A turnaround would not have been possible a week ago.

Jose Mourinho said that he wanted to share the glory, but he did not want to share it too much.

“It’s not about me,” he insisted, slightly unrealistically, at the end of his post-match press conference. “It’s about the team. I just want to help. The fans help. I help. The ball-boy helped. Everybody that loves Spurs helped the players. The players are the most important thing.”

It is not hard to see through Mourinho’s self-effacing act — he said five variations of “I am humble” at his Thursday afternoon unveiling — and by the end of this same sentence on Tuesday night he was reminding the world that this was his 80th win in the Champions League. He is on his best behaviour right now, but then he has only been in the job for a week. And the pretence will not last very long. Because if you look beyond his suggestions to the contrary, the reality is what Mourinho knows it, deep down inside himself, to be: that he has already had a transformative effect on what is now his Tottenham Hotspur team.

That is the only conclusion to be drawn from his two games in charge so far, a 3-2 win at West Ham United on Saturday and this, a patchy defeat of Olympiakos that flirted with disaster before turning into a strange sort of triumph. It was far from perfect. Spurs were dismal in the first half and had Yassine Meriah not miskicked at the near post just before the break, and the score had stayed 0-2 until half-time, then who knows how the second half would have gone. There were plenty of serious flaws in Tottenham’s performance, and any game that needs a tactical substitution after 29 minutes to turn things round has obviously not started well.

But just think how many games Spurs have started badly this season and never recovered. Like the defeats to Newcastle United or Brighton & Hove Albion. Or matches when they have played well in the first half and then wilted at the end, like against Arsenal, Leicester City, Bayern Munich or Liverpool. That was the sad story of the end of the Mauricio Pochettino era — players so drained of confidence, unity and mental energy they could not stick together to fight for games that were on the line.

That, more than anything else, is what made this eventual 4-2 win feel so unusual and surprising. This time, it was Tottenham who seized control of a game in the second half, rather than letting someone else do it to them. And it was inconceivable to think that a turnaround like this might have happened even a week ago, back when the atmosphere was so different, everyone was fed up, sick of each other, and trying to deflect blame rather than take responsibility.

This is not just a theory engineered out of the result alone. Just look at some of the players who are now unrecognisable from how they looked in the last days of Pochettino. Take Serge Aurier. He looked deeply uncomfortable at Spurs at the start of this season. It is no secret the club tried and failed to find a buyer for him this summer, and no secret he wanted to leave. Yes, Pochettino picked Aurier a few times at the start of this season, but he also played Kyle Walker-Peters, Moussa Sissoko and Davinson Sanchez in the same role. Aurier looked distracted, disaffected and made plenty of mistakes. Under Mourinho, he is, so far, a man transformed.

When Tottenham have the ball, Mourinho has them in a 3-2-5 system with Aurier playing high and wide on the right, reminiscent of the role Kyle Walker used to play in 2016-17 when Pochettino’s Spurs would tear apart almost every team in the country. And he is repaying Mourinho’s trust already.

On Saturday, he swung in that perfect cross from the right onto Harry Kane’s head for Spurs third goal. Here, playing at home, he was even better. He fired in the cross for Dele’s first. His quick throw-in — not a strength in his game in the past — set Lucas Moura free to lay on Harry Kane’s equaliser, before he thumped in the third himself from Son Heung-min’s headed flick.

We always knew Aurier had talent but that goal was a strike of a man who, for now at least, looks back on top of his game.

Aurier is not the only one who looks revitalised by Mourinho’s arrival. Moura, for all his talent, was not a regular starter under Pochettino but looks a better fit than anyone for that inside-right role in this new, flexible 4-2-3-1. That was clear when he scored the second on Saturday, and again on Tuesday as his movement behind the centre-backs caused Olympiakos problems, squaring to set up Kane.

As he explained to The Athletic on Saturday afternoon, Mourinho has already had a motivational effect. “He tries to give confidence to everyone,” Moura said of the new boss. “And to change our mentality. Putting in our minds that we are very good players, that we are very strong, and we can win big things. And we believe that.”

The best example might be Dele, who had drifted from being one of the most important players of the peak Pochettino years into a man whose place in the team was no longer clear. But Mourinho has already had an impact, trusting him as a No 10, relying on his instinct for finding pockets of space and opportunities in the box. Another crucial goal here meant that when he was taken off in the second half, walking around the perimeter of the pitch back to the dugout, he was treated to a standing ovation from the whole stadium. The fans’ affection for him has come back fast.

Or, for a final example, Christian Eriksen. Mourinho doubted publicly on Saturday whether he was in the right frame of mind to be a starter but he helped to turn the game on Tuesday, replacing Eric Dier before the half-hour, giving Tottenham the creativity in midfield to overturn that two-goal deficit. Spurs have no one better than him at connecting defence to attack and their play improved as soon as he came on. And he took the perfect free-kick that Kane glanced in 13 minutes from time to kill the game.

Four players then, who for four different reasons had looked slightly lost, slightly disenchanted by the end of the Pochettino era. And who have already made a noticeable improvement under a manager who has only been here for one week.

This is not to blame Pochettino, who could not have done any more to squeeze anything else out of the squad that he built.

There are many reasons why this sixth season proved impossible for him, and not many of them are his fault. But every manager has a shelf life and it had been clear for some time that these players were desperate for a new voice and new ideas to rejuvenate them. And in Mourinho that is just what they have got.

He might well say that this win was “not about” him, but he is the new voice who has changed everything, and he must know it too.