Jose Mourinho is now manager of Tottenham Hotspur. That’s a deeply baffling thing to say, but, unless the internet has conspired to play a massive prank on me (well done in that case), it’s true. Cult leader and temporary narrative destroyer Mauricio Pochettino is out in North London, and The Special One is in.
Jose Mourinho and Dele Alli were made for each other
Mourinho and Tottenham may seem like a strange marriage, but he already has a perfect lieutenant.
Tottenham is not a place Mourinho belongs. His long association with Chelsea makes any other London club a strange fit, although perhaps his antipathy for Arsenal renders this a little more sensible. Ultimately, the story out of Spurs will be that they landed one of the most successful managers of recent history, and that this demonstrates how seriously they are taking the pursuit of trophies. Mourinho is, after all, a “guaranteed winner.”
Football is a silly business in which to be giving guarantees, of course, and I won’t presume to look far enough into the future to work out exactly which trophies Spurs’ new manager will be lifting. But shorter-term predictions are a little easier, and today’s prediction is that one Tottenham player in particular will come out very nicely from this exchange. And that player is ...
... not Eric Dier, who might get a short-term boost from the fact Mourinho is a long-term fan, but who also appears too fundamentally broken to last long in either central midfield or defence, especially with better options available. Rather, it’s ...
... Dele Alli. So far this season, Alli has been a combination of injured and out of favour. Expect that to change now. Mourinho hasn’t had a player with Alli’s skills since his second stint at Chelsea, and we should expect Alli to be as important to this Spurs team as Oscar was to that Chelsea side.
Like Oscar, Alli is an extremely good pressing forward who has a phenomenal eye for seams opening up in opposition defences. He can score and play the quick link passes transition teams need to make the most of their counterattacking chances. Alli’s probably not a good enough passer to run an attack through, but he doesn’t need to be: he’ll move defences around enough so that everyone else can exploit them, and then pop up in the box to help finish off those moves.
And if that isn’t enough, Alli has one other major point in his favour: like Mourinho (and Oscar), he takes snideness to new heights. Mourinho needs to delegate some of his shithousery from bench to pitch, and in Alli he has the perfect lieutenant.
In short: effective pressing from 10, profoundly good off-the-ball movement, an eye for goal and being generally horrible to all and sundry on a football field? Mourinho and Alli were basically made for each other, and it’ll be interesting to see how that pairing shakes out.
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