Tottenham prove they’re still learning as victory over Borussia Dortmund displays the inverted-Spurs effect

Sours never dominated Dortmund yet emerged with a 4-0 aggregate victory over two legs that were the least ‘Spursy’ displays you will see in the Pochettino

What does learning look like? What does experience look like? It looks a lot like this, playing Borussia Dortmund home and away, never dominating but winning the tie 4-0. It looks like a masterclass in grown-up, canny, efficient knock-out football. It looks like a team playing its way into the Champions League quarter-finals.

Never let anyone argue now that Spurs have stopped improving. That they have reached the end of the cycle under Mauricio Pochettino. That he has taken these Spurs players as far as he possibly can and that now all they can do is to enjoy the view. Because these two legs against Dortmund are the greatest example of a team that is still learning from its mistakes and still, despite everything, on the way up.

You can pick your way through last night’s game but there is no point trying to analyse it as distinct from the first leg. Because the conditions for Tuesday night were set at Wembley three weeks ago. And when you take the games together you get a sense of the scale of the achievement. Two legs against the best team in Germany, both times going in with one day less of rest. Two first halves spent defending against a blur of yellow shirts. Two clean sheets earned by the experience and discipline of the back line. Two crucial goals at the start of each second half. And a 4-0 aggregate win that was a triumph of details and margins and application, of surviving the hard moments in games and exploiting the promising ones.

In short, they were the two least ‘Spursy’ games of the Pochettino era.

And for the clearest measure of how far this team has come, look back to last year’s defeat at this same stage. Those two legs against Juventus felt like the definitive performances from the last version of Spurs: Good performances in both legs against strong opposition, only to lose their edge and lose the details that mattered most. Just like when they lost those FA Cup semi-finals to Chelsea and Manchester United in the last two years.

Christian Eriksen analysed precisely what went wrong, what he called “the clinical part” of the game, in an interview with The Independent days after their elimination by Juventus. “We were almost over-confident that it could not go wrong,” he said. “We were in a good position, almost a perfect position, to go through. We know they were more used to the bigger stages, they don’t need the ball as much. We know that in the knock-out stage, it can just be three minutes. That’s the three minutes we need to be even more aware of so it doesn’t happen again.”

Giorgio Chiellini even said after the second leg that it was “the history of Tottenham” that counted against them. “They always miss something to arrive at the end.” And if you had expected Spurs to go the same way this year, then who could blame you? No new stadium, no new signings, this season has at times felt like a full re-run of the last one. So why would these games be any different?

In fact what Tottenham showed against Dortmund was the opposite, a reverse-Spurs, an inverted-Spurs. This time they got “the clinical part” right. This time they did not miss anything when they arrived at the end. This time they did not need the ball as much as much as Dortmund, because they knew how to use it. This time, they used all the accumulated experience from their five years under Pochettino, three in this competition, and deployed it with perfect timing.

It should be no surprise that the most important men in these two wins are those who have been here the longest and have gone through every stage of the learning process. From the Monaco and Bayer Leverkusen defeats in the first season, to Juventus last year, to this year’s group stage comeback, all the way through to Tuesday night.

Pochettino crafted a 4-0 victory for his Spurs side over Borussia Dortmund (EPA)

Like Jan Vertonghen, who starred in the first leg with an assist and a goal, before dominating the second, winning every tackle and shackling Marco Reus. Or Hugo Lloris, who made all those first half saves to stop Dortmund from getting back into the game. Or Eriksen, who looks more at home in these games than anyone, slowly taking control of the play and never giving it back. Or Kane, who knew he would only need one chance for the away goal to kill Dortmund off.

This used to be a young team but now it has grown up into something different. A team that consistently pushes for the Premier League title even though they have a fraction of their rivals’ budget, as well as everything else. A team that is going one step further in the Champions League every year, and is now down to the last year. Suddenly all the quibbling about the Carabao Cup and the FA Cup seems besides the point when Pochettino is true to pledge to compete for the biggest trophies of all.

And what Pochettino was most thrilled with in his press conference last night was that this journey is still not over yet. The cycle is still not finished and even he, the man who has made this all possible, does not know how far through Spurs are.

“To move to the next level, the last level, is not only about today showing a very professional performance. We need to do more, we need to be in a different position. Of course it is so important to be in the quarter-final, but we need to show more. To build on that, the possibility to be on the same level as the clubs we are talking about. I don’t know if we are in the middle of it, or 70 per cent of it going forward. I don’t know how much room we need to achieve, to be there. We are working hard to be there one day.”

Harry Kane bends the ball home to kill the tie (EPA)

Who knows how much further this Spurs story has to go. Who knows whether it will get to the Wanda Metropolitano stadium in Madrid on 1 June, or even close. But no-one thought they would get to the quarter-finals, especially not back in October when they had one point from three games, no signings, no stadium and no midfield. And yet here they are, learning from their mistakes, empowered by their experience, improving in the most visible, measurable way possible. Why not go one more step?