Mauricio Pochettino’s first away game in the Premier League was a narrow defeat at Old Trafford almost four years ago, although he must have made an impression, because Sir Alex Ferguson said that night he thought Southampton had played better than any visiting side that season.

Pochettino was back for the final day of the following season, his last as Saints manager, when the regime that Ferguson had left behind a year earlier was experiencing a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. As United have gone into their post-Ferguson decline, albeit with one more trophy than Tottenham Hotspur in those intervening years, it has been Pochettino whose star has risen.

Of the upper tier of Premier League managerial names, Pochettino, back at Old Trafford on Sunday, remains the junior partner. No trophies and precious little Champions League experience, the bald facts of his CV put him nowhere close to the likes of Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho or Jürgen Klopp.

He is the youngest, albeit only 13 months junior to the trophy-laden Guardiola.

Yet Pochettino remains among the hottest of properties in managerial terms, and even the blemish of Spurs’ Champions League fiasco seems to have been written off as the fault of the Wembley experiment, a bad summer transfer window and by extension the reliably blameable Daniel Levy, who, fairly or not, tends to carry the can for everything that goes wrong at Spurs.