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14^th August 2008 – Season Preview Levy (despite our net spending remaining small or even minus depending on what happens between now and Aug 31) may be realising that lots of people have nearly had enough of (to borrow a phrase used on this website from time to time) being promised jam tomorrow whilst paying jam prices today. For many people, this is the bullsh*t that is the Premier League's final opportunity to show that it can still be a worthwhile competition for a Spurs fan paying top prices. For some that moment has already passed. Levy's reasons may or may not be honourable (selling price of the club etc) but I'm not too bothered about that as long as I see that I might get what I want out of the deal. We still don't know what will happen with Berbatov and/or any incoming players but my predictions are as follows 4th or 5th in the league and a cup final....or even two. Most importantly, I think by the end of the season we will have the makings of a team in place with a style of play that can push on and be successful. The last of these things is more important to me than the short term success of next season. If however we reach next summer and, yet again, we 'have' to sell our best players to the teams we are supposed to be trying to catch up (despite them not 'having' to sell their players when they want to leave for Real Madrid) then the vicious circle of modern day Sky football will end for me. I will obviously never stop supporting Spurs but my hope of our triumphant return to football's top table playing glory glory football will go and I will accept that I support another middle of the road club with no realistic hope of anything more. I'm fed up enough with modern football as it is so I'll just watch what Spurs matches I want to watch from then on in the pub.

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22^nd February 2008 – Cup Final Thoughts My prediction involves a few ifs and buts depending upon the team selection of both sides. My general feeling is that, although Chelsea are rightly favourites and therefore largely expected to win by most neutrals, we have a better chance of winning this cup final against Chelsea than had we played them at any other time in the last five years. Its not often we have days like Sunday so I'm going to allow myself to be uncharacteristically optimistic and say 2-1 to Spurs. 30^th August 2007 - Top 4 Spurs? No, its Top 3 Spurs… After two successive fifth place finishes, Spurs began this summer very optimistic for the coming August.  The question was, after those two fifth place finishes, exactly what would it take for Spurs to break into the top 4.  There has obviously been a lot of talk over the last few weeks regarding Martin Jol and our board’s cack-handed attempt to replace him.  Consequently the hopeful summer of 2007 now already seems like a distant memory.  However, one topic that has never seemed to be too far away throughout has been our inability to beat the ‘big four’ teams.  In view of this I decided to see how the league tables would have finished over the last two seasons if the games between the top five clubs were removed from the equation.  Here’s how things would have been.  2006/07 1 Man Utd 89 – 14 points = 75 2 Chelsea 83 – 10 points = 73 3 Tottenham 60 – 4 points = 56 3 Liverpool 68 – 12 points = 56 5 Arsenal 68 – 15 points = 53 2005/6   1 Liverpool 82 – 10 points = 72 2 Man Utd 83 – 12 points = 71 3 Chelsea 91 – 24 points = 67 4 Tottenham 65 – 4 points = 61 4 Arsenal 67 – 6 points = 61 As you can see, last season Spurs would have finished joint third and the season before they would have finished joint fourth.  Based on these statistics, this should have meant only one thing for the people in charge of the purse strings at Tottenham over the summer; that our squad was on the whole good enough against the 'best of the rest' in the Premier League to compete for a top 4 position but our first eleven was not, where a team is only as strong as its weakest link, when it came to the playing the top four itself.  I have never been Jol’s biggest fan as a coach in terms of him being the long term answer (as a man I like him a lot).  I think he's been great for Spurs but have always felt that he has been too negative when it really mattered and that, more worryingly, this was his natural default setting.  The comments he made on the eve of the Chelsea cup tie last year that he would have to leave Spurs in the next five years in terms of one day having a crack at the league title because “it's possible abroad but not at Spurs” were unacceptable for me.  I questioned what sort of message that sent to our best players and, for that matter, any new players that we would hope to attract in the coming months of top 4 quality.  I found the defeat to Arsenal reserves in January a difficult pill to swallow because it was as if the team had been sent out worried that they were playing a team called ‘Arsenal’ rather than getting on with putting a reserve away at White Hart Lane and finishing the tie (as had happened against a Liverpool reserve side two years before).  Too many times I have felt that we have lost games we could have won through this ‘inferiority complex’ (which must if true affect the player’s belief systems) even stretched to Middlesbrough away in 2004/05 when we went up there to play a team we were better than simply to avoid defeat.

Disclaimer: Please note the words on this page are the opinion of the topspurs columnist and are just that, opinions, not facts and are nothing to do with Tottenham Hotspur Football club PLC. Just a supporter having his say nothing more nothing less. Any commentary on betting is meant for discussion purposes only and does not constitute any form of advice or recommendation.