Spurs weather a Forest storm on a day when the breaks went their way

Spurs survived a tricky trip to Nottingham with a 2-0 win, but despite two goals from Harry Kane, they still looked a little flat.

Winning ugly is important. Very few teams in the history of professional football have won much with beauty alone, and the ability to grind out a result on a bad day at the office can be very valuable indeed. At The City Ground against Spurs, Nottingham Forest put up an excellent fight and looked like the better team for long spells, but Spurs have the experience and nous and ended up with all three points, but also with Antonio Conte having one or questions likely playing on his mind by the end of the game.

It took five minutes for one of this year’s surprise hits to feed one of its longer-standing theats to give Spurs the lead. Dejan Kulusevski was given a surprising amount of space in the centre of midfield and threaded a perfectly weighted pass for Harry Kane to place a low shot across a likely unsighted Dean Henderson and in.

Kulusevski’s intelligence – he often seems to have this moment of forethought beyond whomever is marking him at any given moment – is far too great to be given that much time and space in which to cogitate. Less than ten minutes later Kane was bearing down on goal again, only for a perfectly-timed tackle from Joe Worrall to nick the ball from under him at the last minute.

None of this means that Forest were absent without leave throughout the opening stages. They were energetic when moving into attacking positions, creative with their passing, and just lacked the final ball that only really comes with the experience of playing together regularly, and over a period of time.

But then again, you may only have to achieve that pass once or twice in a game to win it, and occasionally Forest came close to finding it. Lewis O’Brien brought a mildly uncomfortable save from Hugo Lloris, and the Spurs defence looked more than a little exerted from a succession of balls into the penalty area which didn’t quite come to anything.

Forest’s press was, just as Chelsea’s had been a couple of weeks earlier, successfully penning Spurs back, but Chelsea only emerged from that game with a point because Spurs scored twice regardless, and when they did get a foot on the ball in this game, they found a lot of space to move into in the middle third of the pitch, with their opponents having committed a lot of players forward.

Son Heung-min, still awaiting his first goal of the season, curled narrowly over…