Spurs find the Angeball solution to repeatedly going 1-0 up and losing – simply go 4-0 up instead

Going 4-0 up is definitely a good way of solving your problem of constantly losing games from 1-0 up. Spurs really should have considered trying it sooner, and should certainly deploy this tactic again in future.

For all that this 4-1 win over a thoroughly exhausted Newcastle team was enormously needed by Spurs after taking a single point – at Manchester City because of course it was – from five consecutive games they’d led 1-0 is that the overall patternof the game really wasn’t that different to much of what had gone before.

Spurs haven’t broken the wheel here. This game was really just like the Villa game, just like the West Ham game. It was even a bit like the Chelsea game, up to and including a Cristian Romero madness that probably deserved a red card. Except this time Spurs took two instead of just the one of their many first-half chances and Newcastle didn’t capitalise on their inevitable good period at the start of the second half.

Had Newcastle managed to make it 2-1, it’s not hard to imagine how the mood around this ground would have changed. Instead, Spurs made it three and from there on the game was enormous, cathartic fun for all connected with a club that makes a habit of being the butt of the joke at almost every opportunity.

That it was two goals from Richarlison, so often the subject of rivals’ hilarity, who sealed the deal with two goals (the first he has scored for Spurs with his feet) will make it all the sweeter. Certainly, Spurs fans will need no encouragement to revel in Callum Wilson in particular piously complaining after the game about a lack of respect because Guglielmo Vicario made a face at him in stoppage time.

Throughout Spurs’ recent run two things have remained clear. There will always be a fragility – albeit a beautiful, beguiling fragility – to what they do but also that somebody quite soon would run in to them on a day when the chances were taken. Spurs scored four here and could have had twice as many.

The fragility remained, though, and they could very easily be looking at another four games without the brilliant yet certifiable Romero had VAR looked differently upon an idiotic late challenge on Wilson in a game long since won. We’d certainly be more upset about being on the receiving end of that tackle than Vicario’s gurning, which is apparently just one more among the vast number of ways in which we differ from elite athletes.

The result and the performance, though, were vindication for everything this new Spurs team stands for. It had been in the post for a while, and Newcastle suffered the consequences.

Shifting Son Heung-min back to the left and playing Richarlison through the middle proved inspired. It’s rarely looked like Spurs’ best option with Richarlison often too chaotic, too imprecise, for Spurs’ attacking patterns.

Richarlison celebrates scoring one of his two goals against Newcastle United.

No such problems today, though, not least because Son gave former team-mate Kieran Trippier a miserable afternoon. Both Spurs’ first-half goals came after the right-back had been roasted by Son. Both goals also came about from precisely the qualities that define the best of what this Spurs team is about when attacking. Both goals were instigated by the man who would go on to score from close range. This was impressive enough when it was Richarlison winning the ball high up the field and going on to apply the final touch. More so, though, when it was Destiny Udogie spraying a pass from central midfield out to Son and than just carrying on his run like any good attacking midfielder would to eventually tap home from three yards. But this is not how left-backs are meant to behave.

And Udogie received that ball in midfield after a simple 10-yard square pass from Pedro Porro, again playing as much in midfield as at full-back.

Postecoglou’s Spurs certainly didn’t invent inverted full-backs, but there is no other side more committed to their deployment. Porro, signed as a right wing-back in a doomed attempt to placate Antonio Conte, has been a revelation in this Trent Alexander-Arnold role.

Absolutely nothing he’d done previously for Spurs or Sporting suggested he had the touch or range or vision required for this hybrid task; if anything, his best fit in an Angeball XI appeared to be hugging the touchline as a right-winger, given his undoubted crossing and shooting ability. Instead, he has revelled in his task. He created the third goal, and Richarlison’s second, with a pinged ball between the centre-backs that we’ve all seen Alexander-Arnold play time and time again.

The fourth goal came from a penalty won by Son after being slipped in by Porro, who was at this point if anything operating on the left-hand side of central midfield. It’s tremendously fun to watch this Spurs team attack when it clicks like this, even if it was against a defence on its arse.

For Newcastle, it was a miserable experience and a painful, chastening afternoon. Neither Jamaal Lascelles nor Fabian Schar ever looked fully fit, and this was not a fixture Eddie Howe would have relished trying to negotiate while attempting to keep at least half an eye on a massive midweek Champions League clash.

Spurs, for all their own injury woes, don’t have that to worry about. It’s so often been Spurs trying and failing to juggle multiple commitments like this, but any sympathy they may have felt certainly did not extend to any moderation of their attacking play even long after the game was done.

At 4-0 – before the apparently mandatory concession of at least one daftly soft goal – Spurs twice came close to scoring goal-of-the-season contenders as the ball was fizzed around a checked-out Newcastle defence.

There will inevitably be ‘Angeball’s back’ talk now, because every Spurs game apparently has to be a referendum on the manager’s strategy of relentless front-footery and repeated use of the word ‘mate’, but really Angeball never went anywhere. The careless defeats are every bit as much a part of it as the rampant victories.

Only against Wolves, in which Spurs tried to grimly cling to a 1-0 lead for 87 minutes could they really be said to have served up anything other than Angeball even during this grimmest of runs.

Spurs have, in these 16 games, done pretty much what might have been expected of them. They’ve often  looked unbelievable going forward, they’ve very often looked cartoonishly bad at the back, and they’ve nearly always been riotously entertaining. The strangeness really has been in the grouping of the results;  both the 10-game run at the start of the season that opened a door on what was thrillingly possible and then a five-game run highlighting just how very badly wrong it could all go.

It’s very unlikely after this victory there will be any more such runs, for better or worse. What will remain are the entertainment levels that make Spurs either wonderful or harrowing for their own fans to watch without any particularly discernible shift in performance level, but always enormous fun no matter what happens for everyone else.