\n<\/p>\n
It’s official: Tottenham are out of the Premier League relegation zone. Spurs capitalised on a sluggish Aston Villa performance and West Ham’s defeat to Brentford a day prior to escape the bottom three on Sunday night, unexpectedly running out comfortable 2-1 winners over Unai Emery’s out-of-sorts side at Villa Park.<\/p>\n
The north Londoners utterly dominated the first period against a Villa team that was heavily rotated ahead of their Europa League semi-final second leg against Nottingham Forest on Thursday. Conor Gallagher – who shone throughout – opened the scoring after just 12 minutes, controlling a clearance exquisitely on the edge of the box and arrowing a pinpoint finish into the bottom corner.<\/span><\/p>\n Joao Palhinha had a fierce long-range drive tipped onto the post by Emiliano Martinez five minutes later, and Argentina’s No.1 then did well to deny Randal Kolo Muani from close range, but he could do nothing to keep out Richarlison’s header as the visitors doubled their lead in the 25th minute.<\/span><\/p>\n Villa were improved in the second 45 having been booed off at the break, but the damage was already done. They had to wait until the 89th minute for what was nothing more than a half-chance, as Tyrone Mings nodded over. Emiliano Buendia did pull one back right at the death with a clever header, but it was merely a consolation.<\/span><\/p>\n Tottenham are now one point clear of West Ham in 18th, courtesy of their first back-to-back wins since the very start of the season as Roberto De Zerbi oversees a perfectly-timed turnaround.<\/span><\/p>\n GOAL<\/strong><\/b> rates Tottenham’s players from Villa Park…<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s official: Tottenham are out of the Premier League relegation zone. Spurs capitalised on a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3604,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}