Jiménez and Dendoncker feast on Tottenham’s gifts to earn win for Wolves

It always seemed likely to be a close-run thing whether Antonio Conte would break Tottenham or Tottenham would break Conte, and at the moment it is the Spursiness that is on top. Conte’s five league titles may have come in a perpetual frenzy of touchline fury, but he was reduced in the second half to wandering disconsolately around his technical area, giving the occasional bark of disappointment.

After a nine-game unbeaten run in the league after his appointment, three successive defeats mean the honeymoon is definitively over. With familiarity, ingrained habits are beginning to grate. Why can they not put their trousers on the hanger? Why can’t they ever take the rubbish out? Why will they not do the absolute basics of defending?

Games in hand mean that Spurs are still well-placed in the race for fourth behind West Ham and Manchester United, but this defeat means they now have Wolves as well as Arsenal in their way.

Bruno Lage’s Wolves can have a pleasantly soporific quality, like tropical fish in a tank. You start watching the patterns and before you know it five or six minutes have gone by and nothing much has happened. But that still doesn’t quite explain the collective switch-off that led to Tottenham going behind in the sixth minute.

Raúl Jiménez’s goal was a case study of everything that’s been going wrong with Spurs this season. Unable to handle the Wolves press just as they had been unable to handle Southampton last Wednesday, Spurs conceded a cheap free-kick. Harry Kane’s headed clearance was probably a little more central than would have been ideal, but it would not have been a major problem had anybody followed it out.

As it was, Rúben Neves was given time to measure a shot – that’s Rúben Neves who has scored