Erik Lamela guides wasteful Tottenham to nervy win over Brighton

No this was not the Tottenham team we have grown used to over the last few years. They made far too many mistakes for that. But it was a Tottenham team who worked, fought, left everything on the pitch and, for the first time in a month, won the match.

Only the future will tell if this 2-1 win at Brighton was the moment the changed Spurs’ season, the game when they finally started to move upwards again. But we do know that this was the evening when the worst run of the Pochettino era ended. Someone else can be the crisis club next week.

This was far from a perfect performance from Spurs. They looked nervous and edgy in the first half, struggling to create chances, until a Harry Kane penalty, won in unusual circumstances, gave them the lead. Their defending was far from chanceless, and first Lewis Dunk and then Anthony Knockaert should have made it 1-1. Had they done so, a collapse like the one in Milan on Tuesday would not have been a surprise. This might well have been yet another 2-1 defeat, their fourth in a row. And, from there, a week of questions and negativity like nothing Spurs have seen in years. Especially with a Carabao Cup “home” tie ludicrously held in Milton Keynes to be played on Wednesday.

But we will never know. All that is speculation. And, as Pochettino would say himself, the only reality is on the pitch. Tottenham dug in and eventually scored a second. They never went 2-0 up at Watford or at Inter, remember, and it cost them. This time thy did. So by the time Brighton scored, it was only a consolation, too late to cost Spurs the three points. The fact that they hung on to win, away from home, with confidence this low, with all those bad memories of recent defeats at the front of their mind, is indicative of their character. It would have been far easier just to make the same mistakes. Any win, even one this nervous, is better than they have done recently.

There are plenty of questions to ask going into their forthcoming games with Watford, Huddersfield and Barcelona. They will have to play better, in the main, than they did here. But while performances generally cause results, sometimes you need a result to stimulate performances.

Because we all know how Spurs are meant to play. Dominating the ball, passing with purpose, ripping through the opposition with that all that energy and ambition they show at their best. But they arrived here in their worst form of the Pochettino era, and facing questions about their manager’s style and methods that would have been unthinkable four weeks ago. And it showed.

Tottenham began this game as if all that external negativity had started to seep into their foundations. As if that conviction that is meant to characterise their play had been misplaced. Of course they controlled possession, they were always going to against a Brighton team happy to let them have it. Toby Alderweireld and Jan Vertonghen passed the ball out from the back, taking on board Pochettino’s anger with how Spurs used the ball against Liverpool last weekend. There was barely a long ball in sight.

When Spurs got the ball up the pitch, into positions to hurt Brighton, they did not look like themselves. Whether taking too many touches, or not enough, they looked like a team who had forgotten how to create chances and score goals, like a team who had forgotten how to win. In the first 43 minutes, they only had one real chance, and that was from a corner, as Matt Ryan saved from Toby Alderweireld’s header. In open play it was heavy going.

What Tottenham needed was a bit of luck, for something unusual to happen to turn the game their way. Just before the break, that is what they got. Gaetan Bong lunged at Kane, and he went down shortly after. Kieran Trippier shot with the free-kick and Glenn Murray decided to block it with his arm. Kane took the penalty and scored, his first goal since Old Trafford almost four weeks ago.

With Tottenham in the lead, the second half had a different feel. Brighton’s first half plan, to contain and wait, was no longer sustainable. For the first time in the game they had to push. Pochettino had told his players this week to rediscover their commitment to getting a head onto every ball into the box, and that is what Alderweireld and Vertonghen had to do. Vertonghen holding off Glenn Murray from Solly March’s free kick felt like a riposte, of a Tottenham defender finally doing what he is meant to.

Spurs were far from perfect. When Dunk escaped from Eric Dier in the box, he headed over, leaving the mistake unpunished. When Beram Kayal fed Anthony Knockaert he wrong-footed Alderweireld but could only stab his shot meekly at Paulo Gazzaniga. The stand-in keeper was barely tested before the eventual added time goal, which given Spurs’ recent struggles, and the fact they were on the road, says much about the poverty of Brighton’s ambitions. They are a well organised side but this was a game to be won with attacking football, and Brighton could not produce it.

Looking back, those two chances to equalise might go down as turning points in Tottenham’s season. At 1-1, the nerves, the bad habits, the memories of Vicarage Road and San Siro would have come flooding back. But that never happened. And the more Brighton pushed to score, the more room they left, eventually Spurs got their second. Danny Rose raced down the left with the ball and pulled a cross to the back of the box. Erik Lamela, on for Son, swept the ball into the bottom corner. It was Spurs’ most precise move of the whole match.

With more good finishing Spurs would have won 3-0 or 4-0, and a sharper Harry Kane would surely have scored at least one more at the end. In added time he shot straight at Ryan from close range, and Brighton went straight up the other end and scored through Knockaert. If he had scored his earlier chance, rather than this one, it might have been a very different evening.