By the barest of margins! By the barest of all margins!
Yes, Tottenham are top of the Premier League at the second international break, on goals scored, and Ange Postecoglou is the toast of all England.
Getting carried away with yourself is the name of the game at Spurs at the moment, turning a scratchy 1-0 win at the league’s worst team in what journalists are duty bound to call a Difficult Place To Go into a miasma of delight.
Have you seen Luton’s ground, by the way? Wonder if anyone has mentioned it but it’s awfully quaint.
Spurs weren’t that great, to be honest, but weren’t great in the best possible way, in that they created heaps but didn’t score, then nicked one and barely allowed a chance. It was, as we are also contractually obligated to mention in the Ange era, not very Spursy at all.
It’s better to create and miss than not create at all, and the way Tottenham managed the game out was pretty comfortable in the end, again, with the caveat that Luton are one of the worst teams to come up in a long time.
Perhaps there’s a lesson in how Spurs have done it as much as anything else, and the second big game of the weekend plays into that.
We had a real blockbuster between Arsenal and Manchester City, and a theoretically seismic result, too, with the Gunners taking a late 1-0 win via Gabriel Martinelli.
Arsenal hadn’t beaten Citeh in the league since 2015 – Sorry by Justin Bieber was number one in Australia, if you want to know long ago that was – when Arsene Wenger was still in post at the Emirates.
It was also Mikel Arteta’s first win over his mentor, Pep Guardiola, which has to be worth something in the title narrative.
For most of the people watching, those two were front and centre of the debate, but not because of their slightly frosty handshake at the end, or their predictably varying comments on Matteo Kovacic’s non-sending off in the first half.
Instead, it was a big old pile on about what they have done to our beautiful football. Because, while this was clearly a high-quality match, it was also a really boring one.
Prior to the 76th minute triple sub that brought about Arsenal’s winner, neither team had really done anything to score and were playing as if they’d mutually agreed that 0-0 was quite useful to them.
It was, politely, one for the purists. Sure, there was some real interesting out-of-possession stuff, and the tactical battle was written in big letter for everyone to see, but that did result in a lot of quite scared footballers not wanting to make a mistake.
Guardiola is Guardiola and Arteta is his protege, so it’s not surprising that they want to play the same way, and all the players are good, tactically competent, positionally aware and all that jazz, so they follow what they’ve been told to do.
The great Arigo Sacchi said that the ideal game of football where both teams play well would end 0-0 because they would cancel each other out. To wit: yesterday at the Emirates.
It’s easy to get frustrated at the high tactical priests producing a bad game, but really, the best games tend to be styles-make-fights anyway.
If both teams play direct, it can be dull, and if both teams play possession, it can be dull. If both sit off, guess what?
In Saturday night’s Australia Cup Final, we saw two teams with wildly different ideas of how to win, and both played well, meaning we got a great game.
The main argument against Pep and Mikel is that the systems battle didn’t really allow enough opportunity for someone to break it open, which is as much down to players and their confidence to express themselves as anything.
Tactics are about having a set up that maximises what you have and enables your players to express themselves. The second part was missing yesterday.
As Ange is shouting loudly from the other side of North London: why not both? His teams have always built expression into the system, and embraced the chaos a little. Jurgen Klopp might say something similar, as might Roberto di Zerbi, or Mauricio Pochettino.
We’ll find out when they come back after the internationals, because City host Brighton and Arsenal go to Chelsea. They’ll both win, of course, because it’s been fairly conclusively proven now that their systems work really well against everyone else.
Speaking of everyone else: there were a load of other games, wild suitably strange results.
Manchester United have given up trying to be good and thus will be lucky, as evidenced by their two-goal stoppage time turnaround against Brentford, and the Thursday night club – Liverpool, Brighton, Aston Villa and West Ham – are already shaping up as the best of the rest, occupying the spaced from 4-7, with Newcastle one below in eighth.
There’s a bit of a narrative forming that, had City won on Sunday, that would have been that for the title race for another year. Instead, now there is jeopardy all the way down through the league’s middle class.
United and Chelsea are performing the now-traditional role of rubbish big teams, at least two of which can be guaranteed to fail each year, thus opening up space for everyone else to sneak in.
For all the chat about the elite of the game being boring, the teams that are the most confident in their own styles – and willing to take on their opponents in an uncompromising manner – are doing the best.
This weekend showed it all: Brighton and Liverpool played out a back and forth 2-2, as did West Ham and Newcastle, as did Aston Villa and Wolves. Everyone can beat everyone and does, and in different ways.
Brighton battered Newcastle and United, but were soundly beaten by Aston Villa and West Ham. Newcastle battered Aston Villa 5-1 on the opening day, but Villa are now above them.
It’s hard to remember a start to the year that has been so tight, not just at the top but all the way down.
Only the very bottom looks a little forlorn, with the three promoted teams and Bournemouth in for long seasons.
It’s a cliche that this is the best league in the world, but for once, it’s actually living up to that – and with an Aussie on top.
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