Spurs embody Antonio Conte’s will and rage to run Arsenal ragged

Two minutes into the second half of this north London derby, Harry Kane took the ball inside the Arsenal penalty area and entered into a chest-bumping grapple with Gabriel. Kane stalled a little, struggling to keep his feet. Then he did something that seemed to capture the physics, the newtons of this match in a single collision. Kane pushed and found no resistance, no pressure in front of him.

Gabriel fell backwards, swished aside like a pair of rickety saloon bar doors. The ball was nudged back to Son Heung-min, who smashed it past Aaron Ramsdale to make the score 3-0. And this is what happened to Arsenal. They were simply overrun, pushed back by a superior force, made to shrink in the hard white lights.

Two things clicked here for Spurs. First, this was the most Conte of Conte nights. For an hour they played like a team high on pure uncut essence of Antonio, football reimagined as a kind of glorious, performative suffering.

Conte is all about that magnetism, the flashing eyes, the sense of some deep well of personal man-energy. Before kick-off he had demanded that Tottenham’s fans get this place rocking for a game they had to win to keep their season alive. And it did feel like a new frontier in some ways. Not just a first full-house London derby in the new stadium, not just a performance of bracing brutality. Both here and at Anfield something else has shifted. Spurs – and there is no higher praise – haven’t looked like Spurs. How deep can this thing run?

Arsenal did start brightly, finding those familiar angles. Spurs sat back, then applied their shoulder to the wheel. And before long Arsenal were being bumped and pressed back, not so much by fine football but by the weight, the force, the will of Spurs’s movements