PL Hangover: Foxes Clear of Chasing Pack After North London Derby Draw

The hunt for this season's Premier League title has been like no other, and so it proved again on Saturday. In the capital, the hounds turned on each other, as Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal played out a savage battle at an obstreperous White Hart Lane.

Ensconced in Watford, the fox looked on from a safe distance, cocking a snook at the sight of two rivals bludgeoning one another in the driving rain for the sake of a solitary point. If Opta had an algorithm for effort exuded per point, Saturday's game would have busted the machine. You needed a third lung to watch it, let alone to play in it.

Later in the day, under the cloak of darkness that is a teatime kick-off, Leicester City would distance themselves even further from their pursuers.

It was a viscerally thrilling affair in north London. A derby that lived up its fanfare, and there was a hell of a lot of fanfare. Over megaphones all week the message was clear: The 191st derby of its kind was the biggest yet. Roll out the bunting—this was Chas and Dave levels of excitement.

Yet at its conclusion, hunt masters Mauricio Pochettino and Arsene Wenger will be acutely aware that for all the blood spilt, there's a real danger the fox's scent has been lost. Don't listen to Mr Ranieri. Five- and eight-point deficits are not easy to claw back.

A 2-2 stalemate left both clubs with regrets. Draws don't win titles when you are playing catch-up. A point apiece was probably about fair from what was perhaps the best match of the season, yet it was one that elicited downbeat responses from Wenger and Pochettino at full-time.

"You feel frustrated and disappointed because at 11 against 10 you need to keep that result," said Pochettino, per BBC Sport. Wenger in turn conceded: "We have big regrets."

Both managers were flat post-match. In many respects the game held up a mirror to the two teams. Warts and all, magnified. A bit like The Picture of Dorian Gray, but with the painting on the centre circle for everyone to see as opposed to up in the attic. Per Mertesacker is actually 104, which explains a lot.

Despite having dropped five points in 72 hours, Harry Kane was keen to add a little perspective amid the gloom, per the Daily Telegraph: "Look, a point against Arsenal is not the worst result in the world. It still keeps us ahead of them by three points, and we have a good goal difference."

As a spectator, it would be churlish to bemoan the limitations of a contest of such infectious and relentless recklessness. Yet it is easy to see why Pochettino and Wenger will watch it over again on Monday morning with heavy hearts. Neither side had a pass-completion rate of over 75 per cent.

After the game Pochettino argued his team had shown they were the better side. It sounded like a hollow boast given Spurs had failed to see out a match they leading at home against opponents a man down for the final 35 minutes.

David Ospina faced 26 shots and saved nine, the most of any Arsenal goalkeeper in a Premier League match since 2009.

The Colombian proved an able deputy for Petr Cech, with saves to deny Erik Lamela and Kane (when goal-line technology showed 99 per cent of the ball had crossed the line) impressive. Of the nine saves he made, though, perhaps only these two were of any real note. This wasn't Jan Tomaszewski for Poland against England in 1973, despite Pochettino's protestations.

Tottenham pressed so hard and high in the opening exchanges that several Arsenal players went down with vertigo. The home side's dominance of the ball was hamstrung by a lack of poise though, with Dele Alli unusually profligate in particular.

Arsenal were panicky in the first quarter of an hour, cowed by the incessant pace. Had Spurs gone straight for their neighbour's glass jaw rather than working the body, there may have been an early knockdown.

Instead it was Arsenal that struck first when the otherwise impuissant Aaron Ramsey woke from his leggy stupor to impishly flick Hector Bellerin's studied pass beyond Hugo Lloris. A rare delicate moment in a raging inferno of a game, it was as though a butterfly had landed in a nightclub.

"

BRILLIANT: Petit's reaction to Ramsey's goal... pic.twitter.com/lmuw6ji0Qq

— BenchWarmers (@BeWarmers) March 5, 2016"

Ramsey's goal arrived on 39 minutes. In the immediate aftermath leading up to half-time, Tottenham looked a ramshackle outfit. Given Spurs had won 17 points from losing positions going into the game, according to Opta—the most of any Premier League side—it was a surprisingly incoherent response to falling behind.

Referee Michael Oliver's final shrill of his whistle to signal the end of the first half was a welcome sound for those in white shirts.

After the interval it was all about seven remarkable minutes. Between the 55th minute and 62nd, Arsenal went from leading 1-0 and being level on points with Tottenham to being 2-1 down with 10 men and trailing their hosts by six points. It was that type of game.

Francis Coquelin's red card had every Arsenal supporter across the globe shortening his surname in unison.

Already on a yellow card for an impetuous handball in the first half, the Frenchman dived in on Kane to pick up the season's most needless second booking. Not to say he fell for Kane's professionalism hook, line and sinker, but the Spurs man was wearing waders and carrying a fishing rod when he slowed down on the touchline to invite the tackle.

"I'm really sorry to all the fans for the red card, I think with 11 against 11 we could have won the game as we were playing really well," Coquelin told Arsenal's website, via the Evening Standard.

"This red card changed the game. I'm really sorry to the club, to the team and all the fans."

Kane went as close to scoring as humanly possible without actually scoring when the only thing that failed to cross the line was the ball's essence. Oliver's Go-Go Gadget watch ruled no goal.

Spurs didn't have to wait long for a leveller though, as Toby Alderweireld's hooked volley punished some suspect Arsenal defending from a corner after Lamela's shot had been blocked.

Two minutes later, in the 62nd minute of a pulsating contest, Kane scored one of the goals of the season. Mertesacker, at least partly at fault for Coquelin's second booking as he had allowed Kane to get goal-side to put his teammate in a bind, was fully culpable for Tottenham's taking the lead.

Watching the German trying to shepherd the ball out at the byline with Alli and Kane giving chase was like witnessing two kids mug a pensioner from the vantage point of a tower-block window. Alli's impudent backheel, after he had first pocketed Mertesacker's iPhone, kept the ball alive.

Kane did the rest as he took a touch before with his right foot from the tightest of angles curling the most sumptuous of efforts beyond Ospina. The England international has now scored in each of his first three north London derbies, with the striker having netted 14 times in 18 all-capital affairs for Tottenham.

Pochettino's fears about whether Kane was struggling to find his rhythm while wearing a protective mask after a broken nose were allayed in one moment of unfettered magic.

"Harry has a strong mentality and is a very good player and it's true to play with the mask isn't easy," he said via the Daily Telegraph.

"But I think it was a big opportunity to score and show he is back and it's important for him and the team."

It looked like a season-defining moment. It may have been had Tottenham not reverted to a type many thought redundant under Pochettino.

With Arsenal reeling, it seemed to be a question of how many Spurs would score. By the end it was the Gunners that looked the likelier to find a winner after Alexis Sanchez had broken a 141-day barren run in front of goal to peg the home side back on 75 minutes.

Again Bellerin was the architect, this time with a fine slide-rule pass. Lloris will not enjoy watching it back as the Chilean shot across him with a scuffed first-time effort.

Credit to a beleaguered Wenger for a positive substitution when Olivier Giroud was introduced for the quietly impressive Mohamed Elneny. The Frenchman's more muscular presence seemed to occupy Spurs' centre-halves, with Sanchez running between them to bag Arsenal's equaliser. No one could accuse the Gunners of lacking hunger at the Lane, not even their goalscorer.

Giroud was involved in one of the game's most contentious moments when Oliver inexplicably failed to award a second yellow card to Eric Dier after he stopped an Arsenal counter-attack by first pulling him back and then kicking him in the air. Had he pulled an air rifle from his shorts to complete the job, perhaps then the referee may have reached for his top pocket.

Both sides could have won it at the death, as Gabriel was centimetres away from slicing into his own goal, while at the other end, Ramsey was thwarted by Kevin Wimmer's fine lunging block when bearing down on Lloris.

Alas, there was to be no winner in the most oscillating of north London derbies. Except that is, Leicester City.

Mahrez magic sends Leicester into dreamland

Riyad Mahrez stole the headlines for his wonder goal at Watford that gives Leicester a five-point advantage at the top of the table with just nine matches to play. Claudio Ranieri will content himself with the byline. This was, after all, just as much his creation as the Algerian magician's.

Leicester's own Fantastic Mr Fox, Ranieri, has all the eccentricities of a character that has stepped straight from a Wes Anderson film onto the touchline. Though he lacks the duplicitousness of Roald Dahl's original creation, there was no little cunning in the way he engineered his side's victory at Watford.

Tinkerman tendencies have been conspicuous only in their absence this season. At Vicarage Road they resurfaced at half-time via a double substitution that changed both the shape of his side and the game as a whole.

The introduction of Jeffrey Schlupp and Andy King for Marc Albrighton and Shinji Okazaki gave the indefatigable Danny Drinkwater and N'Golo Kante much-needed respite in the middle of the field flooded by an aggressive Watford in the opening period.

The switch allowed Leicester to play further forward and press the home side back. Both Schlupp and King were involved in the build-up to Mahrez's winner.

Ranieri's changes saw the game shift from being end-to-end to largely one-sided.

Nigel Pearson was sat at home in his army fatigues shouting at his television: "I'd have bloody done that earlier."

When Mahrez's moment arrived, in the 57th minute of a contest that was not quite a war of attrition but largely shy of aesthetic pleasures, it was a beauty.

From a typically deep and rich Christian Fuchs cross, Jose Holebas' clearing header across his own box was woeful. Mahrez's match-winning intervention was anything but. A steadying first touch seemed to momentarily stop time, to work a yard onto his left foot, before a second plundered an unstoppable curling strike past Heurelho Gomes from just inside the area. It was his 11th goal away from home this season.

In his column for BBC Sport, Garth Crooks went as far as to say: "Mahrez has got to be worth £20m of anyone's money." Later he went on to confirm water is wet.

As Leicester's points go up and matches left to play go down, a collective party line that they are not looking beyond the end of their nose in taking each game as it comes all seems a little disingenuous. And then you watch them play.

Leicester are enjoying themselves. That they are evens with the bookmakers to win the Premier League title has not paralysed them with fear. Neither has the fact that should they pull it off they would immortalise themselves in the annals of sporting greats.

In any sport, in any era, Leicester City's winning the title would be an achievement to challenge the standing of any previous pinnacles. It really would be that special an occurrence. Pressure? They look like a group of mates on a good run in a work's five-a-side league.

After dropped points at home to West Bromwich Albion in midweek, a repeat at Watford would have set alarm bells ringing. What played out at Vicarage Road was essentially Leicester's passing their latest challenge.

They have exceeded expectations all season; here they met them.

If they can do that in their next six games against Newcastle United (h), Crystal Palace (a), Southampton (h), Sunderland (a), West Ham (h) and Swansea (h), a tricky run-in that sees them play Manchester United (a), Everton (h) and Chelsea (a) would be considerably less foreboding.

Ranieri is sticking to the rhetoric he has peddled all season, per the Times:

"

Five points is nothing though: I'm not dreaming about the title. I don't dream. I just work.

The Premier League is fantastic in this amazing season and nobody can say who will win the title. Anything can happen.

Our target was safety, so we're not nervous. Those who have spent a lot of money to win the title should be nervous.

"

Everything Leicester do is economical and it's fascinating to watch. In design terms they ape the mannerisms of modernism. Anything decorative is deemed superfluous. Utility is as important as beauty. Form follows function: The shape and movement of Ranieri's side is based upon its primary function.

In pockets all over the field they play some wonderfully tight football, but it's never possession for possession's sake. Every pass counts. When in possession, they spring like water, always following the path of least resistance.

To purists, a ball from back to front—like the one that gave Jamie Vardy a run in on goal before the angle beat him in just the second minute, after he had rounded Gomes—is like constructing a Brutalist building in the middle of a row of quaint quintessential English cottages. Jarring amid the neatness.

Yet, is there not something intoxicating about the way Vardy devours ground in a footrace? Watching him drive past his marker as if in possession of a baton on a favourable bend is almost a sport within a sport. It reduces a game's protagonists to fundamental forms, bringing to life individual battles.

Winning these individual battles has given Leicester a foothold to move forward as a collective. While they play with an overarching coherence that is rare in its intensity, individuals stamp a mark on their own areas all over the field.

Wes Morgan and Robert Huth bully centre forwards, Fuchs and Danny Simpson likewise with wingers. The pugnacious midfield duo Kante and Drinkwater are the best pairing since the hinge and bracket. Mahrez provides magic on one flank, Albrighton ceaseless industry on the other. Okazaki is the best wingman in the business, Goose to Vardy's Maverick.

Kasper Schmeichel gave a lovely post-match interview with Sky Sports. Everything he said echoed his manager's cautious sentiments. A smile he struggled to suppress throughout, though, hinted that what he was saying about not dreaming of winning the title wasn't quite what was going through his head.

Believe it Kasper—everybody else does.

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