Spurs undone as Giggs rolls back the years

AMID the bedlam that greeted Jermain Defoe’s magnificently acrobatic opening goal after just 52 seconds, only one man with connections to Tottenham Hotspur remained impassive.

As the home hoards whooped in delight and Defoe was engulfed by a swarm of team-mates, down in the home dug-out, Harry Redknapp merely folded his arms, placed one fingernail in his mouth and began to chew.

Redknapp, a manager whose haggard features bear testament to a life spent on football’s coal-face, has been around long enough to know that scoring first against Manchester United can be a very bad idea – the equivalent of climbing into the tiger’s cage and not so much tweaking its tail as trying to cut it off entirely. Sure enough, United bared red tooth and claw with a comeback that managed to be both dramatic and numbingly predictable.