After all the drama we’ve endured it was good to finally get back to taking part in a football match and it was even better to be playing the ideal opponents at such a time. If style over substance can be summed up in one entity, it’s Spurs.

Allegedly a big club, beating them at their own ground always looks impressive but their natural Spursness means you can usually be confident of a decent result. They’ve started well this season and apparently could have gone second had they won, but it wasn’t mentioned much in the build-up so I’m not sure if that was correct.

Villa lined up with Lamare Bogarde unlucky to be dropped after a couple of good performances, but it’s a long season and he’s still finding his feet at this level. Also out of the side was Ollie Watkins, with Donyell Malen given the job of playing up front.

With most of Villa’s injury list now fit there were no unknown youngsters on the bench, which gave a few options should anything have needed changing.

Like getting back into the game five minutes after kick-off, for example. A cross allowed to be put over, an unchallenged header, an unmarked goalscorer. If ‘Spursy’ has entered the footballing vocabulary, this was ‘Villaey’ at its finest.

We could have gone two down were it not for a marginal offside as the home team dominated but then after 37 minutes and definitely against the run of play Morgan Rogers got the ball twenty yards out and his shot was ideally placed for the equaliser.

The second half saw chances at both ends, the arrivals of Ollie Watkins and Emiliano Buendia and then the sort of moment that makes all the nonsense we’ve had to put up with this week totally irrelevant.

A raking long ball from Matty Cash, still getting booed by Spurs supporters for a reason even they’ve probably forgotten, was superbly brought down by Lucas Digne and laid off to Buendia. His movement and final shot was top-quality, so was Morgan Rogers’ movement to get out of the way as the ball headed goalwards.

Thirteen minutes plus stoppages to go and Villa navigated them with ease, so much so that the other Emi scarcely had a thing to do. That’s five wins in a row and Crisis Team Aston Villa are now the team in form. Rogers is improving from his poor start, Malen is starting to show his quality and Buendia is playing better than ever. Three in four games isn’t a bad return for a player who might not even have been at Villa now if there had been a suitable offer during the summer.