Congratulations Micky van de Ven on your £85m move to Real Madrid

Before Tuesday night we were of the firm opinion that Spurs and Thomas Frank needed more than just Champions League victory over Copenhagen; they needed a performance at least as much as a win.

The win was mandatory, obviously. Failure to achieve that bare minimum would have left Spurs in significant danger of contriving to get knocked out in the group stage which, even for a club of Spurs’ lofty banter standards, would be some accomplishment.

But the pitifully weak and small-time nature of that defeat to Chelsea at the weekend, on the back of failure to achieve bare-minimum acceptability in results at home against Bournemouth, Wolves and Aston Villa, meant something more was needed.

A repeat of the scrappy, skin-of-the-teeth win over Villarreal in this competition, in which a fluke early goal was defended with increasing desperation for 85 minutes, wasn’t going to cut it.

Spurs needed something noticeable. Something memorable.

And now? Well, if anything, Clive, for me, they’ve almost done that too well. They might have attracted too much attention with the specific nature of their evisceration of the Danish side.

On the surface, there are positives (caveated to all heck as they must be by the quality of the opposition) all over the place in the performances of those who have previously struggled this season like Xavi Simons (still likely to just be a bit sh*t) and Wilson Odobert and Randal Kolo Muani.

There was even the chance for Joao Palhinha to make a statement of his own in the wake of the vaguely bizarre kicking he got from Jamie Carragher for not being as good going forward as various No. 8s and No. 10s in the Premier League.

He roared forward to score in a wildly rogue counter-attack, one that also featured for some reason Cristian Romero at centre-forward in what was supposed to be 10-man Frankball defending a chunky lead, having just minutes earlier dropped a fire assist.

It was an assist that propelled Palhinha directly into the top three all-time Spurs assists alongside Jan Vertonghen and Tom Carroll. If you know, you know.

But what Palhinha so carelessly did there was set Micky van de Ven up for one of the most audacious bits of attention-grabbing, headline-making football we’ve seen this season. You will all by now have inevitably seen the full absurdity of his Puskas contender, a touching and eerily accurate if slightly quicker tribute to Son Heung-min’s own Puskas winner against Burnley all those years ago.

We can only concur with the unknown voice in the background at the very end of the clip TNT Sport sent round the world that declares with utter gobsmacked accuracy ‘What a f*cking goal that is!’

Yes, everyone has seen it. Everyone. And that makes this a bittersweet moment for Spurs fans, because at the back of their mind will now be inevitable doubts about what comes next.

They’ve been here before, of course, with a player doing something absurd on a Champions League night and catching the world’s attention.

It’s all just a slightly uncomfortable reminder of Spurs’ place in the food chain, which is somewhere near the top but crucially very definitely not in fact at the top. Van de Ven’s name will now be on the lips of everyone in football, and he will be watched closely.

And watching Van de Ven closely reveals a brilliant – and something close to uniquely brilliant – footballer, truly absurd in the completeness of his skills.

This was already his sixth goal of the season and, while most of the others are indeed your more customary centre-back fare, the kind of grass-scorching run out of defence he produced last night is no outlier either.

He created a goal against Manchester United last season with a similarly improbable yet entirely unstoppable run forward. Then as here, the first thing that strikes you is the sheer astonishing pace of it all, the second just how precise and assured Van de Ven’s touch is for a central defender.

There’s a brilliant angle of the Copenhagen goal captured by a fan in the stands at the end where Van de Ven’s run started rather than finished. It’s compelling for two reasons. First, for the magnificently disbelieving reactions of his team-mates trundling forward in his wake, and second for highlighting just how difficult the finish was at the end of that run.

There are few seasoned goalscoring forwards you’d confidently back to have settled, composed themselves and chosen the right option in that situation after that kind of run. Peak Son is undoubtedly one such player, but among current stars you really are thinking of the truly elite finishers in the Haaland mould. Van de Ven knocked it in like an unmissable tap-in.

He is a truly astonishing footballer, a dominant presence in both penalty areas, and as he showed here also anywhere in between them if given a hint of encouragement. That pace is an extraordinary asset for both his defensive and offensive work, but it is far from all he has. He can harness it.

For further evidence of his ability to combine his pace with further skills, consider his other Kodak moment this year: the goal-line clearance that preserved Tottenham’s fragile lead in the Europa League final in Bilbao.

Without his pace, he wouldn’t get there to make that clearance. But even with his pace, he still wouldn’t have got there without the anticipation and game awareness that has him moving that way before the situation even unfolds as he foresaw that it might.

While obviously a thoroughly different player, there is something undeniably Gareth Bale-like about this knack, about not just having that pace and physicality, but being able to marry it with elite technical ability and game awareness.

And the problem for Spurs and other clubs of similar level is that the Champions League as often as not provides more of an opportunity for your players than it does you as a club. Spurs aren’t going to win the Champions League, but you can be damn sure your players can catch the attention while you’re there of clubs that can.

Spurs lost Luka Modric and Bale to Real Madrid, Harry Kane to Bayern Munich. In all three cases, and especially and most obviously Bale’s, eye-catching Champions League exploits helped serve as convincers at the very least, evidence to these superclubs that here were players with the right stuff to do it on the biggest stage.

Van de Ven has just served similar notice. It’s no secret that Real Madrid need and want a centre-back. And they are said to be ‘blown away’ by the Dutchman. Spending big to prise players away from Spurs has worked out well for them in the past, and it absolutely could do so again.

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