Brighton enjoy fruits of improving what they have despite slipping to draw

“What people have to understand about Carlos is he’s a very young player. He had an unbelievable development in the last year,” said Hürzeler. “At the moment he seems to be on a small down, but it’s very important to understand he’s not a machine. He’s a young kid, he needs support from us, he will get back to the shape he was and be a very important player for us.

“We observed the game and we saw in some moments he struggled. He didn’t track back and he didn’t defend the box like he did in the first 25 minutes.”

Hürzeler said he could “only guess” whether the speculation about Manchester United had affected him. “There might be something that affects him deep, deep, even if he says there isn’t.”

In the blizzard of transfer spending it is easy to forget that managers are meant to make players better than when they arrived. A skill almost ­forgotten at, say, Manchester United, improvement through coaching is one of the few under-reported metrics in football.

Now that management is seen as a process of assembling expensive ready-made articles, those who practise development through tuition have become unsung heroes.

Thomas Frank made it one of his specialisms at Brentford, partly because he had to, given the club’s budget. Brighton have turned it into a business model and art form – buying low and selling high. Hürzeler accepts development as a major part of his job.

Brighton’s draw with Tottenham was shaped by players who are developing as they go. You could call them “the progressives”. For Brighton, Yankuba Minteh’s run from the halfway line to score their first goal offered evidence that he’s adding “end product” to his speed and energy.

In their midfield, Brajan Gruda has quickened his feet and brain, after a first season when he appeared to think slow calculation would work as well in the Premier League as it had for him in the Bundesliga. Yasin Ayari is also progressing.

In the opposite corner, Mohammed Kudus, who was already impressing at West Ham, has embraced the thrill of playing higher up the chain, working zealously down the team’s right side. Frank spoke favourably too of Destiny Udogie’s “outstanding” performance at left-back.

There was no tiredness or developmental stress there.

Photograph by Alex Pantling/Getty Images