There was a gripping moment before kickoff outside the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, as the Levy Out supporters’ march reached its final stop and a single protester stationed himself in its path holding up a Levy In sign, Tiananmen Square-style, a lone show of human will in the path of history.
The sign was snatched from his hand. But wait! He pulled out another one. A minor scuffle ensued. Police intervened. The marchers cheered, then milled off to their high-priced seats inside this spectacular mega-drome, monument to Levy’s commercial brilliance, there to watch their team take on Manchester United, the great ailing zombified giant of English football.
That energy outside the ground was visceral and entirely real, as it was inside where the travelling United fans chanted, as they always do, for the Glazers to go, which is also prima facie an excellent idea.
In the buildup, this game was cast as a kind of Jeremy Kyle Clásico, football as a daytime TV-style theatre of dysfunction, grudges and grievances on show, familial poison to be let. You half expected to see gum-chewing bouncers at the edge of the pitch, cutaway reaction shots to stunned members of the crowd, a scoundrel nephew swaggering on stage halfway through.
In the event the reaction of both sets of supporters felt like an entirely reasonable note of resistance and dissent. These two football clubs often seem to be asking the same question these days. What does this sport mean now? Who owns this thing? What is its energy for? What are these protests about, really? Transfer decisions. Poor governance. Modern life. The hyper-capitalism of spectator sport. A world where endlessly loyal supporters of these cultural institutions are made to pay through the nose to act as monetised passion, the commodified backdrop to a so-so game inside a dazzling multi-purpose piece of real estate. Here, it felt as though the energy off the pitch was as vital as the action on it.
And this was a good afternoon in the end for Tottenham, 1-0 winners of a breezy, fun, medium-grade game that looked for long periods like what it was, a lower mid-table arm-wrestle. It was a good game for Ange Postecoglou, who had some players back, and found in United the perfect opponents, a visiting club that makes his own look a deeply functional, happy, settled place, with an entirely sensible playing squad.
One of the odd things about Spurs’ season is the sense of individual players performing really well, even as the team stalls. Djed Spence had another fine, wholehearted game. Dejan Kulusevski was excellent again. Lucas Bergvall is a wonderful midfielder. It was genuinely entertaining watching Bergvall repeatedly skip around Casemiro in central midfield, a spectacle with its own kind of mismatched grace, like one of those Strictly Come Dancing pairings where some twirling professional is teamed up with a 25-stone middle-aged newsreader.
United began with a very closed team, a flat defensive five with Casemiro chugging about carefully just in front in thick black woolly gloves like a dad at the swings. They struggled to deal with James Maddison from the start. The Amorim structure is easiest to learn when it has parts to press itself up against. Maddison finding those odd little half-spaces presents a problem for players learning this on the hoof.
And it was Maddison who scored the only goal after 13 minutes. What does it take to score against Manchester United? A cross from the right. sloppy marking. A deflection. A shot half-saved. Nobody running back except Maddison, who finished neatly. No devil was required here, no clever play, nothing unexpected. It was like leaning on a door that was already open.
United had their chances over the next 80 minutes or so. But most of the time they looked like a team learning to play from a leaflet, which is essentially what they are. Has anybody ever thrown half a season away like this, trying to ingrain patterns of play? It presupposes an absolute belief that there is only one way to do this, that 3-4-3 really is the grail. Are wing-backs this important? It feels like having a house party where you get so obsessed with the lasagne being ready you forget to dance, have a good time, buy any booze or say happy new year.
But then, the real problem for United is the squad, and not just its poverty but its cost, the length of contracts, the sheer witlessness in assembling it. Rasmus Højlund expended energy quite near the action, like a photographer covering some other men playing football. Joshua Zirkzee played close to him up front, rumbling about usefully, eager to be of service, like a friendly scaffolding tower.
Even the bench here was a jaw-dropper, like an A-level geography trip waiting for the train to Lyme Regis, a row of eager haircuts on best behaviour. The worst part is that there is nothing jarring or startling about this, just a sense they are extremely lucky Ipswich, Leicester and Southampton are so far behind the rest of the field.
For Spurs there was at least hope here. For the rest of us, hope just in the energy outside the game, of resistance to the world that brought both of these clubs to this strange place.
