minute and it should shame all involved that Casemiro was not removed for almost another half an hour. If no-one on that bench represented an improvement then big Sir Jim will be contemplating closing the academy in his latest cost-cutting measure as we speak.
They all contributed handily too. It turns out that just having options does help.
It is impossible to know the truth behind Spence’s past two and a half years since moving to north London but it also doesn’t really matter. When the most recent door opened he made sure to drop that baggage and walk through it into a new chapter of his career. Football’s collective short-term memory means the rest is instantly forgotten.
He has stepped up more than any other player when Spurs needed anyone to. That late block on Hojlund was wonderful and no-one looked quite as comfortable on the ball for either side. It is a mightily well-timed renaissance arc considering England’s sudden full-back struggles.
Who might realistically be Manchester United’s equivalent? The damning basic answer is anyone who has managed to escape an environment which kills anything positive. Antony is thriving away from the spotlight and Rashford has already shown enough to suggest he could encourage a market to emerge for his signature in the summer. Jadon Sancho will bring some money in and Tyrell Malacia’s Roberto Carlos glow-up will be biblical.
That will bring in necessary funds for signings but absolutely nothing in the Manchester United boardroom or recruitment network engenders confidence they can get enough of those deals right when the pressure is off, never mind if the room for error has been removed.
This sort of injury crisis provides a chance for players on the outskirts to step out of those shadows and prove their worth. No-one in this Manchester United squad seems capable and Amorim’s first chance to hand minutes down the ladder to youth players untainted by their unremitting failure has been and gone.
That now-or-never ultimatum issued by the Manchester United hierarchy when they redialled Amorim’s number after an abandoned summer dalliance should have been the giveaway, if not the fact it came in a panicked November in the single biggest sacking botchjob in recent memory.
These are not serious people in charge of a serious club and at no point in more than a year of operations at Old Trafford have they proven themselves worthy of being taken seriously.
Ratcliffe preaches a philosophy of appointing “those who are best in class, 10 out of 10s”, but the only thing he himself has shown proficiency in is cartoonishly unnecessary cost-cutting despite sanctioning a controlled demolition of a season in which each individual position is worth about £3m and as much was spent on five failed months of Dan Ashworth.
There is no need for Manchester United to be this bad but Amorim is gratuitously torching the campaign to such an extent that it surely can only have been specifically sanctioned from above under the pretence of the greater good, that a period of suffering is necessary for eventual growth.
Most accepted it would take time and patience to turn this around but is it really necessary to prescribe so much short-term pain when long-term gain remains more unlikely than likely? Manchester United seemed to have bottomed out when they sacked Erik ten Hag in 14th but they are one place lower and sliding ever further as a sort of controlled experiment to see whether they actually are so inherently insulated from failure as to make relegation an impossibility.
And again, was none of this possible under an interim manager to see the season through when Ten Hag was sacked? Any possible excitement or positivity over Amorim’s appointment has been eradicated and the situation in England is so ridiculous that he is forced to answer questions as the front-facing figurehead about redundancies he has zero input over, while insisting upon tactics he knows the squad cannot adequately carry out.
Amorim has lacked transfer support in such a way that abandoning the campaign seems deliberate. Why not do that without tarnishing the name and reputation of the supposed saviour heading into a brave new era? Make the push in the summer to get him, give him a full pre-season of training his system with his standards and more suitable signings and go from there.
But to hear Amorim say, after yet another defeat, that “we need to stop focusing on the big picture” was remarkable. If “the big picture” was not the entire point of sacrificing these last few months, a homegrown hero, another transfer window, those couple of hundred jobs and all potential goodwill, what exactly was this all for?
