Jose Mourinho up and running as Tottenham beat West Ham to claim first league win since September
West Ham United 2-3 Tottenham Hotspur: Spurs’ victory felt like a formality, despite the hosts’ late comeback
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Your support makes all the difference.A first win that Jose Mourinho will happily take, but a game virtually given away by a woeful West Ham United.
This 3-2 home defeat started as the story of a glitzy new Tottenham managerial regime, but ended with everyone talking about the need for a similar change here at the London Stadium. Spurs’ first league win in two months felt that much of a formality, and surely means Manuel Pellegrini only has weeks left in this job. The late rally, much like so much of West Ham’s defending, felt like a token effort.
They were that bad for the most part. Tottenham didn’t even need to be that good – and occasionally weren’t. That isn’t to say there weren’t positive signs from Mourinho – and there were a few hints at the changes to his methods he has apparently made in 11 months off – but all of that has to be put in the context of just how much of a mess West Ham were for the majority of this game.
And it was as if an initially restrained Spurs realised this quite quickly. Having first targeted West Ham at right-back and in the space in front of the sadly hapless Roberto, they soon found holes pretty much everywhere.
The defence displayed absolutely no sense of organisation, badly exposing Issa Diop. The midfield seemed unable to cover them. The attack – and especially Andriy Yarmolenko – had no interest in covering them. Only Michael Antonio, West Ham’s first goal scorer late on, showed any kind of impetus.
The classic signs of a team in disarray. And a classic confidence boost for a side that need one. This was almost the perfect opening fixture for Mourinho, such was the lack of a challenge.
And, from about the half-hour mark, you could see it flowing through Spurs. You could also see how much the profile of this squad fits Mourinho’s core ideals. They’re the right age profile, with most of the right players in all of his key positions. The 4-3-3 he picked mostly made sense, especially in midfield.
A fully firing Dele Alli is actually close to Mourinho’s ideal as a number 10, given his positional history as a defensive midfielder. It means he can be, as the Portuguese once implored, a No 10 who is “an eight-and-a-half when the team loses the ball” and “a nine-and-a-half when the team has the ball”.
The truth is that Dele’s form has actually been improving in the last few weeks, but it was difficult not to link some of the greater swagger here to the individual attention Mourinho gave him in midweek.
The Portuguese told him to start being “the real Dele”, which you could see today. There was a cockiness – and improvisation – about the grounded flick in the build-up to Spurs’ second goal. He had already been central to so much of their attacking play by then, so easily dispossessing Diop for the first real chance of the game, and then slipping Son Heung-Min inside the centre-half for the opening goal just moments later.
It’s difficult not to think the Korean is another player Mourinho will adore: a forward with brilliant end product, who will work endlessly.
If the Portuguese was allowed craft one of his vintage wide forwards, he could barely come up with better. Son played in the fine ball for Lucas to get the touch for the second.
That was the game won. Spurs were on such a wave then that it temporarily looked like they would utterly humiliate West Ham. Confidence was surging through Serge Aurier, most notably, as he pulled off a nutmeg one minute and then sent in a glorious cross for Harry Kane to head in the third in the next.
That put the striker one ahead of Martin Chivers in the Spurs’ records, to mark an extra bit of club history to a new manager’s first game.
The fact it was exactly that meant there was a natural fall-off from Spurs, as West Ham players gave the semblance they were still fighting to ensure it wasn’t Pellegrini’s last game. Antonio struck, Rice had a goal disallowed for offside, Angelo Ogbonna found the back of the net with 30 seconds left. That sloppy defending, that has been a characteristic of Spurs for some time now, is something Mourinho is going to have to stamp out.
The Portuguese was beginning to get a little irritated on the line by that point, but was of course punching the air in that familiar way by the end.
Spurs had completed something that’s been unfamiliar for the last two months: a league win. It’s difficult to say how long West Ham will have to wait for the next one, though, or how long Pellegrini has left.
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