Moussa Sissoko provides the moment of magic to prove Spurs can win it ugly as they down West Ham

West Ham United 0-1 Tottenham Hotspur: The French midfielder teed up Erik Lamela to head home the only goal of the game and continue his return to form this season

Erik Lamela celebrates after scoring Tottenham's winning goal (Getty)

Tottenham Hotspur rolled back into third place with their fourth win in a row. You might not think of them as a ‘form team’ but after those brief September worries of a ‘Spurs crisis’ they have responded with consistency, focus and application, just as they did here on Saturday.

West Ham away has never been an easy game for Spurs and this is an even harder one with no Dele Alli, no Jan Vertonghen and with Christian Eriksen only fit enough for the bench. Spurs did not play especially well, but then this fixture has never been known for its openness or its ease on the eye. It was tight, tense, stop-start, and the only moment of any quality was a Moussa Sissoko assist.

But then winning in the Premier League without your best players requires all sorts of different attributes. This is not an easy time for Tottenham, given their difficult summer, their injuries, the stadium delays and all the rest of it. But sending West Ham the same way as Cardiff City, Huddersfield Town and Brighton and Hove Albion shows the resources they still have within themselves. Even if they are not playing anything like their best football.

No-one expected their first goal to ever arrive here, but then no-one expected Sissoko to produce a moment of such imagination and precision. His name on the team-sheet is not exactly cause for celebration among Spurs fans, but here he was again, for the third time in the league this season.

Nothing that Sissoko, or in fact anyone, did in the first 44 minutes suggested that we were about to see his greatest moment in a Spurs shirt. But then genius does not need to give advance notice of its arrival. When Kieran Trippier sent Sissoko away down the right, the West Ham defence did not look remotely worried by what would come next. Feinting to run down the line, he checked back inside, leaving Felipe Anderson looking like he had just seen the sun rise in the west.

Moussa Sissoko displayed his finest moment in a Spurs shirt (Getty)

From there, Sissoko used that unfancied left boot to clip a flat cross into the box, into precisely the area where Lamela was running, away from Pablo Zabaleta. Lamela glanced the ball with just enough of his head to divert into the bottom corner.

Given that Sissoko has only scored one Premier League goal for Spurs, and that was the mis-hit last-minute fourth in a 4-0 win over Huddersfield, then this little jink and cross could well be Sissoko’s finest piece of play for Spurs since they spent £30m on him in the summer of 2016. Tottenham tried and failed to sell him this summer and this was the first time when it felt like that might not have been a bad thing.

Lamela flicks the ball into the West Ham goal (Getty)

Suddenly Spurs were alive and they had their only real chance to double their lead straight after. Lamela, emboldened by that goal-scorer buzz, skipped past Anderson on the right and whipped in a shot disguised as a cross. Lukasz Fabianski was alive to it and Davinson Sanchez could do nothing with the rebound.

Those two moments, right at the very end, were the only goal-mouth action of the first half. And yet they made for a more exciting spectacle than anything offered in the second half. Once they had the lead Tottenham were happy to sit and defend it, something they are adept at doing. The onus was on West Ham to break them down.

Erik Lamela is congratulated by Spurs boss Mauricio Pochettino (Reuters)

But this West Ham side is not especially creative, especially with no Manuel Lanzini and with Anderson playing as badly as he did. So the whole responsibility fell on Marko Arnautovic to do it by himself. Twice in the second half he forced Hugo Lloris to save: the first with a header from an Aaron Cresswell cross, the second with a whipped shot from 20 yards. That felt like it was as good as it was going to get for West Ham and Arnautovic looked frustrated for much of the second half. He got one more opening in added time, running onto Javier Hernandez’s pass, but Lloris was out quickly enough to save. This was an important afternoon for him too, his best performance of a difficult season. But for the first time in a long time, he was not Spurs’ decisive Frenchman on the pitch.

Teams

West Ham (4-2-3-1): Fabianski; Zabaleta, Balbuena, Diop, Cresswell; Noble (Antonio, 72), Rice; Yarmolenko (Diangana, 44), Snodgrass, Anderson (Chicharito, 57); Arnautovic

Totttenham (4-3-3): Lloris; Trippier, Sanchez, Alderweireld, Davies; Sissoko (Eriksen, 89), Dier, Winks; Lucas, Kane, Lamela (Dembele, 76)