Every season, the Premier League wonders if this may be it, the North London derby when Tottenham Hotspur at last unseat Arsenal.
It feels even a slightly strange question to ask given the euphoria that has surrounded Arsenal of late, with their three straight wins and the discovery of Francis Coquelin, and yet if Tottenham win at White Hart Lane on Saturday, they will go above Arsenal in the table and move in to fourth place.
In a season in which so many of the contenders for Uefa Champions League places have underperformed – the year of mass transition – Tottenham’s emergence as potential top-four finishers has come almost unnoticed.
Certainly Arsenal’s recent surge has been far more eye-catching, yet Tottenham have won six of their past eight games, losing only to Crystal Palace away.
That was the first league game after the 5-3 win over leaders Chelsea on January 1 and was, understandably, widely seen as being typical of the club.
Tottenham complain about their stereotype as flaky underachievers and yet they keep living up to it, although, in other ways, this is a Tottenham side beginning to change their spots.
The general perception among opposing players last season was that Southampton were the fittest team they had faced.
Various Tottenham players this season have spoken of how long their Argentine coach Mauricio Pochettino, who came from Southampton in the summer, has them performing conditioning work on the training field.
The effectiveness of the work is clear: seven times this season Tottenham have won games in the final 10 minutes (eight if you include the League Cup semi-final against Sheffield United when Christian Eriksen scored a late equaliser in the second leg that was the winner in the tie).
But that is only part of it. Tottenham – rather more slowly than Southampton did – have adapted to the Pochettino method.
They press hard and high when out of possession, dropping back into a tight defensive shape if the initial press does not win possession. Wherever they end up this season, as Pochettino remodels his squad, there should be optimism for next year. At last there is a sense of continuity about the club, a sense that it has found a road map to a future that more accurately reflects their expenditure and expectation than the floundering of the past two or three seasons.
But however positive the future looks, Tottenham could suddenly be in a position to do something now.
Southampton are faltering, Liverpool are in fine form but are two points back, and Arsenal, for all that they have won their last three league games by a combined scored of 10-0, are still more than capable of inconsistency, especially if their injury list mounts again.
Just as Olivier Giroud, Mesut Ozil and Theo Walcott have returned, so Alexis Sanchez and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain have succumbed to injuries.
The liveliness and invention of Sanchez in particular will be a miss on Saturday.
Tottenham, remarkably for this stage of the season, have a full squad to choose from – further evidence of the effectiveness of Pochettino’s conditioning work.
Nabil Bentaleb is back from the African Cup of Nations and will probably take his place in midfield.
They even, slightly mystifyingly, have Emmanuel Adebayor available after a deadline day move to West Ham United was blocked.
“The past was difficult for him and always it is difficult to come back again, to recover the confidence and the best level to compete,” Pochettino said, hinting Adebayor will be on the bench for Saturday’s game against his former club.
This could be a last chance for the forward, who has been in wretched form this season after a brief flickering under Tim Sherwood last year, an act of pragmatism based on the fact that the only forwards in the Tottenham squad are Harry Kane and Roberto Soldado.
That is something that needs resolving in the summer, when it is possible Tottenham will have Champions League football as an enticement for potential signings.
sports@thenational.ae
Follow our sports coverage on Twitter @NatSportUAE
