You don’t learn much from a broken compass and in the same vein only so much can be determined about Tottenham’s direction of travel from games against West Ham. For the time being that means assessments about Jose Mourinho and Dele Alli in particular need some perspective.
It will take a while to compile a sensible sample, to build a reliable bank of data, and just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, three goals against West Ham certainly doesn’t make a revival. Goodness no.
But what a promising start to the new beginning. That can be said for Mourinho despite the late wobble and that is especially true of his most baffling player, who with a dramatic flair for timing, looked here like the boy we used to know.
At times he was superb, jointly with Heung-Min Son the most exciting player in an attack with more verve in the first half than we often saw in the latter months of Maurico Pochettino’s reign.
He excelled and Tottenham excelled. He ripped West Ham apart and Tottenham ripped West Ham apart. He slowed up and Tottenham slowed up. He came off and they got worse. And the point in all of that is his performances, when he is hot or not, tend to influence folk around him. That is why he is so important and infuriating.
If this display proves to be more than a fleeting thing, and that is a massive if at this point, then Mourinho’s job in winning over the cynics will be an awful lot easier.
He knows that, of course. He once said of his press conferences that every word he utters is a message to the guys in his dressing rather than those out in front in the auditorium. And so from that you can attach a vast degree of importance to what he said about Dele Alli this week, with that little anecdote about their first training ground exchange.
‘Are you Dele or Dele's brother?' he asked him. That’s Mourinho’s bread and butter. The show of affection and attention wrapped in a challenge.
Pochettino was a great man manager, of course. Irrespective of what we have heard in recent days about the sourness of this season, he knew how to push buttons. He was a master of the art - perhaps it was his greatest strength. But time breeds complacency in most dynamics of that nature and sometimes a new voice is needed to get through.
That has to be the hope with Mourinho and Alli, who is only 23 and yet seems older given the time that has passed since the 2016-17 season, which was his peak. He got 18 goals and nine assists that season. That slipped to nine and 11 and then five and three and this season it was two and zero before kick off.
That is a trend, a proof of decline. But with Alli, when it is right, you see the difference rather than read it. And on Saturday, against a team that didn’t show up until the middle of the second half, you saw it. It jumped out.
His first half was probably his best showing of the season. Maybe longer. It was the all-round contribution, from the track-back and tackle on Issa Diop under Mourinho’s nose, to the pass to set up Son’s opener – his first assist in the league this season. But there was more, most notably the ingenuity of backheeling a pass to Son while grounded, which helped make the second.
After that, he was biting into challenges again, a reminder of the heel-snapper of his early Tottenham years.
If that turns out to be the new norm, and not another false dawn, then Mourinho will have won a major early battle. Again, though, West Ham is hardly a Rubik’s Cube. Bold pronouncements can wait, then. But the early signs are encouraging.