Hands up who expected that, then? Put them back down you liars.
For just the second time in 35 Premier League attempts, Spurs have beaten Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. And they could scarcely have been more deserving winners, outplaying their frequent tormentors in every way in every part of the pitch to record back-to-back wins after none in their first six.
Eventually, the inevitable errors would come and once the scoreline started to reflect the match it became inexorable, a question only of how large the final winning margin would be as a beaten and humiliated team spent the final minutes in utter, brain-melting headloss.
It’s tale as old as Premier League time. Except with one huge twist. Spurs, who had one win in 34 Premier League appearances on this ground, now have two in 35.
We’ve been scratching our heads about when Spurs last produced this kind of completeness of performance in this kind of fixture. The most recent contender is the entirely misleading 2-0 win at Manchester City in the very early weeks of last season.
But even that was a sit-back-and-counter kind of win. It was a fine plan, well executed, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t Spurs going to a ground where their record is thoroughly miserable and thoroughly outplaying their hosts in every way from first to last.
The real talk is that Spurs have almost never done this kind of thing to this kind of club in the Premier League. Even in the best times under Mauricio Pochettino, away days like this against the very best were rare.
They had it here. Finally, in the eighth game of the season, we saw what the Sandro Tonali-Mateus Fernandes double pivot might look like. And on this evidence, it actually really might look like a midfield worth close to £200m.
It’s one game and they will have to back it up, but this was a stunning proof of concept. Let there be no more f*cking about now. Spurs aren’t in Europe. They are no longer in the Carabao. They’re a one-game-a-week team and this should now be inked in. If those two are available, that’s the midfield.
Jan Paul van Hecke, Mathys Tel, especially Sandro Tonali but especially Mateus Fernandes. He was everywhere for Spurs. Vital tackles here, quick passes there, and even a bit of dark-arts naughtiness to create the conditions that would ultimately lay the foundations for Cole Palmer’s head falling off and subsequent red card.
Which is to say, it was a complete performance. And again of a type you just don’t associate with Spurs even when they’re good. Not just outplaying the opponent, but outthinking and outsmarting them. And then sh*thousing them into doing something really stupid.
Fernandes’ fingerprints are all over this win. He had 121 touches of the ball – 15 more than any other player and almost twice as many as anyone in Chelsea blue. But he also made more tackles than any other player. He attempted 99 passes, and found the desired white-shirted target with 91 of them.
He had the most passes in the final third, the most crosses and the most line-breaking passes. It’s just a complete midfield performance. And it just has to now be the start of something.
It’s often been brief and illusory, a blink-and-you-miss-it period of play where the passes are crisp and the movement alluring. But even in what were ultimately pretty grim defeats against Newcastle and Aston Villa, those glimpses were there. Same in the goalless draws with Everton and Forest.
Those moments had sharper focus and greater frequency at Old Trafford, where Spurs nevertheless needed a late Dominic Solanke goal to salvage the point that was the least their efforts that night deserved.
But here was 90 minutes of compelling De Zerbiball. This is what his very expensive team should look like. This is exactly how they should play.
And they do now have a real chance to get on a roll. They find themselves now in the rarefied air of 12th and only four points behind today’s opponents. Their next five league games before the North London Derby are against Crystal Palace, Leeds, Ipswich, Sunderland and Fulham. Don’t Spurs it up now.
A timely reminder that you can – as Spurs do – have one of the most advanced state-of-the-art training facilities in the world, but sometimes all it really needs to change your season is a few days of sunshine and cans with the boys.
The draw at United offered reasons to be tentatively positive. The win over Coventry wasn’t the most compelling performance, but a night where result trumped all. There was a sense of something moving in the right direction, yet still a vital need for it to really tangibly click into place. For a proper “Now we’ve started” moment. This could really be that moment.
They hit back with 10 men for a point at United, scoring their first equaliser under De Zerbi in the process. Their best spell of the Coventry game came between the p*ss-weak concession of an equaliser early in the second half and retaking the lead. Again, retaking the lead after an equaliser was something they’d never previously achieved under this manager. It was another setback to which Spurs were able to find the kind of response that has eluded them for so long now.
And tonight, finally, they looked like something closer to achieving the final form. A team that isn’t even fragile at all in the first place, but is just uncomplicatedly quite good at football. It’s been so, so long.
It is impossible not to feel for Mike Penders. His first Premier League start was going really rather well right up until it wasn’t, when a disastrous attempted punch under no real pressure from a corner slid off the back of his hand and into his own goal.
It was no more than Spurs’ dominance had deserved, but still a horrible way for it to happen.
One of the first to commiserate with Penders at the final whistle was Spurs keeper Antonin Kinsky. The goalkeepers’ union is real and collective, and there are few better placed than Kinsky to know precisely how Penders felt in that moment. His words will have been genuine, and he shows that a high-profile early disaster need not become all that defines you.
But the crucial difference is that Kinsky came back out of the Spurs team after that harrowing night in Madrid before getting back in and establishing himself as number one. There will be no such chance for Penders to regain the run of himself outside the spotlight. He is Chelsea’s first-choice keeper until Emi Martinez returns and he will have to bounce back immediately if it isn’t to become a huge problem for Xabi Alonso over the next six weeks or so.
Few players of his age can have faced a tougher environment than he has had to endure while trying to impose his obvious but, yes, fragile talent on the world’s most difficult league while playing for the world’s most difficult club.
He has had no margin for error. No room to grow into it. It’s been sink or swim, and thus far it’s been almost exclusively sink.
But this was special. He was Spurs’ preferred target throughout, even with the more established and near-equally impressive Mohammed Kudus out on the right.
Spurs’ best route to success always appeared to come via the combination of Andy Robertson and Tel on the left, and there were near misses aplenty as their bravery in taking on the Chelsea press was rewarded with frequent attacking opportunities down that flank.
When he finally did get his goal, the pressing was all his own. He won the ball deep inside his own half and then simply took off, shrugging off the dispossessed Josh Acheampong, skipping past Maxence Lacroix like it was nothing before firing low into the bottom corner from north of 20 yards.
A stunning goal worthy of winning any match. He is a confidence player in a confidence team, and both have been running on fumes for some time now. That could be a huge moment for both player and club.
The news that it is a groin injury cannot be described as good. But the fact it’s not the knee again is something.
Spurs have looked a different beast with him back in the side, and especially so tonight when finally deployed to spin away and make mischief in front of that Tonali-Fernandes axis.
Alonso will point with some justification to the impact of the two forced changes. Penders’ mortifying error made Emi Martinez’s absence all the more obvious, yet it was still at the other end of the pitch where Chelsea were found most wanting.
Because without him, Chelsea lost not just the focal point of their attack, not just the reliable source of goals and assists he has become, but the entire shape of their play altogether.
In a league blessed with vanishingly few elite forwards, Chelsea suddenly looked deeply ordinary without theirs.
The double-whammy of his absence was in not just losing his direct contribution but in so horribly minimising that of Cole Palmer and in particular Morgan Rogers.
If Palmer’s frustration at Fernandes’ really quite naughty handball was understandable, the scale of his reaction was not. Yellow cards all round was probably the fair outcome, but Palmer’s was without doubt a high-tariff yellow. Had the officials come down on the harsher side, it would have been hard to argue.
Minutes later he planted his studs into Gallagher’s ankle, and his protestations at the inevitable outcome of this were laughable. There was no other possible outcome here. Dismissed players are often criticised for giving the referee a choice to make; Palmer’s mistake was to give the official no choice at all.
It’s Chelsea’s ninth Premier League red card since the start of last season. Spurs themselves are second on that list with five. There can be no excuse for such ill-discipline.
Rogers then hacked Gallagher down in injury time to earn his own very yellow card. Gary Neville may have been guilty of overexcitement in suggesting it too may have been a red, but Jamie Redknapp was closer to the real daftness of it after the game: it was the sort of pointless, petulant foul born of anger and frustration that was as likely to injure himself as an opponent.
But that is the only flimsy defence that can be mustered for just why he persisted for so long with a plan that simply wasn’t working. It felt impossible at half-time to imagine that Chelsea would be as bad again in the second half as they were in the first.
And sure enough, they weren’t as bad. They were worse. And Spurs were better. And yet still Alonso chose to stick rather than twist. It was well past the hour when he finally made a move, and that was a like-for-like switch at left-back.
Simply placing any available warm body into the striker’s role appeared an almost entirely risk-free option, so bad was Chelsea’s first half. Even if they themselves didn’t really do anything, it would at least have given Chelsea the opportunity to get more out of Rogers and Palmer.
Yet it wasn’t until the 87th minute that Alonso turned to Welbeck, by which point his team were a goal and a player down.
He didn’t make it onto the pitch until the 88th minute, his arrival inconveniently delayed by Tel sealing the deal with Spurs’ second goal. In that moment, as across the entirety of a damp and chastening night, Alonso and Chelsea got precisely what they deserved.
