Believe it or not there is more than one Premier League football manager who didn’t get all he wanted in the summer transfer window. But Mauricio Pochettino’s response to two months of disappointment has been to will his Tottenham team to three straight wins.
Already his Tottenham team are six points clear of Jose Mourinho and Manchester United and here on Monday night the gap in direction, understanding and cohesion was written large across the green acres of Old Trafford.
This was Pochettino’s first win here with Tottenham and indeed the first goals scored at Old Trafford by his team. There could have been more of them.
Jose Mourinho cut a frustrated figure on the touchline for much of the game at Old Trafford
While Mourinho has veered between simmering anger and familiar petulance these last few weeks, the Tottenham manager has kept his thoughts to himself after his club failed to bring him a single new player during the transfer window.
You could argue that that Pochettino’s team have spoken for him subsequently. So indeed have Mourinho’s for him, just by way of a totally different vocabulary.
Here United were unfamiliar for half an hour in that they were lively, quick and full of energy. On TV Gary Neville said he hadn’t seen a United team with as much speed for six years. That sounded like an exaggeration but United could indeed have been ahead.
The problems began when they didn’t score and when, inevitably, Tottenham began to find some possession either side of half time.
As Tottenham pressed – and then scored twice quickly – the damage recently inflicted on the United squad by their increasingly erratic manager became apparent.
Confidence is crucial to all sportsmen and here United’s slipped away like water down a drain. They lost by three, it could have been by five and when all is said and done it is hard not to contrast the work this year of the two managers.
Pochettino has been upset this summer, too, but he has dealt with it in a different way. The Tottenham coach clearly feels that to speak too much publicly would have had a negative effect on the players he currently does have. Mourinho sees it differently and at the moment only one approach is working, something was spelled out clearly here in the performance of the two defences.
Harry Kane planted a powerful header into the top corner to give Tottenham the lead
Pochettino fielded two players he had hoped to move on during the summer. He no longer holds Toby Alderweireld or Danny Rose in particularly high regard, for differing reasons, but has said hardly a word about either presumably because he knew that one day soon he knew they would have to do a job for him.
That day arrived last night as both played and both were fundamental to his victory. Alderweireld in particular was magnificent, producing the kind of performance that helps to win games on occasions like this.
In the United ranks, meanwhile, there was only more defensive chaos and it appears whatever disease Eric Bailly and Victor Lindelof caught in the run up to the defeat at Brighton has quickly been passed to Chris Smalling and Phil Jones.
Mourinho made six changes for this game and the introduction of two defenders from the Sir Alex Ferguson era counted for two of them. But Jones could have given away a penalty in the first half and the lost Harry Kane for the decisive first goal.
Mauricio Pochettino’s side showed a resilient streak that may not have been there in the past
Lucas Moura doubled the advantage as Spurs took control of the game in the second half
It wasn’t long before he was hauled off and Lindelof sent on for further punishment. And this is the thing with Mourinho at the moment. His trust in you disappears in an instant and every member of his team knows it.
Lindelof, predictably, was dreadful. Has his back pass straight to the feet of Delle Ali resulted in a goal, we may never have seen the Swede at this club again. As for Smalling, he hung on for dear life as central defensive partners came and went until, right at the end, he was made a fool of by Lucas Moura and Spurs stole in to the night with a bigger winning margin than they ever could have dreamed of.
The strange thing is that United were not all bad in this game. They could have scored two or three goals of their own and carried absolutely no luck whatsoever.
But they are a fragile bunch and that will get you in the end. Who knows what Pochettino has been saying to his players privately since last season ended but it has clearly worked. Tottenham are not a club without their problems at the moment but crucially those issues are not making their way on to the field.
Tottenham didn’t make any signings in the summer but have started the season brilliantly
At United there is no such unity or sense of common purpose. It is a dressing room – and indeed a club – that seems to have an every man for himself mentality and that will only take you one way no matter what level of the game you are lucky enough to play.
Pochettino is a man who manages by design and with a clear sense of forethought. Mourinho used to be like that, too. These days he looks like he is humming a different tune every day and it never ever seems to be the right one.