Since the manager’s arrival players such as Dele Alli and Harry Winks, who looked shot, suddenly look like footballers again
There is, the statswallahs tell us, no such thing as new-manager bounce. Our brains, attuned to spotting patterns, spy a regression to the mean and attribute it to the arrival of a new manager. And probably in the long term that is largely true. But it does seem to ignore the way the replacement of one manager by another can lead players to reset and refocus; a project that had gone stale can, at least temporarily, be refreshed. It also ignores Antonio Conte.
Five Premier League games since he took over at Tottenham have yielded 11 points and, while beating Leeds (narrowly), Brentford and Norwich may not seem like much, the performance in last week’s 2-2 draw against Liverpool represented a clear upturn. There was an energy and intensity that has not been seen since the Mauricio Pochettino era – and not even really in the final few months of that.
