Roy Keane called it “the feel of the group”.

In the modern world, managerial ability is often based on tactical nous, the ability to coach teams to pass in tight areas and even the ability to change games with substitutions. Sometimes the personal qualities which made some of the old greats quite so great are seen as outdated in the new era. Football managers are philosophers or chess grandmasters, not old school banter merchants who know when to ‘put an arm around’ an enigmatic striker.

You always need both.

Thanks to having been around for decades at the top level, we know plenty of stories about Alex Ferguson and lots about his fabled methods. The hairdryer treatment, flying football boots, the lust for iron-fisted control of his football club. No nonsense is one thing, but Ferguson was negative-nonsense: it’s why he remained at the top for quite so long.

“I thought I knew what the group might need, that we didn’t need a big team talk,” Keane told a Q and A session in London at the promotion of his autobiography The Second Half in 2014. “It was Tottenham at home. I thought please don’t go on about Tottenham, we all know what Tottenham is about, they are nice and tidy but we’ll f***ing do them. He came in and said: ‘Lads, it’s Tottenham’, and that was it. Brilliant.”

The story is oft-told and well-remembered, and for the most part it’s used to illustrate how spineless certain Tottenham teams have been; how spursy Spurs really are. In reality, that misses the point somewhat: this isn’t a story about how easy it was to turn over Tottenham, but about just how excellent Ferguson’s United side were. Excellent is the word – they thought they were striving for excellence, that they were so outstanding in their field that they pushed the boundaries of their level above that of every other team in the league.

But the phrase has taken on a different meaning, and it’s obvious why it’s stuck. Because it reinforced what we thought we know about the north London club: that they were soft, one dimensional, and Spursy. They probably weren’t wrong, either.

For a club as big as they are, the fact that Tottenham’s first ever top six finish in the Premier League era came in 2005 shows the flakiness of a team who have always been one of the biggest in the country.

It wasn’t just the 1990s when they cultivated that reputation, though. It comes from a deeper place. A side filled with style and over substance; a team who worshipped skill, technique and beauty, but which lacked the beastliness to carry it all over the line. Easy on the eye and easy opponents, too.

In fact, the more you continue with the caricature of the Tottenham of years gone by, the more you start to see similarities with the current Arsenal side.

The thing is, times have changed at Spurs, too. There’s no way that a Manchester United manager could give a “lads, it’s Tottenham,” teamtalk this weekend. Jose Mourinho is very much in a different mould of management to Alex Ferguson, but that’s not the only thing stopping him from giving such a pep-talk. If he were to do it, it simply wouldn’t work these days.

Switching it to, “lads it’s Arsenal” might, though.

As Manchester United struggle for form since returning from the international break, they face arguably the toughest test they could face this weekend in a Tottenham side who are high on form nowhere near as spursy as they used to be.

If only Mourinho was facing Arsenal this weekend.