Villas-Boas' new habit is more than welcome at Spurs

TOTTENHAM'S reliance on late goals and 1-0 wins were not the only trends highlighted by Paulinho's 93rd-minute winner against Cardiff.

Since Andre Villas-Boas' arrival in summer 2012 we have won all eight Premier League games against newly promoted opposition.

To the outsider, that does not sound too impressive, but Spurs fans know it is all too significant.

Soccer scribes and pundits are still questioning how we did not score more of our 29 attempts on goal on Sunday. 

But Spurs' most irritating problem in recent years has not been our failure to kill off the division's minnows early on but a failure to kill them off at all.

And more often than not, that has resulted in heartache come the end of the season.

In Harry Redknapp's three full seasons in charge - not including the season he arrived to steer us clear of relegation, it would be unfair to count that - we managed just six wins in 18 games against Premier League debutants.

The season we qualified for the Champions League, we took just seven points from Burnley, Wolves and Birmingham collectively.

We repeated that feat the following season in 2010-11. So despite reaching the Champions League quarter-finals, we could only take one point off Blackpool all year.

And it's not just under Redknapp that we have been plagued by these lower-league lapses.

Martin Jol took us to the brink of a top four finish in 2005-06, missing out on the final day having only won two games against Prem new boys Sunderland, Wigan and West Ham.

Obviously, circumstances always play their part and these games are never as easy as they sound. 

But just say we had taken all 18 points from divisional new boys as a matter of course, we'd have finished 3rd in 2011-12, unaffected by Chelsea's European Cup win, and runners-up to Manchester United in 2009-10.

In fact, we would have qualified for the Champions league for five of the last eight seasons.

As chance after chance went begging on Sunday, the press was edging our early top-four credentials towards the bin marked Not Yet Ready.

And, before Paulinho's last-gasp backheel broke Bluebirds hearts, the words "same old story" were forming in the frontal lobes of fans and writers alike.

But Villas-Boas' encouraging back-to-basics trend indicates that this is anything but the same old Spurs.