Well, that felt a little different. The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was a lovely balmy place at kick off, the pitch in deep green late-summer shade. “Welcome to N17” read the vast, pre-match Tifosi sign on the South Stand, which was nicely done, but does sound more like a local estate agent tagline than a blood-chilling call to arms.
But something seemed to shift here, if only in tone and texture and energy, if not anything that resembled, quite yet, a team to push the very best in the division.
Hearteningly, Spurs’ most eye-catching player in this freewheeling 2-0 defeat of an underwhelming Manchester United was a 20-year-old rampaging left-back making his second appearance for the club, who basically ran himself into the ground while seeming, simultaneously, to be having more fun than anyone else in the ground.
With an hour gone Destiny Udogie had done a bit of everything: dribbles, tackles, clearances, completing 90% of his passes despite seeming to be taking constant, rampaging risks.
He roamed into modified, and indeed beyond midfield. At one point he could be seen backheeling the ball around in the United box. Moments later he was booked for picking the ball up and running towards Michael Oliver in the style of William Webb Ellis spontaneously inventing the game of rugby, but more forgivable.
And pretty much all of Spurs’ best attacking moments in the first half involved an Udogie contribution of some kind, from linking well with Son Heung-min, to lung-ripping decoy runs inside.
He is clearly going to be a favourite here, a full-back who is completely unafraid, given licence to roam inside and upfield, and with the positional smarts and the constantly thrumming engine to cover his own absences when the ball is turned over.
There is always an anxiety watching this kind of bravura spirit let loose in the Premier League. Hopefully the game, the moments, the unforgiving replays will be kind to him. It is so much easier to play his kind of role in a team that hogs the ball. At Spurs he will be asked constantly to gamble on the moment, to judge the danger level.
But this is a feature of the Postecoglou-verse. Destiny has been given free will to roam, to see where the chips fall. If he can get a foothold he really will be a lot of fun, not to mention a new brushstroke, something to help distinguish this team from the various jerry-built editions of the last two years. Spurs have a lot of left-backs, but not a lot of great left-backs. Udogie has emerged as the number one, with the hope, presumably part of the Ange way, that he will be given time to blossom.
He did all this while playing on the more vulnerable looking side of the Spurs defence. Micky van de Ven also made his home debut here. Aged 22, he looks at times like a footballer nailed together hurriedly out of left over pieces of two by four, with a kind of stilt-walker gait as he starts to rev up to top speed on those gangly legs.
But Spurs looked increasingly solid as time went on here. Their opening goal owed a little to a deflection off Lisandro Martínez, but a great deal more to a wonderful 40‑yard run from Pape Sarr, which took him from halfway into the six-yard box to effect a deceptively difficult left footed half volley finish. Sarr is still only twenty. This was a lovely moment in his young career.
Moments later Udogie almost added a second, skating through in the inside-left position, and trying to roll the ball under André Onana, but seeing his shot saved. He left the pitch on 69 minutes and received a standing ovation from the home support. Ben Davies came on as a more defensive option, another tick for the manager, feeling the currents of the game in this league and reaching on to the pitch to intervene.
So far the basic likeability of Postecoglou has come as a kind of revelation to the Premier League. How strange that such a simple human quality should seem so alien. Who knew people in football could be likeable, without edge or hostility? Where does he get off, this guy, being nice?
The wider question is what, exactly, is the right level of expectation here? This is a club that has spent the last six years on holiday by mistake, which seemed at times to have forgotten, in some fundamental sense what was good about itself.
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The super stadium. The Champions League final. This is all good. But Spurs is a feeling. Often a bad feeling, but in its good moments a fun, attacking, brittle kind of entity, a club that is essentially – in between deep, dark moments of introspection – happy with itself.
The more classical Spurs teams will at least try to make entertainment happen, and occasionally, in the process, almost but not quite win something, a legitimate, happy, even glorious way to approach this thing. Who knows, by some chaotic process, an oscillation between weirdly ill‑fitting extremes, they may even have accidentally hired the right manager.
