Spurs turn on the style as Pochettino calls for final push
If they awarded league titles for strut, Tottenham would have had the Premier League sewn up by Christmas. When they are in the mood, there is no team in the country as puffily confident, as ridiculously self-assured.
Here they did not so much destroy Bournemouth as destroy the very idea that Bournemouth might ever beat them. It was close to the perfect afternoon: four goals, a clean sheet, no injuries. The win was wrapped up in the space of 20 minutes, and even the luckless Vincent Janssen got a little luck, scoring his first Premier League goal from open play.
But these games, home fixtures against limited opposition, are where Tottenham eat and drink. And this was the last of them. The gap to Chelsea is four points, but now things start to get tough.
Four away games against Crystal Palace, West Ham, Leicester and Hull. Two home games against Manchester United and Arsenal. The likelihood is that in order to win their first title since 1961, they will need to win all six.
“Four points is a lot,” Mauricio Pochettino said afterwards. “Now, the pressure is on Chelsea to try to win at Old Trafford. If they don’t get the points, it will be fantastic, but they are still the favourites.”
We are approaching the point in the season when Pochettino teams have often flagged, and where they crashed and burned last season, winning just two points in their last four games. This time, however, Spurs are a year older, a year shrewder, and Pochettino insisted that they were in better shape.
“We have learnt a lot,” he said. “That was a very bad period at the end of last season. We spent a lot of energy fighting against Leicester, but also against West Bromwich, against Chelsea, against the media, against the people. We were fighting against everyone, and we spent a lot of energy.
“It was good to hear Claudio Ranieri [on Sky’s Monday Night Football] before Crystal Palace v Arsenal, recognising that the world was for them, trying to help Leicester. The team that all the world tried to kill was Tottenham. Impossible to understand why. But now you recognise why the situation was so, so difficult for us.”
Even if we should probably take Pochettino’s account of events with a pinch of salt – Tottenham were loudly for their skill and style last season – then it was a useful insight into how he is fortifying his squad this time around.
Chelsea may ultimately be just too good. The gap may already be too wide. But Pochettino is determined that they will have to earn their title rather than be handed it.
Bournemouth, on the other hand, seemed almost to acquiesce in their inability to lay a finger on their opponents, like a journeyman boxer hired to give the champ some punching practice. “We’ve got the ball,” their fans gamely chanted during their brief spells of possession.
It could have been embarrassing for them, but they deserve credit for sticking to the task and maintaining some semblance of a contest. Their situation is unchanged: their next four fixtures against Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Stoke and Burnley will decide their fate, not this.
“Tottenham are the team we aspire to be,” manager Eddie Howe purred. “They keep the ball so well.”
Games like these are often broken open by a single moment of brilliance or a single elementary error. Here, it was the latter, as Simon Francis ushered the ball out for what he thought, wrongly, was a goal-kick.
From the corner, Mousa Dembélé scored from seven yards, and despite having started a little sleepily, Tottenham were away.
Two minutes later, Jack Wilshere gave the ball away in midfield – how the Tottenham fans enjoyed that– and Harry Kane flicked the ball on to Son Heung-min. His low finish from a tight angle was followed, as is now customary, with a choreographed celebration with Dele Alli, a jaunty Morecambe and Wise-ish dance number this time.
Kane settled matters definitively early in the second half: losing the ball in the penalty area, winning it back again, and shooting low past Artur Boruc.
It was his 20th league goal of the season, a mark he has now reached three years running. This puts him in a much more exclusive club than you might think: Alan Shearer, Thierry Henry, Ruud van Nistelrooy and now Harry Edward Kane from Walthamstow. Whatever he goes on to achieve, Kane is no longer a potential Tottenham great. He is already there.
And so for the remaining 40 minutes, this was the sort of game that Tottenham fans could luxuriate in like a warm bubble bath: a safe space where nothing bad and everything good could happen.
Eric Dier juggled the ball in the penalty area before shooting. Bournemouth finally had a shot on target, and everyone cheered. Wilshere, on loan from Arsenal, hobbled off with an ankle injury, to cruel taunts of: “Jack Wilshere, it’s happened again.”
Only one thing could improve Tottenham’s afternoon, and in injurytime, Janssen provided it. He still needed two goes from four yards out, but after taking 23 Premier League games to score a goal that was not a penalty, he at least retained the good sense to avoid celebrating too wildly.
The hard work starts here, then. Even if their grip on second place is almost secure, and Arsenal are now 17 points behind them, Tottenham must strive for more.
“Nothing is enough,” Pochettino explained. “Always play better. That was our challenge from the beginning of the season: to improve our mentality, to improve our belief.”
And so Chelsea go to Old Trafford with all the pressure on them; anything less than a win, and Tottenham really will start believing. Their next opponents? Chelsea, at Wembley next weekend. This season really is building to a magnificent finish.