NO doubt when Tottenham Hotspur travel to Manchester United this Sunday a TV camera will linger on Jose Mourinho and much will be made of his former occupancy of the Old Trafford technical area. It can be safely assumed that Martin Tyler will have a neat line rehearsed and ready for the shot.
Curiosity aside, however, the manager’s doomed spell in the North-West will have little relevance to proceedings and the same also applies to his handy habit of besting ex-employers. Time was when Mourinho liked nothing more than to return to old stomping grounds and leave with the points but that impressive record fell by the wayside last season when Spurs lost twice to Chelsea and struggled home and away against United.
Let’s leave the past in the past then and concentrate instead on an altogether more meaningful connection between the clubs, namely that nobody else in the Premier League comes close to infuriating and confusing as much as Spurs and United right now.
Each club is consistent only in their inconsistency and frankly it is impossible to predict which incarnation will appear from one fixture to the next. Will this weekend showcase the rampant, dangerous Tottenham who put Southampton to the sword so recently? Or will we see the apathetic, muddled 11 who offered barely any resistance to Everton on the opening day? Will this Sunday afternoon herald the Manchester United who remained unbeaten post-lockdown last term? Or will they be a continuation of the side that has toiled just to do the basics this past fortnight, with a defence that looks startlingly fragile and an attack wholly dependent on individuality and penalties?
Truthfully, nobody knows: it is Jekyll and Hyde coming up against Jekyll and Hyde and if this is a source of frustration for those seeking probabilities in the market, substantially more sympathy is due to the fan-bases because this miasma of uncertainty has followed their clubs around for some considerable time. Combined Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer have been in situ for 32 months yet both Spurs and United remain devoid of identity or direction. They are misshapen and half measured. They are desperately in need of a new manager with new ideas, yet they’ve had a new manager with new ideas for a while now.
Premier League home defeats since May 2017:
Liverpool: 0
Man City: 5
Arsenal: 7
Man United: 8
Chelsea: 11
Tottenham: 12 pic.twitter.com/VyVpeyx3cX— ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) September 28, 2020
Highlighting this though only distracts us with the bigger picture and seeks also to castigate and there is no room for that here. What matters is trying to determine what might take place as two hit-and-miss teams collide and to do this perhaps it is wise to drill down into the present, to better decide who goes into this fixture in the better shape.
In theory this would work, except of course Spurs and United are so comprehensively unpredictable that their patchy form is not just spread out across the months. Even within the space of ninety minutes they are impossible to define.
Take Tottenham’s afore-mentioned 5-2 hammering of Southampton. On the face of it this was a real statement of intent, against a team that has come on leaps and bounds under Ralph Hasenhuttl. Yet in the first half Spurs were abject and disjointed, only coming to life – admittedly very much so – when Harry Kane and Son Heung-min combined extraordinarily to score all of the goals between them.
Okay, maybe we’re finally getting somewhere then. With Spurs so reliant on the pairing – who have scored an astounding 52% of their Premier League goals since the beginning of last season – maybe the injury and absence of the South Korean swings the balance in United’s favour?
Except this is Spurs and Spurs don’t make sense post-Pochettino. Last year one or both of Kane and Son were missing for 14 league commitments and Mourinho’s men compiled a healthy 2.1 points per game during those periods. For the rest of the time, with their brilliant duo spearheading their attack, they amassed just 1.8 PPG.
Mourinho has responded to Ole's goalpost joke with his own jibe about Man Utd's penalty record
"I understand for him the dimensions of the goalposts are not important. For him, what is important, is the dimensions of the 18-yard box.
"I think he would prefer a 22-yard box!" pic.twitter.com/P7sUoPZdwQ
— Goal (@goal) September 28, 2020
Which leaves us in no-man’s-land. For this is a team that leans so heavily on their strikers for goals yet who performs statistically better without them. Good luck therefore and godspeed when betting on Spurs and beware too that Kane has a poor return against United with just two in 12 games.
Far more tempting in the goalscoring market is the 9/5 available on Marcus Rashford to score anytime because if the visitors look to individuals to get them out of a collective jam that goes double for United. This was evidenced with their own venture to the south coast last week where a woeful showing was saved by a piece of direct magic from Rashford. For the superstitious among you incidentally Anthony Martial is due a goal and is also a decent shout at 9/5 to notch anytime. The Frenchman has drawn a blank in his last four games.
As for the overall result the choice is yours whether to randomly wave a pin at the screen or be seduced by the 29/10 for an away win. The latter option should be plumped for but only because an out-of-sorts United surely cannot carry over their good fortune from their Brighton escape.
