Tottenham are an absolute joy to watch right now
The Spurs are playing beautiful football that is a joy to watch even if it doesn’t win a trophy.
Most good football teams are pleasurable to watch, but often in different ways. They work on different parts of the brain, and provoke different noises from the mouth. Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona? A cross between a gasp and a sigh. Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid? A low, bassy chuckle. And so on.
Mauricio Pochettino’s Tottenham side may never rack up the trophies of those illustrious teams, but they are, in their own way, one of the more enjoyable sides in European football at the moment. Unless you’re Borussia Dortmund, of course, who on Wednesday night had a wonderful view as Spurs scored three second half goals to take control of their Champions League last-16 tie.
Presumably the noises coming from their mouths were unprintable.
Tottenham, if we want to break it down a little, are actually two kinds of fun: one immediately obvious, the other a little harder to pin down. The obvious one is the football they play. They attack. Not stupidly, and not mindlessly, but as a kind of general principle. They’re here to win games.
It helps that they attack with a fair amount of style as well. Christian Eriksen is a delightful, thoroughly modern playmaker disguised as one of those vaguely consumptive, mysteriously continental waifs who drifted through English football in the 1980s.
And his supporting cast are pretty good too: Harry Kane, an honest and remarkably effective labourer; Dele Alli, who seems like he could do anything with a football; Erik Lamela, who pretends to like the sport but is really only in it to have a small piece of yellow cardboard waved in his face. Oh, how he loves it.
Then there’s Son Heung-min. Throughout the season, the South Korean has been giddily leveling up before our eyes, and has somehow negotiated two international tournaments — two! in one season! — to become one of the most terrifying forwards in the Premier League. He does everything, he does it at top speed, and he does it off either foot.
He palpably loves his job, too, which is the key to the second, more nebulous pleasure. To watch Tottenham is to watch a collection of footballers who are, on the whole, advancing to and then beyond the limits of their talent. And they are enjoying this: pushing on, getting better, pushing on again.
There is something deeply pleasing about watching footballers flourish from game to game, an almost parental satisfaction. And Tottenham have been the best place for this over the last few seasons. All these lovely lads, getting better and having fun in the process. That’s the noise that comes out of your mouth. “Isn’t this nice?”
Nice isn’t a trophy, of course. Elite football is far too hard-nosed and serious for nice to ever translate to anything more than pleasant memories and a few big transfers. And the arc of Spurs’ development has so far taken them high enough to look like they could win a trophy, but never actually get one. This laces their overachievement with a suggestion of under-. Perhaps if they were a little bit worse, the slips might matter less.
But there again, they’re still in play for the biggest cup of the lot. Wednesday’s win wasn’t just impressive in its execution, but also in its seriousness. Dortmund, free-scoring Bundesliga leaders, were contained in the first and then efficiently dispatched in the second, all by a Spurs side missing at least three starters, relying on a couple of kids, and playing Jan Vertonghen as a left wingback. (Although he immediately looked like Spurs’ best left wingback, so maybe he should have been out there earlier.)
Overall, it was a proper European first-leg performance, right down to the plundering of goals two and three. The kind of thing that used to happen to Spurs. Winning the game: good. Damn near killing the tie is … well, for Pochettino, his players, and his fans, it must feel extremely nice indeed.