You’d be forgiven if you didn’t see Tottenham Hotspur’s 4-0 away win over Aston Villa coming after the first half. It was a terse opening 45, with Tottenham managing to keep possession of the ball for large stretches, but only managing one shot.
But while we may not have seen Tottenham’s four goal second half barrage coming, Ange Postecoglou did. In his press conference following the match, Postecoglou said he had a feeling that Aston Villa were starting to tire at the end of the first half, and encouraged his team to just keep doing what they were doing, trusting eventually good things would come.
“The whole game, I was really pleased with the way we handled the whole day. Obviously we knew it was a significant game coming here, tough venue, good opponent. I just thought, obviously the atmosphere here, they get behind their team. I thought with all that, the context of all that, first half we did really well, just to make them work hard more than anything else, they had to try to contain us, and the threats they had we snuffed out.
“I had a sense towards the back end of the first half that they were beginning to really tire a little bit. That was the message at half-time, just to persevere, stay calm, play our football, maintain the intensity, which is going to be important. And we did. We got off to a flyer, the quality of our football was excellent, to see out the game.”
That’s exactly what Spurs did, and it worked. We know that Postecoglou’s Plan B is “keep doing Plan A” and that’s frustrating to watch sometimes when things don’t appear to be working. That’s less of the case this time around. The first half featured a lot of what looked like empty possession by Tottenham, but it was a compelling half to watch despite the stat line. Spurs were doing what felt like a decently good job of progressing the ball, and getting balls into the box. Villa put in a good defensive effort and snuffed out a lot of Spurs half-chances, and Tottenham also wasn’t able to get a lot of space to create and execute shots.
In some ways it’s ironic that Tottenham’s breakthrough came shortly into the second half after both sides had a chance to rest a bit, but the two goals in three minutes forced Unai Emery to shift out of his tweaked 5-3-2 formation and into his preferred 4-4-2 to chase the match. Villa have been very effective this season in that attacking formation, but after the McGinn red card it became moot.
Ange also was pleased with the overall execution from his attackers, noting that he hasn’t been getting the match performances he expected from his front line lately.
“What’s important for us is that I thought we scored four good goals from four key players who need to be scoring for us. I keep saying that that’s the area of the park where I don’t think we’ve got bang for our buck, considering how hard we work in that front third.
“Even today I thought we had more opportunities to score but I was just really pleased in the execution of all our goals and the players who got them. That’s more important. We can be a team that scores a lot of goals but we’re still a work in progress in that area.. So to get four goals, and away from home, and the players who scored them was more important and the execution of them was really pleasing.”
The win puts Spurs at an advantage in the race for fourth place in the Premier League. They’re now two points behind Villa with a match in hand, and ahead of Villa in goal differential (+20 – +18). Certainly not a done deal, but with upcoming matches at Fulham and home to Luton, there’s a real opportunity to stake a claim on fourth place.
The only negative was the injury substitution to Micky van de Ven, who put in an immense defensive performance against an in-form Ollie Watkins before a muscular injury forced his substitution for Radu Dragusin. When asked Postecoglou said that he didn’t know Micky’s status, but the player didn’t seem to think it was that bad.
“I’m not sure, he doesn’t think it’s anything too significant. So disappointing for him because he was outstanding again up until that point. Great for Radu to come in, his first significant game-time in a big game and I thought he handled it really well.”