Ange Postecoglou was not having anything said against his Tottenham Hotspur team after that performance at Old Trafford.
He quickly grew agitated with one radio interview when it was suggested that Spurs could have made more of their dominance. The reason for his anger? It’s because the Australian has never been as proud of his team as he was on Sunday evening and he wasn’t going to hear a bad word said about them.
For even in the face of the ridiculous challenges thrown at Postecoglou and his players in their first six months together this week has reached new depths.
The Tottenham boss could not even enjoy getting early January signings through the door in the shape of Timo Werner and Radu Dragusin, because in the same week he lost Ben Davies, Giovani Lo Celso and Dane Scarlett to new muscle injuries, Ryan Sessegnon picked up a short-term “niggle” in Postecoglou’s words after his return following 11 months out, but even that wasn’t the end of the problems.
For fate was not done with his team yet as illness began to spread throughout the squad. Dejan Kulusevski copped the worst of it. The Swede felt temporarily better and attempted to train on Saturday only to worsen as the day went on and by Sunday he was not able to play any part.
Postecoglou told football.london that both Oliver Skipp and Destiny Udogie were among “four or five players” in the team who had also fallen ill, yet the duo ended up pushing themselves to the limit and beyond, Skipp playing 84 minutes and Udogie the full 95 minutes. For some within Tottenham it would have brought back bad memories of the famous ‘Lasagne-gate’ incident all those years ago.
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In all Postecoglou had 11 unavailable first team players including captain Son Heung-min, vice-captain James Maddison, in fact he had no attacking creative central midfielders to call upon at all and the Spurs boss couldn’t even name a full bench. He could only select eight players, which included two goalkeepers and three young academy players. Eighteen-year-old centre-back Alfie Dorrington had played the full 90 minutes for the U21s less than 48 hours before in their 3-2 win at Southampton.
In his starting XI, Postecoglou had one centre-back who had not played a minute in around two-and-a-half months and another thrust in after more than three weeks out following just a couple of training sessions. Not only that but Werner came straight into the team despite having not played a minute of football since November 4.
So it would have been entirely understandable if Spurs had fought valiantly but struggled as the Theatre of Dreams instead brought only nightmares.
For Tottenham had only won two of their previous 11 games against Manchester United in the Premier League, one of them earlier this season at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Defeat was surely on the cards when Rasmus Hojlund fired a rocket of a shot past Guglielmo Vicario just two minutes and 32 seconds into the encounter. United had won every one of their previous 15 Premier League matches at Old Trafford when going into the break ahead.
In fact, Opta states that Tottenham have gone 1-0 down in 25 of their 32 Premier League games at Old Trafford, which is the most one side has conceded the first goal away to another in the league.
Yet Spurs’ beleaguered players were having none of it. This was the first time they avoided defeat having trailed at half time in this Premier League fixture since October 2005.
On this occasion, they went to Manchester and made United look like the plucky visitors. Postecoglou’s men had 64% of the possession and made 497 passes, more than double the 237 made by Erik ten Hag’s side.
Spurs had 16 shots at goal with six on target and forced Andre Onana, who had delayed his Africa Cup of…
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