Some afternoons come like a kick in the teeth. Not only did Ipswich suffer a fourth successive home defeat in a game that never felt as one-sided as the scoreline ultimately suggested but fourth-bottom Wolves inflicted on Bournemouth only their second defeat in 16. After weeks of bubbling along in touch, the gap to safety is now five points and survival is becoming an ever more distant prospect.
There was no sense in which this was an undeserved win for Spurs, some sort of smash and grab to offend notions of dignity and propriety, but equally it wasn’t entirely convincing. Not for the first time this season, there was a sense that if only Ipswich had been able to seize their opportunity, it might have been very different.
Related: Arsenal 0-1 West Ham, Ipswich 1-4 Tottenham and more: clockwatch – live reaction
For five minutes there was only one team in it as Liam Delap repeatedly charged at Archie Gray and made him look every inch the gifted midfielder gamely filling in at centre-back. Within the first 30 seconds, Delap had drawn a smart low save form Guglielmo Vicario, Jaden Philogene’s goalbound follow-up striking an offside Omari Hutchinson on the back. Another thrust had Delap squaring across a vacant goalmouth and he then headed a Kalvin Phillips free-kick against the post.
But the opportunities passed, Tottenham rallied and Ipswich fell behind. Gray had, unusually, been deployed as the right-sided of the two central defenders, and that helped create the angle for him to pick out Son Heung-min with a glorious long diagonal. Faced by Ben Godfrey and Dara O’Shea, Son jinked both ways to create room for a low cross that Brennan Johnson turned in for his eighth goal of the season. Eight minutes later, Johnson, making his first start in a little over a month after recovering from a calf injury, had another. His was rarely the first name mentioned in discussions of the Spurs winter injury crisis, but his movement and instincts have been missed.
Son, again, was the provider, slipped through this time by Rodrigo Bentancur. It would be premature to say the South Korean is back to his best, but he made the most of being up against a full-back as heavy-footed as Godfrey, who was withdrawn at half-time.
There is no side in the country, though, who inspire less confidence with a two-goal lead than Tottenham, who led 2-0 against both Brighton and Chelsea and lost. For a period after Hutchison had swept in Jack Clarke’s first-time pass, Ipswich had hope – but the truth is they are simply not good enough defensively. Any team who concedes at over two goals a game is going to struggle.
James Maddison’s quick feet set up Djed Spence to fire in his first league goal via a deflection off Luke Woolfenden to make the game safe after 77 minutes, and Dejan Kulusevski bent in a fourth seven minutes later. Ipswich protested that Jacob Greaves was down after a minor clash of heads with Dane Scarlett but, while they may have had a point, that was not why they lost.
Download the Guardian app from the iOS App Store on iPhone or the Google Play store on Android by searching for 'The Guardian'.
If you already have the Guardian app, make sure you’re on the most recent version.
In the Guardian app, tap the Menu button at the bottom right, then go to Settings (the gear icon), then Notifications.
Turn on sport notifications.
Spurs could approach the game with a sense of profound calm. Beyond pride – and there’s not much of that remaining – this was simply a game that didn’t matter beyond trying to find their rhythm ahead of the European League games against AZ Alkmaar. Even to clamber into the top half would mean making up a sizeable gap. At the start of play, seventh and likely Conference League qualification was 11 points off. That could, in another context, be pleasantly relaxing, if only this weren’t football, where having nothing riding on the final third of the season is, for a team of Tottenham’s aspirations, indicative of extreme underachievement.
As it turned out, while this probably was a useful runout in terms of getting more minutes in the legs of a number of returning players, and while the value of any win should never be underestimated, it was not a game to say much more about the Tottenham project other than that it remains wildly variegated: very good in some parts and very bad in others.
There’s 12 games to go and strange things can happen in the run in, but Ipswich should probably start preparing for a return to the Championship.
