VIDEO Highlights Tottenham 4 Newcastle 0 Sheff U next

What a difference movement makes. The first half against Newcastle United in the quarter-final of the League Cup saw Spurs start to play at home in the manner which Pochettino has been urging and we looked a different side.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that Eriksen could give us more and that perhaps the reason he was not creating was that we had no movement, no midfield runners. Well for the Swansea and Newcastle games we had just that, runners, movement. Eriksen looked a different player and Tottenham a different team.

The first half performance should be enough to show the squad that this style can be successful as Pochettino has insisted it can to them. Perhaps now those players who have not bought into this will now buy into it.

If you don't believe in something totally, then you don't give it 100% effort and if you don't give everything 100% you don't get maximum results. If you don't get maximum results you reinforce your initial view and you give a little less effort next time. It's a self fulfilling prophecy but it works the other way as well. When you totally believe, you give it maximum effort, get maximum results which reinforces your view this really works and so you find you find a way to give a bit more.

We do still have a problem we will have to address during the interval and that is giving the ball away in our half in midfield. We have put ourselves under pressure too many time but we are now also fizzing the ball around. Regular readers will know I have been complaining about us slowly passing to a team mate so they have to wait for the ball to arrive. That was not the case in the first half tonight.

Rose, Vertonghen, Stambouli errors gave Newcastle chances early in the second half after we had started quickly and Chadli had put us two up. The important point though was that we continued the movement which Newcastle couldn't handle and on top of that we saw much more of the high-energy high-pressing game that we have been expecting.

Everton, Swansea and now Newcastle, three encouraging performances that show the style is just starting to come together. I have, as many of us have, criticised Townsend in the past but today was the best game I've seen him play for a long while. He was running but more importantly he was looking for passes and trying to link with players, almost as if he has suddenly realised he doesn't have to try and do it all himself to get noticed.

Vorm did everything he had to do and I was pleased in the second half, when we were 4-0 up, that he called out to Fazio to tighten up when he had made a mistake and the keeper had to save a bouncing shot. As I suspected Vlad Chiriches looks far more at home as a right-back than a centre-back, take the aerial game away from him and he can concentrate on what he does best, which is play with the ball at his feet.

Rose was excellent going forward, although at times he didn't know what to do when he got there but there were a couple of occasions where he went to sleep and Newcastle attacked, he has to watch out for those lapses of concentration.

Another well taken Kane goal and a confidence booster for Soldado two minutes after coming on. A poachers goal, he started to follow up Eriksen's shot just before he struck it so was left in acres of space to pounce on the rebound.

We can look forward to our 14th semi-final and hope we draw Sheffield United. And we have.