Mou’s pragmatism pays off against ‘all-out’ Leeds

JOSE Mourinho does not care much for poets and so the beauty of the Leeds United side that Marcelo Bielsa has created at Elland Road was never likely to bewitch him or his Spurs team in the way that it has dazzled others this season.

Mourinho sees fragility in beauty and when he confronted it at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, he exposed that fragility ruthlessly and all too easily.

This first meeting of Mourinho and Bielsa in English football pitted the pragmatist against the adventurer, the cautious man against the cavalier, the cynic against the romantic, and those who feared that Leeds’ swashbuckling, crowd-pleasing style would play straight into the hands of the Spurs counter-attacking machine were proved correct. Leeds played some fine attacking football in patches but they were undone by two mistakes from goalkeeper Illan Meslier and were simply not good enough in defence, where they are depleted by injuries, to cope with their opponents, who moved up to third place with this comfortable 3-0 win. Mourinho’s team ended the match with 10 men after the late dismissal of Matt Doherty for a second bookable offence but snapped a streak of four league games without a victory and now sit only four points behind leaders Liverpool and Manchester United.

And if Mourinho’s tactics are sometimes characterised as anti-football, there is beauty in his team, too, particularly in the attacking partnership between Harry

Kane and Son Heung-min who are so talented, so clever and so attuned to each other’s game that they are often unstoppable.

Leeds presented their defence to Kane and Son gift-wrapped and they accepted the gift with both hands.

Spurs had taken the lead against the run of play in the first half with a penalty that stemmed from Meslier playing the ball straight to Harry Winks, but it was a fine move between Kane and Son that provided the match’s decisive moment just before half time. Kane was the provider, Son the finisher. It was the 13th time they had combined for a goal this season, equalling the record for an entire campaign, set by Alan Shearer and Chris Sutton for Blackburn Rovers in 1994-95. The strike was also Son’s 100th goal for Spurs.

Bielsa had lost all four of his previous matches against Mourinho when they were bosses at Athletic Bilbao and Real Madrid respectively and Leeds never looked like improving his record for him.

Mourinho appears to have his number: his teams have now scored 18 times against Bielsa in five attempts and conceded only twice. The furore over Leeds’ response to Karen Carney’s comments about their hard-running style and the subsequent deluge of misogynistic abuse she suffered on social media had cast a pall over Leeds’week but Spurs were not without issues of their own as they approached the game. dailymail.co.uk