It has become almost impossible to guess which face Spurs will show so this was, for those invested in their fortunes, an evening of welcome stability. An ultimately routine win brought appreciable rewards: it put them in the top four for the first time since New Year’s Eve and, seemingly despite themselves, Tottenham find their season wide open. Antonio Conte will not have liked watching from home after his brief return to touchline duty but he still had his say and there was plenty to take from an aggressive, insistent, smart second-half performance that bore no relation to what had passed earlier.
Their fans enjoyed imploring Emerson Royal to shoot whenever the ball reached him after the oft-derided wing-back opened the scoring, his goal the product of an incisive combination with his left-sided colleague Ben Davies. But the supporters took even more pleasure from a player who is far likelier to take aim.
