For 46 minutes, it all felt a little awkward. Plainly the ‘Harry Kane team’ inference is nonsense to anyone who has watched Tottenham play under Mauricio Pochettino, but in the context of the past 24 hours, this game was threatening to embarrass the Argentine.
Having taken such big swings at Pep Guardiola on Friday, he put himself in the rather peculiar situation of wanting more than a victory.
It wasn’t a case of ‘needing’ more – in the pragmatic world of football, points are the only things that truly matter. But it is reasonable to aspire to more, to dress the windows a little, and in this instance the unspoken desire would have been to silence Guardiola and a narrative that the Catalan claims he never intended.