Arsenal extended their lead at the top of the Premier League table with a commanding 4-1 victory over Tottenham Hotspur at the Emirates Stadium on Sunday. The win not only reinforced Arsenal’s dominance in the north London derby but also left Spurs struggling to keep pace.

The standout performance of the evening came from Eberechi Eze, a player who was once a target for Tottenham but ended up in Arsenal’s ranks under the guidance of Mikel Arteta. Eze etched his name in the history books by scoring the first hat-trick in this fixture since 1978. Even without Eze’s brilliance, Arsenal maintained firm control of the match, with Tottenham offering little resistance.

Tottenham managed to get on the scoreboard thanks to a consolation goal from Richarlison, but the visitors were clearly outmatched as Arsenal displayed their championship potential. Spurs, on the other hand, appeared far from the standard required to compete at the top level.

Reality dawns on Frank 

For Tottenham manager Thomas Frank, this defeat was a harsh introduction to the realities of leading the team. Losing to Arsenal in such a manner is simply not acceptable, especially without mounting a genuine challenge.

Frank might contend that going head-to-head with the league’s best is a daunting task, and he may well have a valid argument. However, this result highlights the significant gap Tottenham needs to close if they are to compete with the Premier League’s elite.

Eberechi Eze was Arsenal’s star man as he showed Tottenham exactly what they are missing 

Thomas Frank has learned that he cannot play Spurs’ north London rivals with so little fight

The problem is that the way he went about this game was tantamount to surrender and that whiff of inferiority will follow him until he gets the chance to put right – if he last that long, of course.

The Dane is a bright guy. He knows how football works. He knows to organise a football team. Equally, he knows what perception is and here he looked for all the world as though he brought Tottenham across north London not to win but to try not to lose.

That’s okay if you are manager of Brentford, where every point you get against a big club is a mini-triumph, a strike against the head. It’s simply not good enough when you are in charge at Spurs, a club with aspirations of European credibility.

Frank’s 5-3-2 formation was a love letter to pragmatism. Stay in the game and then hope was the intention. But it was doomed from the start. How were Spurs supposed to get and keep the ball when they were always a man down in midfield? How were they were supposed to get any possession in the final third if their only out ball was a long pass up to Richarlison who would not be a target man even if he wore stilts?

The days of Ange Postecoglou’s daring and expansive football are gone and Tottenham fans should not yearn for them. They led this great football club all the way down to 17th place last season.

Equally Frank must find a way to satisfy both ends of football’s oldest equations if he is to survive at Spurs. They must be tighter than they were under his predecessor and they must be less chaotic. But they must have the courage to play some football too.

The first half was always likely to dictate how this game played out and by the midway point Spurs were 2-0 down, hadn’t had a shot or a corner and had mustered only two touches in the Arsenal penalty box. It spoke volumes.

Frank had come here looking for a tight contest and didn’t get one. As a result his club’s greatest rivals handed him a lesson he must learn quickly.

Joao Palhinha was full of fighting words ahead of the derby but he is by no means Spurs’ weak link in midfield

Palhinha is not the problem 

Tottenham midfielder Joao Palhinha had hit back at Jamie Carragher’s assertion that he isn’t good enough for the Premier League by calling the Sky Sports pundit ‘embarrassing’. The truth of the matter is that the Portuguese holding player is the least of Tottenham’s problems.

Every team needs a dogged midfielder to tackle and read games and break up play. If they can get on the ball and pass and play as well then all the better.

And Palhinha – once of Fulham and then of Bayern Munich – is not the worst at that bit.

His most notable contribution here saw him dispossess Martin Zubimendi with a lunging tackle in the centre circle in the second half and that enabled Richarlison to beat David Raya from distance and at least give this game a bit of a competitive edge for a while.

Tottenham are missing ball players in midfield. Dejan Kulusevski is the best player at the club and can play centrally while James Maddison is also injured. They are both huge losses. Spurs will be better for their return but none of it will really matter if Frank doesn’t ask his players to be brave enough to get on the ball and play.

Richarlison will never be the answer

Richarlison took his chance instinctively well. It was a terrific bit of skill, given that Raya would have backpedalled and intercepted anything but the perfect shot. Nevertheless, Tottenham will not go where they want to go with the Brazilian playing up front.

Through his time at Watford and Everton and now at Spurs, a player with cumulative transfer fees of more than £100m has shown himself to be a forward of the occasional big moment rather than someone who can be relied upon consistently.

When he was first bought from Everton in the summer of 2022, it was thought he would play on one side of Harry Kane with Heung Min Son on the other. Here, with Spurs short of options, he was asked to play through the middle.

Richarlison scored one of the goals of the season but he has never been a consistent figure

The 28-year-old is not robust enough or willing enough to do that job and away from home when possession is scarce, the lack of an out-ball will always hurt a team. Tottenham simply have too many forward players of which not enough is really known or proven.

Why, for example, did the Spurs recruitment team pay £55m for Mohammed Kudus instead of throwing money at West Ham to try and get Jarrod Bowen instead? Bowen would have been a perfect replacement for Son and the word is that he may well have come. Kudus, by comparison, looks like a frivolous decoration.

Arteta got his big call right 

What a day for Eberechi Eze. A player who almost joined Spurs in the summer chose this day of all days to produce the performance of is life for the club he supported as a boy.

We should have known what was coming the moment he scooped a fabulous pass through to Declan Rice in just the third minute. That almost led to the first goal and pretty much everything the England player did after that was laced with quality.

But perhaps Mikel Arteta will be best pleased with a decision he saw born out at the other end of the field.

Injuries played a part in derailing last season’s title challenge and losing central defender Gabriel to a problem picked up on international duty asked Arteta a big question ahead of this game.

His decision to hand Piero Hincapie a first Premier League start was a big one. He could have asked Ben White to step in. But Arteta trusted the Ecuadorian – on loan from Bayer Leverkusen – and it paid off.

‘He has title winning experience in Germany,’ was Arteta’s pre-match rationale.

Squads, rather than teams, win titles and maybe, at the fourth time of asking, Arsenal maybe where they need to be in that regard.