The question going around after Tottenham's 2-0 win over Crystal Palace isn't whether Spurs won. It's whether the win means anything, given Palace spent most of the match down to ten men after Jean-Philippe Mateta was sent off in the 13th minute for a studs-up tackle on Micky van de Ven. Referee Michael Oliver initially reached for yellow before VAR sent him to the monitor and upgraded it to red for serious foul play. From there, Spurs had 80 percent of the possession and 34 shots, nine of them on target. Archie Gray headed one in from a corner before the half-hour, Jan Paul van Hecke added a second in the second half, and that was that.
Call that "unflattering" if you want. Just be honest about which team it's unflattering for.
A red card doesn't happen to a match by accident. Somebody commits it, and this time it was Mateta. It's become a pattern for Crystal Palace. Axel Disasi was already sent off earlier this season for a high challenge on Jack Clarke against Ipswich, a game Palace also lost. Two red cards in nine league matches is recklessness, repeated, and it sits on the players making the decisions and on Pierre Sage for not getting it out of his dressing room. Palace are now third-bottom after a third straight league defeat, with bigger problems than how flattering Tottenham's finishing looked.
A side with an extra man for 77 minutes should be putting this game to bed by half-time, and missing clear-cut chances against ten men is a real finishing problem worth naming. Kudus somehow failed to turn home what should have been a tap-in after a teenage substitute did the hard part of the work for him. That's on Kudus. It doesn't erase what Sandro Tonali did in the middle of the pitch, in one of his better performances in a Spurs shirt, and it doesn't erase Van Hecke spending most of the second half pinning Palace inside their own box. Plenty of teams turn a man advantage into a nervy 1-0 squeak and spend the last ten minutes hanging on. Spurs didn't do that. They controlled it, scored twice, and never let Dean Henderson face a clean look until Dejan Kulusevski forced a genuinely excellent save out of him.
There's also a human story in this one that has nothing to do with Palace's numbers problem. Luca Williams-Barnett made his Premier League debut off the bench, and in a short cameo he beat two defenders before setting up the chance Kudus somehow spurned. That's a kid walking into a top-flight match and looking composed.
This stretch matters for where Tottenham started the season. Roberto De Zerbi's side went winless across their opening six league matches. Three wins on the spin now have them up to eighth, though the table means little with most of the season still ahead. Going from winless to this is a real shift, man advantage or not, and pretending otherwise because Palace imploded is just contrarianism.
Palace are the ones who should be furious about how this game looked, because they're the ones who made it look that way. Spurs didn't ask Mateta to leave his studs up on Van de Ven. They just made him pay for it, properly, for 77 straight minutes. It's what a team that's finally figuring itself out does when the other side hands it an opening.
