Matt Targett gets his aim wrong to hand Spurs nervy win over Aston Villa

For Tottenham, the rot has stopped and that for now is perhaps the most important thing. After three successive league defeats, culminating in the embarrassment at Arsenal, any win is a good win – this one delivered when Villa’s Matt Targett turned the ball into his own net under pressure from Lucas Moura. But the result aside this was an uneven performance in a game that lacked quality before half-time, the occasional poverty of the football highlighted by the grandeur of the stage.

There were flickerings of promise, especially in the second half. Oliver Skipp continues to grow into a role at the back of midfield. Son Heung-min looks as lively as ever and played a key role in both goals. “The only difference between the two teams today,” said Dean Smith, “was Son.”

Harry Kane, remaining higher up the pitch than he has recently, was fleetingly dangerous and nearly caught Emiliano Martínez out with an opportunistic free-kick. But still it’s hard to avoid the feeling that this is a team nowhere near as good as the stadium in which it plays; there remains an element of Florence Foster Jenkins at Carnegie Hall about them.

It had been more than a month since Spurs had taken the lead in a league game when Pierre-Emile Højbjerg, having won the ball on halfway, continued his run, and took a pass from Son unmarked on the edge of the box. The Denmark international’s more advanced role this season means he sometimes finds himself in positions in which he is not entirely comfortable, but on this occasion he rolled the ball calmly into the bottom corner. It was a goal that had, just about, been coming but there was little fluency to Tottenham, little sense of an attacking plan beyond Lucas Moura dropping deep and driving forward.

Nobody doubts that circumstances have been difficult for Nuno Espírito Santo. It’s no secret he was some distance from being first choice as José Mourinho’s replacement, something that impinges on his credibility and also reduced to a few days the time available to him to assess the squad and begin to plan before pre-season training began. At Wolves, even before everything went stale in his final season, the sense was of a manager who was perhaps too concerned by planning, whose side was hard for better teams to break down but often frustrating in games they were expected to win. There were signs of that with Spurs on the season’s opening weekend in the win over Manchester City, but not since.