Lads, it's Manchester United. Or at least, it's something that looks a bit like them, United at one remove, a United-style product. On a chilly, slow-burn, ultimately raucous afternoon at White Hart Lane the contrast between the collection of energetically baffled red shirts currently representing English football's champion club of the past 25 years, and the team Alex Ferguson could send out to feast on their opponents with a flick of his finger was so pronounced as to be more or less completely meaningless
This was instead a kind of alternate red and white world, Manchester United glimpsed through a psychedelic prism. Weird, late, jumbled up. Expensively acquired, dotted with youth, charged with pace. But somehow also lost in their own ponderous moments, like a collection of dying flies trying to batter their way out of a fluorescent tube.
There have been a few disjointed, downright odd days in the recent history of Manchester United. The competition is pretty stiff here. But this has to be up there, an afternoon to make you question not simply whether Louis van Gaal should carry on as manager of the club, but whether anything could actually be gained from getting rid of him, an existential-crisis 3-0 defeat for a United team so devoid of urgency and bite the only emotion it seems to inspire is a kind of humorous relief, a perverse kind of weirdness-fascination.
United started brightly here, before descending slowly, but inevitably into entropy. No doubt in those opening 20 minutes Spurs were a little spooked by United’s late arrival for the game, the time to reflect on and digest Leicester’s victory at Sunderland , a result that took a great deal of heat out of this game. Even in victory Tottenham ended the day seven points behind. Leicester have been top or joint top on all but four Premier League weekends since the 21 November. Oh for a more open league.
In effect there was more riding on this fixture for United, who came here with a fair chance of edging Manchester City for fourth place.
By the end both the result and the performance felt like the final, rasping breaths of their league season that has spluttered and sparked without ever seeming to thrum into life.
What now for Van Gaal, who seems to be wheeled out at the end of games such as these as much out of a perverse, vicarious fascination with what he might say next?
Even for a Van Gaal sympathiser it is almost impossible to make a case for keeping him in place for the final year of his contract. Not because any team has a right to win trophies, or because it is a disgrace to come fifth in a competitive league. The positives of the Van Gaal interlude were on show here in a team containing three players aged 20 or younger.
Anthony Martial might have opened the scoring here in the second half. He looks a wonderfully pure modern footballer, blessed with speed, power and driving intelligence. Timothy Fosu-Mensah is a hugely impressive teenage powerhouse, and was United's best player until he limped off.
It is simply that United continue to play with so little verve and joy. There is no sense here of a team emerging, of a shape and a purpose being found, simply of a collection of parts poking out in various places, occasionally offering the odd misleading sparkle of hope, before collapsing back into a froth of confusion.
For 20 minutes Tottenham played like a team with a slow puncture. For 10 minutes midway through the second half they began to surge and swarm in familiar fashion At which point United abruptly buckled. Dele Alli had been quiet, but he was there to sweep in Christian Eriksen's excellent cross from the left on 70 minutes. Three minutes later it was 2-0. Six minutes later it was 3-0, each goal coming from United's right via a fairly simple cross.
And suddenly United looked utterly hollowed out, bumbling, slope-shouldered, a group of players who simply no longer wanted to be there.
At least at the start of the second half there was an opportunity to speculate exactly why, how, with what in mind – satire, boredom, an obscure absurdist protest at the rigidity of identity politics – Van Gaal would have decided to send on Ashley Young not as a false nine, or a deep-lying striker, but an actual lead-the-line centre forward.
By the end Young had moved to right-back, Jesse Lingard had shuttled most of the way across the midfield, Juan Mata had spent an inconclusive spell filling in at right-wing, Fosu-Mensah had done a fine job winkled in at right-back.
At the final whistle Van Gaal stood up as the players trooped off and ordered them down the touchline to applaud the away support. They looked more than a little surprised, but trudged over and waved a bit, to a mixed response. It was a fittingly half-cocked end to an afternoon on which the most jumbled, oddly skewed and seasick-looking United team of modern times more or less reached an end point in the Premier League season.
(Guardian service)
