Spurs absolutely thumped Crystal Palace 4-0. So that must mean Spurs are good, right? Erm… dunno. Maybe? Maybe not?
Crystal Palace v Tottenham always promised to be a fascinating game. They are perhaps the two strangest teams in the Premier League.
Both teams are a box of contradictions. They are inconsistent, obviously, but inconsistent in wildly consistent ways. They are impossible to predict, but their unpredictability falls within clearly defined and predictable limits. Neither of them have won any games against top six opponents this season – for Palace make that top half. Spurs are always shit in the first half. Palace are often shit in the second half. Both teams are excellent at clawing back points from losing positions, with the obvious downside there being that both often find themselves needing to claw back points from losing positions.
So really, what we should have expected was for this game to produce a wildly improbable outcome in an entirely predictable way. So that’s what we got. Spurs were terrible in the first half – albeit after a brief and seemingly deceptive bright convention-defying opening 15 minutes – and Palace could easily have been ahead by half-time. Instead it was goalless as Spurs extended their record to one first-half goal in now 11 games. In the second half, Spurs – as they so bafflingly and inexplicably often do – came to life. Four goals still seemed like an unexpectedly large amount, but it’s not even the first time they’ve gone from level at half-time to winning by four this season; they did it to Leicester in September’s bizarre 6-2 win over Brendan Rodgers’ side.
What was different for Spurs tonight was that they scored the first goal, the first time they have done so in any game in any competition since a 2-0 win over Everton in October when Liz Truss was Prime Minister. They hadn’t been 3-0 up in a game since Boris Johnson was still partying away in nominal charge of the country back in May. So this was still at least a relatively novel variation on their now trademark bit.
The speed with which Spurs went from disappointingly second best yet again to 2-0 up at the start of the second half really was jarring. But being surprised by it requires us to be surprised by Harry Kane scoring two Premier League goals, and we should all have gone quite some way past that point by now. He has almost 200 of the things.
What can be said with absolute certainty is that Kane was the catalyst for the…
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