Ken Early: Mauricio Pochettino has cured ancient Spurs malaise

You might have expected Mark Clattenburg’s final whistle to trigger an angry uproar on the slopes of the Etihad Stadium. The Manchester City supporters had a lot to be angry about. The referee had given a harsh penalty against them, and their team had blown it against a title rival for the second time in a week. Instead, the sound that split the air was the ecstatic roar from the Spurs end, as the Tottenham fans experienced an unfamiliar and exhilarating sensation. So – this is what it feels like to support the best team in the league.

The lack of anger from the home fans tells you something about Manchester City. City are a superclub now, but most of the match-going fans have been there since before the days of Sheikh Mansour.

They've spent more than a billion euros on players in that time, but money can't buy you a genuine sense of big-club entitlement – only sustained, multigenerational success can do that. These fans still expect City to let them down. It can take a long time for a club's core identity to change. Which just goes to underline what an impressive job Mauricio Pochettino has done at Tottenham.

For decades Spurs’ core identity has been soft, flighty, dilettantish. They sometimes have some nice players but they are always essentially unserious. That’s what Alex Ferguson was getting at when dismissing Spurs with one of his most insulting ever team talks: “Lads, it’s Tottenham.”

Pochettino is serious. In a year and a half he has turned Spurs from soft touches into a hard-as-nails, knife-between-the- teeth sort of outfit that is capable of alternately running, playing and kicking opponents off the park.

Over recent weeks several Spurs players have spoken in interviews about the squad’s extraordinary team spirit. They proved it was more than just talk in the second half, as the harshness of the penalty awarded against Raheem Sterling got Manchester City angry and inspired them to launch a sustained onslaught.

The Etihad is not an easy place to hold on when City get on a roll. They give the defending team a lot to worry about. Yaya Touré rumbling through the middle, David Silva intelligently switching the direction of the play, pacey attackers swarming down the flanks, and the constant penalty-area menace of Sergio Agüero, who needs less space to score than any other striker in the league.

Below-par

Against Spurs, Agüero got a lot less space than he’s used to getting. It was a below- par performance from the Argentine, and that had everything to do with the way Spurs’ defenders closed in around him every time he got near the ball.

Spurs took everything City had to throw at them, then, with the match and maybe the title teetering in the balance, they surged forward and seized victory. Christian Eriksen’s goal was such a glorious moment that even Pochettino, the man who once insisted “I only show emotion in my bed”, celebrated with abandon.

You don’t win a match like this by accident. Spurs won because Pochettino has managed to extract from his players a level of effort and focus that was beyond any of Spurs’ last few managers.

The comparison with his immediate predecessor, Tim Sherwood, is particularly instructive. Sherwood would say relaxed-sounding things like “I’ve just let them have their head and go out there and enjoy themselves. We’ve all played in the street and sometimes you need to take it back to that. I think football is sometimes too regimented.”

Pochettino wouldn't agree that football is "sometimes too regimented". There was nothing spontaneous about the defensive and counter-attacking team movements that defeated Manchester City. This isn't street football, it's the Premier League. Regimentation works.

As for the psychology of team-building, Sherwood was from the “arm around the shoulder” school, best demonstrated by his faith in inconsistent talents like Emmanuel Adebayor. “He told me, I will not tell you anything,” Adebayor said. “You have been around the block with Arsenal, Manchester City and Real Madrid. For me that was big confidence coming from the new manager.”

Pochettino is from what you might call the “terminate with extreme prejudice” school. He has sold or released an astonishing 37 players since arriving at Spurs in the summer of 2014. He doesn’t indulge players who display a poor attitude. He has got rid of so many of them that he’s still running an overall surplus on transfers.

Smallest squad

The manager’s refusal to tolerate failure is a big part of the reason why Spurs now have the smallest squad in the Premier League, with just 22 senior players. It could yet be that the lack of numbers will tell against them on the run-in. The advantage of the Pochettino purges is that everyone still at the club wants to stay there, and they know what happens when you displease the boss.

"Everyone in this group works hard and is working towards the same thing," Harry Kane said last week. "If you have one or two bad eggs, it can bring others down - and we don't have that."

That unity of purpose – not arms around the shoulder or shit-in-your-shoes banter – is the true basis of team spirit.