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Roy Keane, the Sunderland manager, is comfortable with long silences but intolerant of equivocation. Having taken advantage of the transfer turmoil at White Hart Lane to secure Sunderland’s first victory in the Premier League away to Tottenham Hotspur, he spelt out where the North London club have gone wrong in the embarrassing saga over the future of Dimitar Berbatov.

“If you want to go places, you try to hold on to your best players,” Keane said. “But if you’ve got big ambitions, like Tottenham, someone taught me ‘no’ is a sentence. Just say no.”

But what if the player, as is the case with Berbatov, wants to leave? “If a player did not want to play for me, I know what I’d do — I’d drive him myself to wherever he wants to go just to get rid of him,” Keane said.

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Juande Ramos, badgered all afternoon over his decision to leave Berbatov out of his squad, responded with a rueful smile. “Roy Keane is a great manager and has been a great footballer, with a lot of experience, so that’s an interesting point of view,” the Tottenham head coach said. “Yes, a very interesting point of view.”

Ramos deflected many of the queries about the Bulgaria forward by stating that the club, not him, make the decisions. Much has been made of player power but the contrasting styles of Keane and Ramos highlight that manager power is also a crucial issue. “It’s got to be the manager who is the most powerful,” Keane said. “Players go through physical fitness issues, and in this Berbatov's case it’s psychological and we’ve got to deal with it.” Was Berbatov even in the stadium? “I don’t know,” Ramos said.

Ramos pinned the defeat partly on Berbatov — “Of course there are repercussions; today we were only able to play with one forward” — but Jonathan Woodgate, the Tottenham defender, disagreed.

“That’s a load of bulls***,” Woodgate said. “We’ve lost two games because we haven’t played well. It’s nothing to do with anyone else. It’s about us; it’s got nothing to do with him if we lost two games.”

Woodgate believes that Tottenham’s pre-season was too soft and that the defeats by Middlesbrough and Sunderland mean “we’ve come back to reality with a bump”. That bump could become sore with Tottenham’s next match away to Chelsea. “We have to put a good performance on because they’ll wipe the floor with us if we don’t,” Woodgate said.

Kieran Richardson outmanoeuvred Jermaine Jenas to give Sunderland the lead and, after Tottenham equalised through Jenas, it was left to Djibril Cissé to provide the classic denouement, coming off the bench on his debut to head in the winner.

Cissé has joined Sunderland on loan from Marseilles to prove that Liverpool were wrong to let him go after an Anfield career marred by two broken legs. Cissé is talking of growing a third limb — not as back-up but as a means of honouring Prince Kobe, his two-month-old baby. Cissé has inscribed the names of his two older children, Ilona Celeste and Cassius Clay, on his boots.

“I have another child — so I will have to get another leg,” he said. “I have a big point to prove after the way I finished at Liverpool. It was always my plan to come back to England. I had a few offers but I chose Sunderland because of the manager and I think the club have big ambitions and a really good infrastructure, good players. This win shows what we are capable of. We can surprise a lot of teams. I’m made for England, it suits the way I play. I still have my house here, my wife is English. El-Hadji Diouf told me they have good ambitions. I think we will be quite lively together. I never played against Keane — luckily. He was a big factor in my decision to come here.” And, presumably, it will be down to Keane, and Keane alone, when Cissé leaves.

Tottenham Hotspur (4-3-2-1): H Gomes 5 — D Zokora 4, J Woodgate 6, L King, B Assou-Ekotto 4 (sub: T Huddlestone, 56min 4) — J Jenas 5, L Modric 5, G Bale 5 — A Lennon 5 (sub: Giovani, 56 4), D Bentley 6 — D Bent 4. Substitutes not used: C Sánchez, Gilberto, C Gunter, M Dawson, J O’Hara. Booked: Bale. Next: Chelsea (a).

Sunderland (4-4-2): C Gordon 6 — P Bardsley 6, N Nosworthy 7, D Collins 6, D Higginbotham 5 — S Malbranque 6, D Whitehead 6, K Richardson 7 (sub: D Cissé, 66 7), A Reid 6 (sub: L Miller, 87) — E-H Diouf 6, D Murphy 6. Substitutes not used: D Ward, M Chopra, G Leadbitter, D Healy, A Stokes. Booked: Richardson, Malbranque. Next: Manchester City (h).