Cristiano Ronaldo relieves pressure on Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as Man Utd beat dismal Tottenham

• Cristiano Ronaldo puts Manchester United ahead with a spectacular volley from a Bruno Fernandes lobbed pass.
• Ronaldo interlinks with compatriot Fernandes again to play Edinson Cavani through for the second. 
• Marcus Rashford comes off the bench to confirm the win in the 86th minute. 
• Tottenham Hotspur fail to record a single shot on target. 

For Ole Gunnar Solskjaer after the long week of repentance, this was a game that turned into someone else’s tragedy, which was as good as the Manchester United manager might have hoped for after the wreckage of Liverpool last Sunday and all that talk of the end coming.

He is a man with a useful habit of salvaging a result each time his toes are nearing the precipice and suddenly the Champions League date with Atalanta in Bergamo on Tuesday and the visit of Manchester City in a week’s time look that bit less daunting. Instead Solskjaer saw close-up the makings of a managerial calamity with a full-scale mutiny directed at Nuno Espirito Santo amid the kind of defeat that can bring the end very quickly for a Tottenham Hotspur manager.

It is Nuno thrust into survival mode: booed at half-time, booed for his substitution of Lucas Moura, and then finally the Spurs fans called for him to go. When United substitute Marcus Rashford added the third with four minutes of regulation time left the South Stand sang “We want Nuno out”, and as a chairman who is acutely aware of his own fragile relationship with the fanbase, Daniel Levy may just oblige them. These were two clubs enduring crises of their own and for the Spurs manager there is no goodwill from a heroic playing backstory to fall back upon.

There were too many abject performances among the Spurs players for any encouragement to be taken, and the lingering sense that too few of them wanted to save their manager’s skin. With a forward line of Harry Kane, Heung-min Son and Moura, Spurs managed not a single attempt on target. Their last such goalbound shot was before half-time of the defeat to West Ham six days previous.

By contrast, United took their chances when they arrived. The first two were scored by Cristiano Ronaldo and Edinson Cavani and each restored greater confidence. They had less of the possession but much more of the important stuff around the opposition’s goal. The return of Raphael Varane to a five-man defence gave an added certainty. Later Solskjaer would anoint Scott McTominay as the man of the match. The system of three centre-halves, two wing-backs tucked in and a couple of defensive midfielders was the locked door that their manager craved.

“Solidity” was how Solskjaer characterised it later. The defeat to Liverpool preceded a rare week of uninterrupted training and he had picked his team early on in the process, with Ronaldo and Cavani told to prepare to be a striking partnership. “We managed to get Raphael Varane and put him right smack-bang in the middle of the defence,” Solskjaer said. “We needed a clean sheet, we needed to control the game and we did.”

He admitted that playing three centre-halves and not getting a result would see him “scrutinised” even further although one could also argue that Spurs were ideal opposition. The home fans even appeared to boo the lacklustre Kane.  At the other end the two United strikers had a combined age of 70 but fortunately for Solskjaer they are, as he pointed out, “fit lads”. Cavani, he said, had led the way since Tuesday morning’s first training session since the Liverpool defeat.

“He lead the line,” Solskjaer said. “He was a great example for everyone how to go about changing the mood and changing the performance.”

Whether it is a plan for the long-term remains to be seen but certainly the mood changed. Barely an hour had passed and the United support were acclaiming their embattled manager anew.  The Ronaldo-Cavani axis relied on Bruno Fernandes to connect them to the rest of the team, and he also performed well. Fernandes provided the assist for Ronaldo and then the pass to his Portuguese team-mate before the assist for Cavani. “He [Fernandes] showed his quality with those passes,” Solskjaer said later, “I have been on to him about his decision making”.

Nuno had also gone for security: Oliver Skipp and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg in the centre of midfield and Giovani Lo Celso more advanced to try to reach the front three. One by one they would let him down. Skipp lost the ball to Fernandes for the second goal. Lo Celso was hopelessly off the pace, missing the chance to play in Son early in the second half with Spurs still trailing by a single goal. In the early stages Spurs did apply some pressure in the press and there was a chance for Son on 24 minutes in the second phase after a promising free-kick. Spurs did not take it.

“When they [the fans] don’t see the team play the way they expect they are going to boo,” Nuno said later with what was a more prescient analysis of Spurs’ fans than he may have imagined. “I believe the players are better than that and it’s up to us to change the mood.”

Fernandes had already created a chance for Cavani that was headed wide when he was given too much space to pick out the run of Ronaldo in the 39th minute, with United settled on the edge of the Spurs area. He lofted a nice chip over the head of the retreating Ben Davies, where it was met expertly on the volley by Ronaldo with his right foot. A beautifully taken goal – the kind of technical precision required of a side that do not create many chances. It was in stark contrast to Lo Celso’s pass at Son’s fleeing heels as he prepared to run off the shoulder of the final United defender in the 52nd minute.

Two minutes later the Spurs fans would turn upon Nuno for his substitution of Moura, replaced by Steven Bergwijn. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” came down in waves. Then young Skipp was hustled off the ball by Fernandes who delayed perfectly to find Ronaldo running beyond him, and he in turn waited the extra second for Cavani. With a sweet economy, the Uruguayan lifted the ball over Lloris.

The momentum was lost from Spurs and Nuno searched out solutions: first sending on Tanguy Ndombele, and then shortly after that it was Dele Alli, not seen in the Premier League since his half-time substitution against Arsenal on Sept 26. These were old ideas that had been tried and abandoned but nothing else was working. Instead United plundered a third, another turnover of possession high up the pitch – this time the substitute Nemanja Matic to Rashford who ran onto a ball through a large gap in Spurs’ static defence to finish with a stroke of his right foot.