Spurs' inability to beat Manchester United since 2001 - an eleven-year hoodoo that should have been broken many times - is certainly something of a weird curiosity. Tottenham's secret countermeasure at Old Trafford tomorrow might be their own unpredictable and inscrutable talisman; the shaman of the Opta data sheet even has his very own pharmaceutical-sounding acronym. AVB is still an unproven quantity in English football, a man of tremendous potential encumbered by a weakness for overcomplication, a compulsion for intricacy where a simple remedy would suffice. Like a junior doctor rushing to perform difficult surgery on a paper cut, AVB can make a simple operation seem mystifying. Thankfully, the Spurs team is close to picking itself, and appears immune to the kind of obsessive tinkering impulse not seen in the Premiership since Claudio Ranieri.
AVB will have to play the outstanding Jan Vertonghen again at left back after the Belgian international's slick, forward-thinking performance against QPR, but the manager has a tougher diagnosis to make regarding midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson, who seems dizzy in the league that so embraced him last season. Dempsey may start behind Defoe, rather than on the left, where AVB abandoned him for a long, painful first half last weekend.
