ROB DRAPER: Mikel Arteta won the tactical battle with Antonio Conte as Arsenal stormed to a 3-1 win

There is nothing more captivating than idealism winning the day. Mikel Arteta is a young manager. He has been trained in the Pep Guardiola school that possession trumps all and that the team that plays the best football will ultimately win the most matches. To be honest, when you have the players that Guardiola has, it’s often a self-fulfilling philosophy.

But if you have the players that Arteta has? There is an Arsenal trope, which has been around for about 15 years now and which is roughly equivalent to the time Patrick Vieira left the club: Arsenal are beautiful, but rarely feared.

For idealistic, read naive. For aesthetically pleasing read weak. Arsenal have been a joy to watch since the days of Arsene Wenger. In the last few years they were sometimes a joy to play against.

Arteta falls neatly into this cliché. The recent Amazon documentary showed that his team talks may be more David Brent than Sir Alex Ferguson. He talks a good game but his team lost fourth place last season.

In fact, like one of those childish comparisons, along the lines of ‘if a shark fights a lion, who would win?’ you felt that if Arteta had to go up against Antonio Conte, there would only be one winner. And it wouldn’t be the star idea the Basque coach harbored at Barcelona.

Conte is cut from different fabric. He’s a great coach. He really has nothing to prove but the endless desire to prove himself again that plagues all successful obsessives. Serie A titles, Premier League titles, FA Cups: he has them all.

He transformed the Spurs last season. He had them undefeated this season and looked just like a title contender as Manchester City has Erling Haaland.

This was the first time these teams had met for some time when they both rode high, both among the best in the country. And you knew how Conte would play it. Despite all the buzz from Arsenal’s truly impressive start – Gabriel Martinelli hitting a post, Hugo Lloris fluttering on Thomas Partey’s long throw and Granit Xhaka’s daring mid-air back heel – there was a moment when Cristian Romero singled out Harry Kane with a 50 yard pass and Arsenal looked terribly frail.

The offside flag came to their rescue, but for a team with 64 percent possession, they looked fragile. Whenever Tottenham deployed that ferocious counter-attack trio Son Heung-Min, Kane and Richarlison, they risked being discovered.

And so the game seemed to settle into that pattern. Thomas Partey’s opening attack from twenty yards in twenty minutes was truly something special, although you wouldn’t want to be Pierre-Emile Hojberg in the team meeting next week when Conte checks who was meant to shut him down. Arsenal had dominated. Arsenal looked fantastic. The Emirates trembled with zeal and you can’t write that often.

And yet here we were, thirty minutes into Tottenham with only 36 percent of possession and the score at 1-1. Kane, inevitably, from the spot after Richarlison slipped past Xhaka and tripped over by Gabriel. Same old Arsenal.

And so this was a real test. Taking revenge on Brentford two weeks ago was one thing, but a bit like the overprivileged class bully lashing out at a poorer, weaker boy. The fact that they were so happy with themselves pointed to their weakness and lack of self-confidence. This was something else. Conte looked about to do what Conte does to idealists.

And maybe he had. He couldn’t count on Hugo Llorris to give Arsenal an early goal in the second half as he parried first and Gabriel Jesus tried to score. Nor with Emerson Royal losing his head and kicking Martinelli’s shin, reducing his team to ten men. Even for Conte, this was now a major task that became impossible when Martinelli and Xhaka sent together to send Eric Dier the wrong way and let the Swiss strike the third trick.

Arteta jumped into the air as his team ran to the corner and chased Xhaka to celebrate. and Conte looked increasingly annoyed as old friends Kane and Dier had a heated debate over exactly who was to blame.

The empty Spurs ending at the final whistle told its own story. Kane went up to them to applaud. It was pretty much a meet and greet with the 10-20 fans who chose to see it to the bitter end.

For most it was too painful to keep watching. As for Arsenal, the DJ chose to put on The Champs’ 1958 Latin song Tequila. It is a new favorite for Arsenal fans, due to the scanning potential of William Saliba’s last name. It also nicely summed up the sense of joy and celebration you can get from inflicting a shameful defeat on your neighbors. And win the day in idealism.