Never underestimate the haplessness of this Manchester United. Never underestimate the haplessness of this Tottenham Hotspur. Never underestimate the capacity of the Premier League to uncover drama in the least plausible situation. The embers of a game of little quality seemed cold and dead but somehow burst into glorious flame in the final six minutes plus stoppage time.
What it means is anybody’s guess, other than that these are two sides who remain deeply flawed. The shadow of Bilbao and last May’s Europa League final was unavoidable; in purely technical terms, that game was just as bad as the first 84 minutes of this one, but it at least had a sense of edge. Nervousness is permissible if there is something to be nervous about. Such scrappiness in a routine league meeting is far less explicable.
For the second week running, United took the lead, seemed comfortable, conceded twice and were left talking about their resilience and character after getting away with a 2-2 draw. But the truth is that this was a game they should have had wrapped up long before the Spurs fightback belatedly began. Not for the first time this season, their intensity dropped in the second half as Casemiro tired.
Spurs had offered nothing in the first half, not a shot on target, not the glimmer of a threat. Their xG at the break was 0.07, a 40% improvement on what they managed in the entirety of last Saturday’s drab defeat by Chelsea, but still the sort of figure you can generate if your centre-forward looks hard enough at the opposition goal. The game drifted. Worst of all was the sense that neither side was actually trying to kill the game, that, like Lennie with the rabbits in Of Mice and Men, they’d done so by mistake, as a result of their own clumsiness. There was a rumbling sense of frustration. The stadium gearing up for a symphony of booing. And then suddenly three goals happened in 11 minutes and nobody knew quite what to think.
The blunt fact is that Spurs haven’t won any of their last five Premier League home games. Six games at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium have yielded five points. They might have begun the day sixth in the table but poor home form is far less forgivable than poor away form, particularly for fans who regularly protest against rising ticket prices. The smallish contingent who felt they were above appointing a manager from Brentford now find themselves joined in scepticism by those bewildered at just how unadventurous some of Thomas Frank’s football has seemed.
Frank did not win any of his first eight games as manager of Brøndby and lost eight of his first ten games at Brentford. The circumstances were slightly different, admittedly, but still the precedent is there: he has a track record of overcoming poor starts. It may even be that the slow start is part of the process of him instilling his way of doing things.
But there are also specific circumstances: Tottenham have been without Dominic Solanke, James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski for most of the season, and they lost Lucas Bergvall and Mohammed Kudus last weekend.
That is a significant creative deficit to make up, particularly given Xavi Simons appears to be finding acclimatisation to the Premier League so testing. In the end, although it was Mathys Tel and Richarlison who got the Spurs goals, the key figure in coaxing the game’s ashes into life was Wilson Odobert, who had come on at half-time for Randal Kolo Muani.
The 20-year-old’s beginning to life at Tottenham has been hampered by hamstring problems but there is a reason why he has been capped 14 times by France’s under-21 side. He carries the ball well and, after scoring against Copenhagen in the Champions League on Tuesday, played three key passes here as part of a 100% pass completion rate.
In a game characterised by sloppiness and carelessness, he stood out. At the very least he supplied the wallpaper that covered up what for 84 minutes had been a pretty disappointing game, for Tottenham in particular.
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And in doing so, he spared his manager the sort of reaction that had greeted the final whistle after the defeat by Chelsea last week. Frank may work for Spurs or he may not but the pattern of his previous jobs, limited evidence though that may be, is that it takes a while for him to get his teams playing his way. The Europa League success obscures just how awful Spurs were at times last season; that will take time to rectify, and the injuries in forward areas will only extend that process. The fix was never going to be quick.
With United enduring a similar rebuild, perhaps a game of mixed quality, a mishmash of the dismal and the excellent, was only to be expected.
