Tottenham rolls the dice and cashes in on United’s sad shrine to wasted money | Manchester United

Well, Manchester United: here is your Wembley of the North. A number of years ahead of schedule, and perhaps not quite as envisioned in the architect’s drawings, but perfect in most other respects. A shopping temple with a football concession attached to it; a shrine to wasted money; a ground where the noise barely rises above a disgruntled murmur, and where Tottenham feel comfortably at home.

Afterwards, Erik ten Hag tried to maintain a certain dignity, like a plumber calmly filling in his bill while the brown water lapped around his knees. After all, this is not just a job, but an office, and even in moments of decline a certain carriage is demanded. “Is there a fire drill?” the Tottenham fans asked cheerfully as Old Trafford slowly emptied. There wasn’t. But the real work is getting dangerously close.

Of course, an entire industrial complex has been built around the idea that United is in crisis. Sour-tongued experts, 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 is somehow the most disgraceful in living memory, every setback is dissected and deconstructed as evidence of some essential species disease, a disease that only truly can are cured with some more ritual bloodletting, a three-minute viral illness. rant from Gary Neville and perhaps some more unsubstantiated locker room gossip.

The more prosaic truth is that United are still an imperfect, evolving side who were ambushed by an early goal, a somewhat harsh red card and a very unconventional opponent. If anything, this was evidence for withholding judgment rather than hastening it: a sort of unicorn game played under unique circumstances, against an idiosyncratic team unlike anyone else in the Premier League.

For Ange Postecoglou, this was perhaps the most impressive victory of his Spurs period. Not just because of the size of the opponent, the weight of history, the late withdrawal of Son Heung-min, but because this was a game they wanted and bent into their own strange shape. United didn’t just show up dazed and disintegrated; in large part, they were represented that way by a dazzling first-half performance that forced them to question everything.

Take the starting line-up, which at first glance felt like a system inspired by the Garth Crooks ‘team of the week’ on the BBC website: heavy on attackers and almost completely devoid of midfield cover, with Rodrigo Bentancur the only shield behind James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski, and then a threesome ahead of them. It 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 first seconds. Joshua Zirkzee and Bruno Fernandes formed a barrier for Bentancur, preventing Spurs from building through him. So Guglielmo Vicario, Micky van de Ven and Cristian Romero simply passed the ball around aimlessly among themselves, while United congratulated themselves on a job well done. Hey, it took you ten years and seven different coaches, but you finally learned to apply pressure!

But in fact United stepped into a carefully designed trap. For as United pressed and pressed, as the crowd began to become interested, Tottenham quietly put together numbers on the flanks. On the left, Timo Werner stayed high, in the presence of Maddison and Destiny Udogie. On the right, Pedro Porro formed another battalion with Brennan Johnson and Kulusevski. The goal: to move the ball quickly down the wing, break in the second ball and break at pace.

As always with Postecoglou’s Spurs, this is an exciting tightrope walk. Lose the ball and more than half your team is out of position. Two minutes later, such a situation saw Marcus Rashford gallop clear with Alejandro Garnacho in front of him. One misunderstanding and one excellent point later, Van de Ven was squaring the ball for Johnson to score.

This is how crazy fine the margins are, how arbitrary the pauses. But the reward is that you can set the terms of battle. United were shocked afterwards and clutched at the shadows, whatever plan they had blown to bits. Tottenham picked them off at will in the second half, and had Werner abandoned his unfortunate habit of missing one-on-one, the scoreline could have been truly seismic.

But there was so much to love, from Maddison’s decoration in the first half to Kulusevski’s orchestration in the second half, from the energy of the indefatigable Dominic Solanke up front to the effervescence of the unfairly maligned Johnson next to him, the feeling of improvement, the feeling of a plan coming together in a surreal way.

Of course, this is the way Spurs should play, the only way they should play can play. Order is not their friend. Logic is not their friend. Order means being seventh forever and constantly being snatched away by wealthier rivals. Logic dictates that Postecoglou should still coach in the AFC Champions League. But the madness, the fervor, the cult vibes, the high line: maybe this is how they turn the tables in the casino. It won’t always work. But when it does, it will feel suspiciously like redemption.