A good response despite missing players
This was the first chance to watch Tottenham in action since that 4-3 thriller against Leeds on November 12 and almost a month on Antonio Conte was back, looked freshly tanned from his exotic winter getaway, to oversee the preparations for the second half of a season like no other.
With only two friendlies for the non-World Cup players to get sharp, the Spurs head coach wants to make the most of them and that meant the first team stars got 74 minutes in their legs against the visiting Motherwell side on a pitch at Hotspur Way before nine young academy players replaced them.
Conte did not have everyone available to him. With Ben Davies and Rodrigo Bentancur both out with injuries suffered in Qatar, his line-up was also missing Ryan Sessegnon, Emerson Royal, Lucas Moura, Clement Lenglet and goalkeeper Fraser Forster.
READ MORE: Tottenham player ratings vs Motherwell: Doherty double, Kulusevski great as Spence and Gil shine
football.london understands Sessegnon is back working on the grass but not with the group yet following his injury against Nottingham Forest last month in the Carabao Cup so this match came a little early in his return to training.
The other four players are believed to have suffered various minor knocks in training in recent days so their absence from the match was precautionary.
That left Conte with just enough players to put out a strong base to his team, with Harvey White, Brandon Austin and Charlie Sayers adding a little extra academy flourish to the starting line-up, with all three having got experience in and around the first team in the past 18 months.
The result was a team with plenty of attacking verve despite having no recognised senior striker available and Motherwell, who return to Scottish Premiership action in just over a week's time, struggled to see much of the ball in the Tottenham half.
Spurs enjoyed 61% of the possession and played 590 passes to the visitors' 334, with 14 shots on the Motherwell goal, eight of them on target and most of all there was plenty of pressing, hassling and harrying and that made life difficult for the Scottish side. That will have pleased the Tottenham boss the most as Spurs are at their best when they press well as a group.
It's only a friendly match so Conte will not read too much into the scoreline or the dominance but he will look at how the players responded to his specific instructions and which ones looked sharp ahead of the return of Premier League football.
Eye-catching wing-backs
Spurs' 3-4-3 formation with Harvey White playing as a false nine ensured there was plenty of space out wide for Djed Spence and Matt Doherty to make a difference and they both grabbed the opportunity.
With Sessegnon on his way back to full fitness and Ivan Perisic taking on Richarlison's Brazil in their World Cup quarter-final clash, Doherty took up a position on the left and caused Motherwell plenty of problems. He ended up as the game's top scorer with two goals - something even he seemed to laugh about after he planted the second one into the net.
The Irishman has struggled this season to rediscover the form he was showing towards the end of the last campaign before that poor tackle by Aston Villa's Matty Cash injured his knee and left him with months of recovery.
Conte asks of his wing-backs that they are defenders when out of possession and auxiliary strikers and wingers when the team has the ball. Both Doherty and Spence did exactly that on Friday afternoon.
Doherty's first goal showed his composure. Yves Bissouma played a perfectly-weighted ball into the path of Dejan Kulusevski. The Swede found Bryan Gil and the diminutive dribbling Spaniard teed up the Irishman. Doherty cut inside, past two defenders, and hit a low shot with his right foot that rolled into the net.
His second goal came during a period when he had shown yet more versatility, stepping into a role on the right of the back three for a spell. That gave him a different task at attacking set pieces and he duly accepted it, heading home Kulusevski's curling corner.
"It was just nice to get the shirt back on and get back out there. We played well, took the game seriously and we pressed how we wanted to press and didn't give them any real chances to start the game well. We were on top from the start so it was quite enjoyable and I managed to be in the right place twice," Doherty said in a post-match interview on SpursPlay.
"[This kind of break] hasn't happened before but we were only off for two weeks, so it's not like we lost a lot of fitness or sharpness. We're obviously training hard again as if it's a mini pre-season to try and improve and get even better at that.
"We're taking it as if it we did in pre-season. Whatever they tell us to do we're going to work hard and try and get better as we know we've got a game in two weeks against Brentford that we need to be ready for for the second half of the season. We took the two weeks off, we took the rest and come back and taken training very seriously."
Even Kulusevski had a chuckle when asked about Doherty's attacking instincts, saying with a laugh: "He's so good, he's incredible! I took the corner and told him to go inside and I will find you and that's what happened."
On the other flank, Spence was the focus of plenty of the Tottenham fans' attention. They are desperate to see him given a chance down the right ahead of the less attack-enabled Emerson.
Spence will be just as frustrated at his slow progress since arriving from Middlesbrough, without a start to his name, but the key for him is to take any opportunity he can to press his claims with Conte and show him that he can fulfil his high demands as a right wing-back.
While he did not face as stern a defensive test as he will in the Premier League, the 22-year-old showcased a lot of good work going forward. His footwork is particularly impressive, with technique that when allied with his pace gives him an immediate advantage over the opposition defender he is taking on.
Doherty has the best on-pitch relationship with Kulusevski among the right wing-back options but Spence and the Swede showed plenty of promising moments of link-up play in this appearance together.
The England U21 international put in a couple of dangerous early crosses before Kulusevski sent him clear midway through the half only for the goalkeeper to deny him as he tried to dink a shot over him.
In return he teed up Kulusevski for a chance before the half hour mark and sent a header across the box from Doherty's cross that White couldn't quite reach. Then in the second half he flashed a low cross across the face of the Motherwell goal.
It was an eye-catching performance from the young wing-back but there is only one pair of eyes that matters and that's Conte's. This period is going to be crucial for any trust to be developed between the two men.
Youngsters make their mark
Spence was not the only young player looking to make an impression as Harvey White and Charlie Sayers also grabbed their opportunity in front of Conte.
The Italian has namedropped White a couple of times since arriving at the club as a player who is rapidly improving but that has never actually resulted in a competitive minute played under him.
The 21-year-old played once in the FA Cup and Europa League under Jose Mourinho but first team football since a good half-season spell at Portsmouth early last year has been hard to find.
White is a versatile young player, naturally a central midfielder who can be attacking or defensive, but he can also play as a left-back when required. This was a new role for him on Friday though as he played as a false nine between Kulusevski and Gil.
It's clearly something that's been worked on in training sessions this week under Conte because White did not look out of place. One moment he would be dropping back to help out the midfield and the next he would bursting into the box to help the attack.
The best moment of the match from the academy product was a terrific instinctive first-time curling pass into the path of Kulusevski to set up Gil for Spurs' third goal.
He had a couple of opportunities to score himself early in the second half, sending one at the keeper and one high and wide and he deserved a goal for his efforts. It's unlikely to be a role he finds himself playing much more in the future but he proved to Conte that he's tactically intelligent enough to adapt to whatever is asked of him.
That marks him out as a man to keep around to help squad depth but White needs to play football if he is to continue to develop and the club must consider loaning him out next month to help his progression.
There was also another opportunity for Sayers to get friendly minutes under Conte, having been a late call-up to the club's pre-season tour to South Korea in the summer.
Signed from Southend almost exactly a year ago, the 18-year-old, who can play at centre-back or left-back, has been impressing the academy and first team staff but suffered a serious eye injury this season that resulted in him missing a couple of months of action for the development squad.
Now back and fully fit, Sayers was excellent against Motherwell. He showed real composure for a teenager, switching the ball effortlessly to Spence on a number of occasions with pinpoint crossfield passing.
He also made a number of important interceptions and even got up the pitch to have a shot blocked on the edge of the Motherwell box in the second half.
It was a frustrating absence in recent months for Sayers but now he can concentrate on making real progress in his development in the second half of the season.
The second half of Friday's game brought a flood of academy players entering the fray from the bench and the fact that they kept the Scottish Premiership side out at one end and created a couple of chances at the other was a real credit to a team featuring a number of 17-year-olds.
Two players came on earlier than the rest. Goalkeeper Alfie Whiteman, back from another successful loan in Sweden at Degerfors, was a big presence at the back and made one good low save.
Romaine Mundle was rewarded for a positive season on both wings as Conte brought him on as a left wing-back. The 19-year-old worked hard and curled in a great cross for 17-year-old striker Will Lankshear later in the game.
It was a big day for Lankshear. Signed from Sheffield United in the summer in a deal that could eventually be worth £2.5m despite having never played a first team game, the teenage forward has got plenty of eyes on him behind the scenes with seven goals in 11 academy games since arriving.
He came on alongside Alfie Devine, Yago Santiago, Maksim Paskotsi, Malachi Fagan-Walcott, Alfie Dorrington, Nile John, Jamie Donley and Marques Muir for the final 15 minutes. Lankshear's eyes would have lit up when Mundle's cross floated towards him but the 6ft 1ins striker's header was not strong enough and was cleared before it reached the goal line.
It was another important step in his development though and working in training with Conte and his coaches during this period will have done wonders for his game. Spurs' young players face an FA Youth Cup third round tie against QPR on Tuesday night, battling for the right to play either Birmingham or Luton in the next round, and this exposure to first team football might just have come at the perfect time for them.
The attacking talents of Kulusevski and Gil
Motherwell simply could not handle the movement and ability of Dejan Kulusevski and Bryan Gil.
With no disrespect intended to the game up north of the border, the Swede in particular represents a calibre of player the Scottish side are not going to face week in, week out in their domestic league.
They were left chasing shadows for much of this encounter as he ended up with a goal and two assists and if anyone epitomised the Spurs players' desire to treat this as anything but a friendly it was Kulusevski.
He looked sharp from the off. He had promised to use this break to get himself back up to match fitness after his hamstring injury-enforced absence last month and he looks to have been true to his word.
You don't require a friendly match to quantify just how important the Swede has become for Tottenham but this was a reminder of just how much the game revolves around his performance.
He was a dominant presence and every time the ball came to him he produced something exciting with it. He had a goal to his name just two minutes into the match when he picked up a loose ball, forced by the pressing of Gil, and he gratefully fired a low shot past the goalkeeper.
Kulusevski's fitness was clear to see as he covered plenty of ground and could easily have finished the game rather than come off with 16 minutes to go. He put Spence through for a big chance between Spurs' first two goals in the first half and was also involved in the build-up to Doherty's goal before teeing up Gil for Tottenham's third before the break.
He then curled a pass into the path of Doherty for a second half chance before swinging in the corner the Irishman scored his second from.
After the game, Kulusevski hinted that Conte has been trying to bring in different ideas to implement for the second half of the season and he enjoyed that.
"I feel very good. It has been two hard weeks of a lot of training so this game was a little bit hard but it was very fun," he said. "As Matt said, we did it the right way, pressed good, played good with the ball, we have to improve and we did some new stuff that I like. So we keep working and it's going to be good weeks."
The Swede admitted that it was strange to be playing a friendly against Motherwell just before a World Cup quarter-final with two of their team-mates facing each other was about to start.
"I thought that too while I was playing. That's life, you have to adapt. We are not at the World Cup, we are here so we have to improve and that's what we want to do," he said. "Now we'll shower and watch the games and enjoy it on TV. So best of luck to Ivan [Perisic] and Richy that's playing now."
Doherty was full of praise for the Swede and admits he loves playing down the right-hand side with him.
"He's vitally important. You see what he brings to the table when he plays and you see how he impacts the team when he doesn't play," said the Irishman. "Always involved with going forward, whether he's scoring or creating, and just personally for myself I love playing with him as he understands people's games around him and understands my game.
"I like to combine and link so when I give him the ball he can usually lay it off one touch and we seem to link up well together. He's a pleasure to play with and we're glad to have him back."
When asked whether he was happy with Doherty's assessment of him, the laconic Kulusevski joked: "Yeah, I'm almost going to cry!"
A word also about Gil, who was a constant pest buzzing around the Motherwell backline and he looked full of confidence, even when bringing the ball out of his own half, and he thoroughly deserved his clinical goal.
With his stature the 21-year-old Spaniard may never be Conte's cup of tea but there's no doubt of his football intelligence and his ability or that he can go on to become a terrific player. The question will remain whether it will be at Tottenham. A loan move could be on the horizon in January if Spurs can bring in a more ready-made Conte-style attacker to supplement the front lines.
Lucas Moura's injury issues and whether Tottenham take the option on his contract could also have a part to play in the coming transfer window.
Conte will have big plans for the second half of the season and he will want to club to react accordingly when the window opens in three weeks' time.
Friday brought the first glimpses of the Italian's tweaks to Spurs. The first team is set to take on the development squad next week in a game or two on the training pitches at Hotspur Way as Conte continues to work with his players on what he wants in match scenarios. Then the second friendly against Nice on December 21 will have most of the World Cup stars back in the fold.
This was the first step in a mini pre-season that allows Conte to lay down what he requires from the players and the club. All eyes will be on what he gets out of both.
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