Ange Postecoglou’s Spurs project is a magnificent act of misdirection

The open-top bus parade begins at Monday lunchtime. Thousands of fans are expected to line the streets to pay tribute to Ange Postecoglou and his team as they wind their way down the High Road, before a civic reception at Tottenham Town Hall. There, captain Son Heung-min will end 16 long years of silverware famine by hoisting aloft the Denying Arsenal The League Trophy, and frankly few men have done more to earn it.

Of course Spurs have never made things easy for themselves, and there were plenty of heart-stopping moments during that crucial defeat by Manchester City when it looked like they might salvage a draw, or even a disastrous win. To come through in the end was a genuine team effort, key players standing down when it mattered most: that reliably unreliable defence, Pierre-Emile Højbjerg failing to plug the gaps in midfield, Son gloriously fluffing that one-on-one chance in the closing stages.

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And perhaps the most arresting aspect of this deeply weird game was the way that – even in the depths of its weirdness – it also felt like an entirely logical culmination of everything that has come to pass in Postecoglou’s first season. The hearty embrace of pyrrhic victories over actual victories. The spinning and repackaging. And above all a campaign defined less by tangible objectives than by the irreverent pursuit of pure enjoyment at any cost. Welcome to the temple of Ange, where the wins feel like wins and the defeats – somehow – also feel like wins.

So really this was the perfect result all round: a defeat that made Anne Hathaway, Martin Keown and Piers Morgan miserable, and yet still preserved a certain self-pride and enhanced Postecoglou’s own coaching reputation. After all, there is little shame in losing to City, particularly when you do so as stylishly and ambitiously as this: attacking with startling abandon and tactical verve, enjoying the lion’s share of possession and a slew of good chances.

And yet even as Son ran through on goal in the final minutes, you could still detect a certain ambivalence among the Spurs fans behind Stefan Ortega’s goal, a sense that it would be fine if he scored, and fine if he missed, and good banter either way. The winning of a corner in the 78th minute was greeted not with the sort of feral roar you might expect from a team 1-0 down and still in with a shout of Champions League qualification, but a polite and almost embarrassed ripple of applause.

It had been that kind of week, really. Ever since it became clear that Tottenham held Arsenal’s fate in their hands, this was a game condemned to die at the altar of The Discourse.

There were rumours of Spurs fans returning tickets to the exchange in their hundreds. Rumours of Arsenal fans hoovering them up. Rumours that a 61-year-old Erik Thorstvedt might start in goal.

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Naturally most of this belonged in the realm of online silliness, and soon enough pre-game ambivalence gave way to a thrumming, relentless opening, a kind of Total Angeball: four midfielders, two wingers, no strikers, the kind of lineup Pep Guardiola used to put out when he still had ideals. Half-time arrived with Spurs on 55% possession, and Erling Haaland on just 11 touches.

Haaland’s inevitable opening goal smashed the facade, and yet Spurs spent the rest of the game gallantly trying to maintain it. Pedro Porro tried a backheel and lost possession, but Ange still seemed to like it. Rodrigo Bentancur came off and looked furious about it: again good, because it showed he cared. Son sprinted 40 yards to charge down Ederson, putting him 40 yards offside for the next phase of play, but good intensity, good areas.

In a way, the entire Postecoglou project is a magnificent act of misdirection, an exercise in making the same failure taste better. Losing 4-1 at home to Chelsea with nine men: a bold sign of progress. Losing 3-2 at home to Arsenal: a fantastic comeback from 3-0 down. Not qualifying for the Champions League: fine, actually, because this is a holistic journey and we are not bound by your staid earthly metrics. Sending on 16-year-old Mikey Moore at 2-0 down for a pointless injury-time debut told us nothing about Moore, but did tell us what a great guy Ange is.

And, frankly, why not? Tottenham are not set up to win trophies on an industrial scale, now or in the future, and so to an extent the job of any Spurs manager is to find the joy in the game, to reconnect with the process rather than fixate on the ends. If stopping Arsenal from winning the league makes Spurs fans feel good, then who is anyone to begrudge that?

Naturally Postecoglou affected a furious demeanour afterwards, but really this was a situation he himself has created. This has been a season of genuine progress, a necessary palate-cleanser after the sourness of the José Mourinho and Antonio Conte years. Fifth place with a makeshift squad after selling Harry Kane: really, not bad at all. But when you detach your project so thoroughly from actual results, you don’t get to act surprised when fans start to do the same.