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Spurs end drought as Man Utd turmoil deepens with loss in battle of the barely deserving

Tottenham Hotspur's Cristian Romero consoles Manchester United's Alejandro Garnacho after the Europa League final. Pic: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire.

For Tottenham Hotspur, a dream come true after a nightmare season. For Manchester United, another reality check in a campaign already chock full of them.

Yet as Brennan Johnson wheeled away to celebrate the fittingly scrappy goal that decided this battle of the barely deserving, it was hard for any real neutral not to feel that the right team won.

Because while the prize was the same, the motivations from both clubs to win were wildly different.

For Spurs this was all about ending the 17-year wait for a trophy and changing, as Giorgio Chiellini so brutally remarked, “The history of the Tottenham.” And for all the criticism flung in his direction this season, for all the expectation that he will still be handed a P45 in the next few weeks, Ange Postecoglou has been consistent about the need to flip the club’s narrative.

Last week he reminded his players that the majority of pictures on Spurs' wall of honour at their stadium are black and white, memories of a distant past.

They can hang one now, in brilliant colour, of captain Son Heung-min, a decade into his time at the club, lifting the trophy.

Maybe another of Postecoglou, his fists clenched, beaming from ear to ear.

Few clubs do sentimentality as well as United but no one could deny that for them the descent on Bilbao was about cold hard cash more than silverware.

The past six months, never mind Wenesday night, have shown how much change is required in the squad if Ruben Amorim’s insistence upon playing his 3-4-2-1 system is to be a consistent success next season.

But the club is still facing the brutal reality born from Jim Ratcliffe’s reign of cuts.

Ineos’ head honcho was in the stands with Avram Glazer to his right and Sir Alex Ferguson, in his penultimate game as club ambassador before his deal expires at Ratcliffe's behest, on the left.

And as both sets of players continuously gave away possession cheaply with misdirected passes or poor control, it was worth recalling the uneasy moment earlier this season when Amorim said his underperforming players should accept blame for the redundancies being implemented by the owners.

Which is a bit daft, of course, when you consider Ratcliffe remains one of Britain’s richest men and the club remains a global marketing behemoth despite a decade of slipping on-field standards.

One train of thought for United fans struggling for positives today is that missing out on Europe altogether will free up the calendar sufficiently next season for genuine development to take place.

But the financial implications of missing out are so severe that so many of those names already linked with summer transfers could now say no thanks.

A place in the Champions League is worth in excess of €100m once TV, prize and ticket money are factored in. Plus a lot more if you can make a deep run.

“There are obvious benefits to the Champions League but the club has been in the Champions League before,” Postecoglou said before kick-off. “We haven't won a trophy in a long time, that's the most important thing."

He was bang on the money – and, for Spurs fan at least, those full-time scenes made the past nine months (or maybe even 17 years) of misery worthwhile.

Both arrived in Bilbao on the back of unprecedentedly awful domestic campaigns with the towel thrown in weeks ago. A look at the Premier League form table, based on their most recent six games, shows they are the bottom two with five defeats and a draw each - some feat in a season where the three relegated teams have been historically bad.

Then again both camps were united in their belief that what has gone before would not matter at all in the cauldron of San Mames.

Spurs, very briefly, opened with a confidence and directness entirely at odds with their Premier League performances, forcing a number of corners and bringing a couple of routine saves out of Andre Onana. Amad’s flash across goal offered United a hint of promise too before they began to occasionally control possession.

And then, just as we mistakenly began to consider that this could develop into a pretty good game, reality set in. Soon the general quality looked an awful lot like 16th against 17th in the Premier League, even if the atmosphere and tension helped to mask both sides’ vulnerabilities.

There have been cagier European finals - there could well be another in next week’s Champions League should Inter have their way against PSG - and both teams did try to get forward.

The problem was simply neither are very good and, save for glimpses from Amad and Johnson, there appeared no one capable of producing a moment of magic.

Even the handful of impressive bits of play were the consequences of shambles in an earlier phase - not least Micky van de Ven’s wonderful goal-line clearance to compensate for his goalkeeper, Guglielmo Vicario, producing a lame attempt to claim a high ball in the box.

Vicario did redeem himself with a top stop to keep out Luke Shaw’s header in added time.

But for one half of north London does any of that matter this morning? Of course not.