Being qualified for the Champions League already is a game-changer, isn’t it? A match which could have been all edgy and must-win now becomes, more appetisingly, desperately-want-to-win, which changes everything about the mental preparation for Saturday night and grants the opportunity, as Thomas Tuchel says, for the group to approach this exciting season-capping and possibly even career-making prospect ‘full of joy’. And if that’s how we supporters feel, as we get ready to go into this game, then I’m quite sure the players will be feeling that way about it, too.At Aston Villa last weekend we knew the flat feeling of having your fate in your own hands and somehow dropping it – or rather seeing it somehow mysteriously fall to the ground while we did absolutely everything to hold onto it. Because this was another of those 90 minutes – and there have been a handful of these this season – where the game was clearly won and by a wide margin, in every single one of the categories by which one can reasonably measure a football match except the one that ends up counting. One of those games, in other words, where you end up despairing, not of the team, nor of players in particular, and certainly not of the direction that everything is going in, but of football.Accordingly, as it panned out, come 5.45 or so, as the 2020/21 season wended its way to a close, we found ourselves beholden to Tottenham Hotspur, which was a highly unusual position for us all to be in, for all manner of reasons, and, indeed, quite possibly an entirely unprecedented situation in our lifetimes.I can very vividly, for some reason, recall one which went the other way, but I’m struggling to recall a time when something important about the outcome of a season depended on Tottenham doing us a favour. And I’m certainly struggling to recall a time when we needed Tottenham to do us a favour and they actually did it – never something you would ordinarily stake money, your reputation or anything else on.

But there we were: Tottenham, with a degree of dedication to our cause which was as admirable as it was surprising, fought their way to a hard-earned victory at Leicester, and our place at Europe’s top table was secure for another year.Not that this was entirely selflessness on our north London neighbours’ part. Their reward for those three points was a place in the new and exciting Europa Conference League, which I’m hoping, by the way, we can all agree to pronounce ‘con-fey-ronz’, in order to give it that extra little bit of international flavour that it might be needing in its early days as it tries to find is rhythm and its place in the supporters’ affections.Nevertheless, without doubt many of us since Sunday will have been looking into our hearts a little bit and asking ourselves, in all good conscience: should we now, in the wake of this really quite moving turn of events, be looking to moderate our feelings about Tottenham and adopt an attitude towards the club which is generally less… well, shall we say less grudging, less quick to mock, more well-meaning and benign? In short, does this change everything about our relationship with Tottenham as we know and practise it?And having had the best part of a week to reflect on this now, to give it the full weight of my attention, to revolve the issue in my head at length and consider every dimension of it, moral and otherwise, from all sides, I think I can honestly say that the answer is no.

But that doesn’t mean we weren’t enormously grateful to them, and to Gareth Bale in particular for his efforts, on Sunday afternoon. Without those efforts, we would currently be looking at a season of Europa League football in 2021/22, which is very nice, of course, if other options aren’t available, but which would have been an unjustly minor reward for the way this club has performed and turned things around since January.It’s been a season in which we have seen some great things – albeit from a socially distanced remove and mostly on the television. And arguably the best of those great things have come in the Champions League – in the victories over Real Madrid and, before that, over Atletico, who are now La Liga champions. This young and still formative side has rolled over some of the best in Europe already this season, and over the best team in England twice, and now it simply needs to do it once again, in a one-off game, with the pressure blissfully off. Do we get to keep City for beating them a third time in one season – indeed, a third time in just over one month? No. But we do get the Champions League trophy for a while, and for the second time in our history, and that’s a reward worth having.