At times during this furiously entertaining, furiously committed and often simply furious north London derby there was a sense of having being transported down some beautifully sunlit, early-springtime tunnel into English football's pre-modern recent past.

Not only did Arsenal win 1-0 at White Hart Lane with a George Graham-style tribute performance of deep-lying defensive resilience but Tottenham also produced in defeat a display of unrelenting, full-throttle, old-school commitment. They launched the ball long and early towards Emmanuel Adebayor in the first half and generally contributed to the nagging sense of watching a particularly whole-hearted Premier League match from some time in the early 1990s.

The paradox here was that the Spurs manager, Tim Sherwood, had accused his team in midweek of lacking spunk, verve, spirit, commitment and all the rest of it. Here, though, they produced a performance of relentless energy that, rather than reinforcing their manager's position as is the usual way of these things, seemed almost to undermine it. Spurs played like lions at times but were let down, if anything, by their own linear attacking patterns, producing on demand a harum-scarum performance in which they tried from first minute to last to blow the bloody doors off – when a little more craft and patience might have done the job better – while remaining hostage to the perilously high defensive line that led to the only goal of the game in the opening minutes.

On this evidence Sherwood has not lost the dressing room but is instead leading it very eagerly and at high speed down a dead-end country lane with a crate full of energy drinks in the boot of the car.

For all that, Spurs really did not deserve to lose this game. "I'm a winner. I want to win so bad. Anyone who's seen that game knows we didn't deserve to lose that game," Sherwood said, rightly pointing to Spurs' territorial dominance of the second half. And yet the fact remains that in the space of four days his team's season has effectively ended. Trailing 3-1 to Benfica and now seven points off fourth place, for Spurs and Sherwood it is realistically now all over bar what seems sure to be an incredible amount of shouting.

There was credit for Sherwood in the performance here of Adebayor who remains, when focused, a hugely talented, gracefully controlled, rambling beanpole of a centre-forward. Goaded continuously by the pocket of Arsenal supporters in the away corner, Adebayor leapt and wrestled gamely and with no little skill beneath the succession of high passes lofted his way from midfield and full-back positions. His first act was to hold off Kieran Gibbs by the corner flag and rag him out of the way with a swing of the hips. His second was to pull down a long pass in the right channel with a levitating kung fu pirouette. His third a pinpoint, 10-yard chest-off to Christian Eriksen.

And yet, as English football surely knows by now, things tend to fall through the cracks when the game is played at this speed and trajectory. Here Sherwood resisted the chance to play his best No10, Eriksen, in the No10 position, instead stationing his attacking left midfielder Nacer Chadli there, where the Belgian had a horribly ill-fitting game.

Chadli was presumably picked to play in the centre because of his greater speed and power. But he lacks the Dane's fine footballing motor skills, wasting plenty of excellent, hard-won possession in tight areas and displaying all the refined peripheral vision of a bolting horse. His game was summed up by an extraordinary episode at the start of the second half as Wojciech Szczesny twice spilled the ball under a high cross. Both times Chadli dithered and fluffed the opportunity.

Throughout all of which Sherwood appeared absolutely, inconsolably furious on his touchline, at one stage hurling his gilet violently in the direction of the home dugout, like a matador swirling his cape into the crowd.

It is tempting to wonder about this kind of thing. Talk quietly and carry a big stick seems like a pretty good motto when dealing with the modern elite-level footballer, but Sherwood takes the opposite approach, berating his players in public while bemoaning his own lack of apparent muscle within the club.

To their credit and his, Spurs continued to play with great energy against an Arsenal team who were out-hustled and looked generally low on gas, but will be hugely encouraged at this stage in the season by the degree of resilience shown.

The only goal of the game was brilliantly finished by Tomas Rosicky, one of several alarmingly clean and simple breaks in the first half of this thrilling, error-strewn, Sunday afternoon tear-up of a Premier League game.

Adebayor continued to menace both centre-halves. Chadli ran and ran. Andros Townsend ran and ran and ran. And for the final half hour Spurs battered Arsenal, albeit at a level of football where battering quite often loses out to fine-point incision and where – with Sherwood providing a non-stop display of air-taekwondo on the touchline – Spurs looked like a team very in their manager's image.