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30th October 2008 – Spurs and the satanic sluts

It’s great news about the new stadium. We already knew about it of course, after Jim broke the story last April, and it was picked up by the media a week later. It means no leaving Tottenham, no move to Stratford, no need for a groundshare, and possibly more toilets, nice LCD screens and less queuing. The downside of a new stadium is the inevitable ticket-price rises, the loss of atmosphere, new seats and new neighbours, the deluxe £8 burgers, and the fact that the beer will still taste like piss. But it’s a necessary development if we’re to keep up with the Joneses, and Levy has promised it will be “iconic” and “at least as good as The Emirates” in this interview with the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/7700250.stm. The decision to go with a 60,000 capacity perhaps reflects the need to be seen to keep up with our beloved neighbours rather than a realistic assessment of demand for tickets based on current club performance. But that’s no bad thing.

The other downside is no more “White Hart Lane” as the club will be selling the naming rights because, as Levy puts it, “it’s a function of modern finance”. He’s right, of course. You get a lot of money for selling the name of your stadium at no material cost. Tottenham is a business, run like a business and that’s just the way it is. In other words, we need the money, or at least we will do when we come round to financing this as yet un-financed project. It’s not quite like Arsenal’s situation – they were moving and had to find a new name for the stadium anyway. We’re actually moving closer to White Hart Lane, and I think, whatever they call it, we’ll still be able to call it White Hart Lane, much like the City of Manchester Stadium is commonly referred to as Eastlands. Or, better still, in the same way that The Boleyn Ground is usually inaccurately referred to as Upton Park. And the trains will still be stopping at White Hart Lane.

Levy was fairly cagey on the details – the plans will be unveiled more fully in a fortnight. There’s no specific timescale, or even general timescale, other than that the planning application could take up to a year. Levy is probably wise to be cautious in this respect. The stadium plans at Liverpool and Everton have ended up becoming embarrassingly derailed, and we all remember what happened at Wembley.

The strangest part of the announcement was the claim that “the transport infrastructure around the stadium is already in place, with 4 stations (White Hart Lane, Northumberland Park, Seven Sisters and Tottenham Hale) and over 100 buses an hour serving the stadium area. Together these deliver a total capacity in excess of 90,000 passengers an hour.”

For years, the club has been using the lack of transport infrastructure as a reason not to develop the stadium. That always seemed an inflated claim and a precursor to a move away, or perhaps just a tactic in negotiations with Haringey Council and TfL. More of a problem is the lack of capacity in local pubs since West Ham smashed up The Bank and The Cockerel. If we’re lucky, maybe the new development will include a Yates’s.

The timing of this announcement adds a little more context to the decision to sack Ramos. If we still had two points, we’d be a laughing stock. The fantastic comeback at Arsenal last night provided an excellent platform. If 9/11 was a great day to bury bad news, this was a great day to announce a new stadium, even if it was somewhat overshadowed by the fascinating story about improper phonecalls to Manuel from Fawlty Towers’ answering machine regarding his granddaughter from the “Satanic Sluts”.

 

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28th October 2008 – I am not a number…

Harry has made his first political move in the latest revolution at White Hart Lane, or second if you count his decision, or Clive Allen’s, to recall David Bentley to the first team. The Famous Five have been given shirt numbers. In case you’d forgotten, the Famous Five are Stalteri (13), Ghaly (15), Taarabt (19), Boateng (23) and Rocha (33).

 

Great news. Not because they’re any good, but because it marks the end of an era, started by Jol, or maybe Santini, or maybe Pleat, or maybe Hoddle, or maybe Graham, or maybe just a club tradition, of side-lining players whose faces just don’t fit, for whatever reason. Graham did it to Ginola, Hoddle did it to Sherwood, Pleat did it to whoever it was that he needed to shaft to further his own ends, Santini did it to Carrick, Jol did it to Davis, Lee, Ghaly, Stalteri and whoever, and Ramos did it to half the squad. I’ve never liked it because, quite simply, it’s not very nice and I can’t see any basis on which it promotes team spirit.

 

Harry wants to give everyone a cuddle and that’s no bad thing. I’d like a cuddle too.

 

Harry, whom I shall hereafter refer to as Harry, has started off his WHL career with aplomb, or more precisely, a win, which was much needed and has gone a fair way to blowing away the malaise about the future that has been poisoning all our minds. It wasn’t particularly special, but it was the straightforward home win to which we have become so unaccustomed and it was nice to have it back. The first goal was borderline offside, and the second was perhaps a dodgy penalty, but it was ultimately the sort of bread-and-butter home victory which we used to expect. The away team even had a player sent off, as if it wasn’t already straightforward enough.

 

The biggest failure of the Ramos Revolution was that such simple tasks became incredibly complex affairs. Right-backs at left back, centre-mids at right back, centre-mids at centre-half, left-backs at left-midfield, right-wingers at centre-mid, right-wingers on left-wing, and double subs at half-time, 3-5-2, 3-4-3 and ultimately, defeat and promises to work harder. It might have all been very clever, but football isn’t rocket science and somewhere at WHL the powers that be had forgotten that. So we had a fancy new management structure which would become a trailblazer for the new young Turks, like Newcastle and West Ham: a cerebral director of football with a CV from Wengerland and a law degree to prove it, and a double UEFA cup winning coach with immense tactical nous and pidgin English.

 

Harry isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. He is, in many ways, the antithesis of the former regime. I’m not sure if it’s a class thing, or a perceived dodgy-dealing thing, or a hypocritical-and-fast talking thing, or an ambiguous-track-record thing, or a Marco Boogers and Joey Beauchamp thing, or just a basic Harry thing. I find it difficult to take a categorical view on him either way, as apparently have many club chairmen given that he’s never managed to get the job offer that his CV probably merits. But it’s just a massive relief to stop having to second guess everything that goes on at the club, if nothing else. Harry’s in charge and Harry gives it to you straight, even if it is straight in a used-car-dealer’s kind of way. At the same time, it’s kind of embarrassing for reasons I can’t quite explain.

Levy, in his lonely hearts column on the club website, went into admirable depth about the thinking behind it all. One line really got on my tits though. After explaining the sales of Keane and Berbatov, he said, “Perhaps these insights will help once and for all to de-bunk the myths that have been perpetuated around these transfers.”

 

The reason, Mr Levy, that we spend so much time debating the myths about the club is because no one ever bothers to tell us what’s really going on, so we’re left to speculate about whether the perpetual leaks from the club to the media are true, half-true, made-up, or just one faction shafting another. I’m not surprised by much that goes on at our club, but one thing that never ceases to amaze me is the number of tabloid stories that I read with a skeptical eye that actually turn out to be true when the dust finally settles. Is the truth really so unpalatable that it’s not fit for public consumption? Hopefully, the Redknapp era will mark a new dawn in the PR at the club, not least by removing a layer of potential politics from the club’s operations. I don’t really know who Donna Cullen, our head of PR, is, or if it’s true that she used to go through Jol’s programme notes with a red pen, but I’d very much like her sacked and not replaced.

 

I’m not generally a board-basher. I genuinely think they have the best interests of the club at heart. Not out of some altruistic love of the club, but because that’s what will maximise shareholder value in the long term. They have a track record of investment in the club, and Levy says as much in his apologia. But there is a bit of contradiction in the club’s line. Jol wanted to sell Berbatov, says Levy, but he vetoed it because it was “completely unreasonable”. And yet ultimately the club sold Berbatov and Keane because the technical staff thought they’d be bad for morale, in the latter’s case, despite his “professionalism”.

 

Whether or not you buy the explanation, I think that says much about where and why things have gone wrong. Jol was never afforded the respect he ought to have commanded. More than once Levy effectively admits to learning on the job, and hopefully it looks like he’s finally grasped the basic point in his decision to entrust the club to one man and let him live or die by his decisions. However well it works on the continent, the structures they adopt have been developed organically and trying to superimpose the template on a club has never been the policy anywhere.

 

Let’s not let it get lost in all that that Berbatov wanted to leave 12 months after signing, or that ManYoo really did offer a paltry £20m for a player for whom they ended up paying over £30m and whom Fergie described as “worth every penny”. Right from day one, Mr Bulgaria thought he was too good for the club and he had Fergie’s illegal tapping-up to prove it. The fact is he wasn’t too good, and never will be, whatever his agent, or rapist father, might think. Spurs are a great club with a great tradition and a history of great players and the idea that he was too good for the club is an embarrassment to himself and the fawning media who somehow think he must be playing the best football of his career because he plays for ManYoo and he’s scored a few goals against mediocre sides in the vastly overrated “Champions” League. He is a wonderful talent, of course, but he’s never going to be as good as he thinks he is for the very same reason that he wanted out of Tottenham, namely, because he’s a wanker.

 

Levy also cited the fact that Berbatov could have used the FIFA regulations to get out of his contract in 12 months time. I’ve actually read the FIFA Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players. It’s a great read. But the salient point that I hope the club’s lawyers have spotted is that the compensation mechanism which is provided for in the event that a player exercises his rights under the regulations is subject to the proviso “unless otherwise provided for in the contract” (Article 17.1). In other words, you can effectively contract out of the regulations by specifying in the contract what sum will be due if the player terminates the contract prematurely. I really do hope you’re reading this, Mr Levy, and that you will include such a sum in player contracts in the future. Perhaps, then, you can re-adopt your mantra of having no need to sell players under contract, though it wouldn’t explain why you sold Robbie Keane just because he pretended that he used to support Liverpool.

 

To be fair to Levy, he really does hit the nail on the head when he says “Quite simply, we failed because we were not as decisive or as successful in identifying or replacing the two strikers as early as we should have been.” I remember thinking, early in the transfer window, when our interest in Pavlyuchenko and Arshavin mysteriously made it into the press, that I didn’t fancy that pair, but by the end of it I had convinced myself that it would be wonderful. In the end we only got half of the dream ticket, the poorer and cheaper half. But I think that quote reveals what really underlay the club’s thinking in their decision to sell the strikers. They, wrongly, believed that they could replace them. And when I say “club”, I mean Levy, Comolli and Ramos, and anyone else who sanctioned the deals. It’s like the old saying, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” or whatever the saying is.

 

 

 

 

26th October 2007 - Plus Ça Change

Bloody Hell.

 

I don’t think any of us were expecting this news while we were putting our clocks back. Ramos, Comolli, and Poyet all sacked on the eve of another “must-win” game against Bolton. And Redknapp already installed as the replacement.

 

Where to start? We can’t blame Ramos for the loss of Keane and Berbatov. And, let’s be fair, we can’t blame Comolli for it either. The club may have decided who to sign by committee, but the decision to sell that pair was taken at the top.

 

So if the major haemorrhage that caused the current debacle wasn’t their fault, why sack them? Well, as they say, a good workman doesn’t blame his tools. So Ramos has to carry the can for his failure to get a decent squad more than two points out of 24. And this isn’t just about this season. Our league form wasn’t that impressive before the Carling Cup final. At that stage he had an excuse, namely getting points on the board by whatever means, and focusing on securing a route into Europe. And after that, the insipid displays were never wholly explicable on the basis of having met that goal. I mean, seriously, how can a side under a new manager meander for three months just because they won a minor cup? It just never added up.

 

I don’t want to belittle Ramos’ achievement. The Carling Cup win was the best day in my adult life as a Tottenham supporter. And I don’t think it would have happened under Jol. But I find it hard to escape the idea that Ramos was benefiting from a honeymoon period which somehow galvanised the squad to defeat Arsenal’s semi-reserves and Chelsea, whose under-par performance perhaps mirrored our own versus Blackburn in 2001.

 

I’m sure he’s not a bad coach, in his own culture, and his own language, but success in management is an ephemeral commodity, not just in football, but in business, politics, and any sphere of human affairs which is dependent on so many unpredictable variables. On a fairly base level, if we were all wondering whether this strange man with a voice like Donald Duck on speed really had the answers, no doubt the players were too. And the endless player interviews this week revealed as much.

 

It’s incredibly harsh, of course. But football is harsh and the system of promotion and relegation that makes it tick ensures that. There are very few managers with the luxury of holding onto their best players and there are other managers who muddle through without the luxury of spending £70m+ on new players. You might say that he didn’t spend that money, others did, but he signed up to it and he’ll be handsomely rewarded for the failure of the project.

 

And it was, presumably, his decision to overhaul half the cup-winning squad. It surely is part of a manager’s job to manage people out of what he perceives as their weaknesses. In which case, he failed to manage the likes of Robinson, Chimbonda, and possibly Malbranque, amongst others, out of their psychological issues.  If his view was that they all just had to go, or that it was better to take the money and reinvest it on some other players, he’s got to carry the can for that. Other managers would have handled it differently.

 

I do wish him all the best, and I’m hugely disappointed that it didn’t work out, but I don’t regret his departure, because I think by the end, he was, quite simply, out of his depth.

 

As for Comolli, I don’t think anyone will regret his demise. We will never really know to what extent he had control over the club’s budget, but it’s fair to say he didn’t have the vision to make the club’s resources go further than the some its parts. Lame duck signings last summer were followed by expensive gambles this summer, as though, given the resources, he had nothing better to do than chase after a few captain-obvious acquisitions based on familiar faces from the international scene. He certainly didn’t have Arsene Wenger’s eye for the kids, however you’d like to interpret that.

 

Levy is, of course, hiding in the background. It was his set-up, his decision to sell the strikers, his everything. But he’s the owner, or the owner’s son-in-law or nephew or whatever, and he’s not going to sack himself, or, if he did, he’d have to appoint a shadow director to do his bidding. So there’s little mileage in pointing out the obvious about to what extent he’s fucked it up. He’s well aware of that and so are we. He’s backtracked over the principle of not selling star players under contract and now he’s backtracked over the much-vaunted management structure, and, for the latter, we’re very grateful.

 

What I will say, in defence of the board, is that if they thought the writing was on the wall, they were right to act sooner rather than later. They may get stick in hindsight for another failure to back a manager, but at this point in time, they’ve acted swiftly and decisively to secure a manager with a reasonable track record to get us out of this mess.

 

The white knight, of course, is Harry Redknapp, for £5m, a man sure to divide Spurs fans as to his credentials. I’ve always had mixed feelings about him, and it’s nigh on impossible to gauge whether this gamble is going to pay off, but, just as last week Ramos was the only game in town, this week the only game in town is Redknapp. At this point in time, avoiding relegation will justify the appointment. So we’ll just have to cross our fingers. Football is a funny old game.

 

Finally, a word about Poyet. Universally popular, it’s very sad that he should be leaving the club under these circumstances. The reasons why he isn’t to stay on may be as much down to the man and his principles as to the club. Or it may be down to Redknapp. No doubt we’ll get half the story via the media in the fullness of time and be none the wiser.

 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose

 

 

24th October 2008 - The “rSol Campbell debate” part 2

This is a somewhat belated response to JimmyG2’s critique, dated 13 October 2008, of my views on the great “Sol Campbell debate”: http://www.topspurs.com/thfccol-jimmyg2.htm. Please accept my apologies for continuing this now somewhat dated and rather silly discourse.

 

Firstly, I don’t have a problem with JimmyG2 finding the song offensive. It’s meant to be offensive. But I do believe in the right to offend, at least within the bounds of the law, and I’m not aware that singing the song in question breaks the laws of the land, though it probably does break the bylaws at Tottenham, as does anyone who ever swears at a football match. And what I really object to is the idea that the powers that be are going to retrospectively pick on some random supporters and hit them with life bans because of a misinformed media bandwagon, which, in the absence of a transfer window, has nothing better to do than dredge up a two-year-old story. At the end of the day, it’s just a song, which some people find offensive and some people find funny. We don’t need the police, Tottenham Hotspur, the Guardian or the Mail to arbitrate as to who is right.

 

As an aside, I should point out that despite my labelling of “muesli-eating Guardian readers” (a line first used in the House of Commons, I believe), I am actually a Guardian reader myself, or at least I used to be before I discovered the internet, and I sometimes eat Fruit n Fibre, though I prefer Coco Pops. I was also a Times reader, as it happens. And now I read all the press for free. All of this is a bit of an irrelevance, but the point I’m making is that I’m a liberal and as such I believe in people’s reasonable right to offend. I draw the line at racism, but I also understand that it’s a social construct brought about to stamp out a particularly pernicious social problem. In the absence of that social problem, it would be just as accurate or inaccurate as any other form of human stereotyping.

 

That same reasoning doesn’t necessarily apply to homophobia. That’s not to say there aren’t people who are bullied, disadvantaged or discriminated against because of their sexuality, but it’s a more subtle social problem which doesn’t require the same blunt instrument as the blanket taboo that the effects of racism demand, and society and the law, reflect that. To say that they’re both equally wrong is, I think, to apply dogma to what is actually a complex and evolving social phenomenon. This is all getting a little beyond the scope of a fanzine, but the point, in this particular case, is that the reason why the song is intended to offend Sol Campbell is not because he’s gay. It’s because he’s not. And it’s not that being gay is an insult, it’s rather the idea that hiding one’s sexuality is some kind of deceit. It’s the reason why, in law, you can sue for libel for inaccurate aspersions about your sexuality, as Ashley Cole did. (I think he also sued for breach of privacy, and they settled, so I’m not sure if there is legal authority on the point, but still, you get the drift).

 

The other reason why I’ve veered off on this tangent is to repudiate the notion that it doesn’t matter if it isn’t racist if people wrongly think that it is. I really object to this idea which seems to permeate every aspect of the modern media age. It’s bad enough that every ignorant moron on the planet thinks they have the right to “have their say”, courtesy of internet message boards and the BBC, but, if anything, that makes informed, responsible and authoritative journalism more important than ever. In any case, the barometer of public opinion is as crass a measure of anything as one can find. 45% of Americans think John McCain would make a better president than Barack Obama.

 

I’m probably being a little harsh on Americans, who probably don’t think McCain would make a better president. There’s no obligation to engage your brain before you vote, just as there’s no obligation to engage your brain before you take a trip to White Hart Lane. It’s just tribal instinct.

 

Which brings me nicely to my final point which is about the idea that the supporters who sing this song are bringing shame on the values and traditions of the club. The fact is no one outside White Hart Lane gives two hoots about the values and traditions of our club. Such things may be a crumb of comfort to some as we sit at the bottom the table, but everyone else is laughing and wishing us the worst. If we really need a scapegoat for why we’re in this predicament, let’s look no further than the “Big Four” cartel which has systematically poached our best players, or, in Chelsea’s case, our director of football. If abusing former players sends out a message to anyone else who fancies bettering themselves somewhere else that they will incur the wrath of one million Spurs fans who will taunt their brother until he goes to prison for GBH, then all the better. There’s no point in playing nice with your enemies if their ambition is to destroy you. This isn’t foreign policy, it’s just football.

 

As a footnote, I wrote this while watching our 2-0 defeat to Udinese. I have little to say other than to reiterate the obvious points that we’re low on confidence and prone to panic, we need Ledley King present on a regular basis, we need Didier Zokora absent on a regular basis, and we’ve not got a lot up front. The highlight for me was at half-time when Stan Collymore, when asked for his expert analysis, suggested we needed to try to nick an away goal, seemingly unaware of the league format of the group stage.

 

22nd October 2008 – King of the Castle

There’s not a lot to say about Tottenham at the moment that hasn’t been said already. Sell your star strike force, buy a load of Eastern European square pegs to fit in round holes, and generally have nothing up front, and you can pretty much predict the scenario. And yet somehow it wasn’t meant to be like this.

 

The media are really enjoying it and you can see why. As every game passes the story becomes bigger and better, and more tragic if you have the misfortune to be a Spurs fan. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion, except usually we expect it to be West Ham or Newcastle. But this is Spurs. A bona fide big club whose relegation only comes around once in a generation.

 

No one’s quite sold on the worst case scenario yet. Even the bookmakers are cagey about Spurs’ prospects for relegation. But the odds are falling weekly with every disjointed performance.

 

It would be easy to point out that this media bandwagon that is slating the Tottenham hierarchy for masterminding this debacle was the same media who were predicting a sustained challenge against the top four. How Super Luka would wow the Premier League with his subtle arts. And how David Bentley was the new David Beckham. But, to be fair, most of that was predicted before deadline day when Spurs sold Dimitar Berbatov and replaced him with Frazier Campbell on-loan.

 

And yet, if the media were to be believed, and from what we have witnessed largely since the Carling Cup Final, Berbatov had already gone in spirit if not in body. So, when we point the finger at Comolli or Levy or Ramos, as the case may be, we should bear in mind that we all believed, or at least hoped, that despite the exit of Keane and Berbatov, Spurs would be a stronger outfit for the new signings, and it just hasn’t worked out like that.

 

We’re not the experts, of course. And we are entitled to trust that the powers that be know what they are doing. But at the same time, if we all got it so wrong in thinking that Modric, Bentley, Gomes, Pavlyuchenko and Corluka would compensate for what we had lost, it’s fair to say that the Tottenham hierarchy didn’t see it coming either. And now that we’re where we are, there’s little point in recriminations. Batten down the hatches and hope beyond hope that the management and the players can find the formula to get us out of this mess. There is no other game in town.

Talk of a demonstration against the board is absurd. They might have got it wrong, but it wasn’t for lack of ambition, as an impressively circumspect Martin Jol pointed out. "They've changed the team but have done it with good intentions as they want to be better. They need to get good results, but it will take time, and unfortunately in England you don't get time."  Just a lack of judgement then. Or, hopefully, even just a lack of time.

Jol provided a few interesting insights into the machinations of the politics at the club. Firstly, of Dimitar Berbatov, he said, "The only person who was always complaining was Berbatov. They said to me he wants to leave because of you, but I don't think it was because of me. He proved me right and left anyway." If you cast your mind back to the beginning of last season, when we started with insipid defeats to Sunderland and Everton, all the talk was about Berbatov and his negative body language, including, as I recall, a petulant substitution at the Stadium of Light. The media was full of speculation about his relationship with Jol and it comes as little surprise that the idea of sacking Jol was in part motivated by a desire to somehow placate the odious Bulgarian.

 

On Damien Comolli, he said: "I respect everybody, so for me there was no problem. The only thing is there is just a different structure over there. So if you have four or five players from France and they are as good as Michael Carrick and people tell you they are, you have to believe them. Some were good; some weren't good. But I will never blame someone else, because I am there as well - so you have to take part of the blame."

 

That’s a real insight into the way transfers are conducted. If the Director of Football recommends players that the manager isn’t familiar with, he has little option but to take his word for it. But at the same time, he’s entitled to take his own view, and if he doesn’t have the expertise or the courage to say no, he has to take his share of the blame. I can see why the club might want the scouting network to work for the board, rather than the manager, so that all the research and contacts aren’t lost with every change, but the downside is a dilution of accountability and the substantial risk that the manager ends up with players that aren’t what he hoped for.

 

The structure is an easy target for the English media who hold continuity up as the mantra like there’s some merit in not sacking crap managers. The fact is it that it’s standard procedure on the continent and, at a club like Tottenham, which has lacked continuity of management in recent decades, it’s not wholly unreasonable for the club to hedge its bets until the day comes when the club can entrust itself to one man for 25 years. Don’t get me wrong – I’d rather appoint a good manager who conducts the transfers himself. I just think getting the knives out for Comolli is a bit of an easy option. For all the dismal performances, we do appear to have just about the strongest squad I can remember. Perhaps that says it all.

 

The most telling comment from Jol was on Ledley King: “It’s simple: Tottenham are twice as good when he plays.” Ramos has lost 17 of his 53 matches as Spurs manager, 14 in the 38 games where King was absent (I got this stat from The Times, I haven’t verified it). So that’s only three defeats when King has played. I used to think he was the best defender in the world. I think the club’s plight in his absence proves it.

 

 

7th October 2008 – Racism, homophobia and idiocy

I’ve seen it all now. I’m not talking about our home defeat to Hull, which I had both feared and expected. I’m talking about Peter Tatchell, the famous gay rights activist, being given a platform in The Guardian to stick his oar into the “Sol Campbell” debate.

 

When push comes to shove, I tend to side with the political correctness brigade rather than the PC-gone-mad brigade. But this issue just takes the biscuit. Not only do we have the usually “it’s PC-gone-mad” Daily Mail on our case, but now we’ve got the bastions of free speech at it too. They’re in favour of free speech as long as it doesn’t offend their muesli-eating sensibilities. I wish they’d all fuck off to whatever ignorant hole they crawled out of.

 

This is about loyalty and betrayal. It’s about Spurs v Arsenal. It’s about why we pay through the nose to turn out to watch our hapless millionaires lose at home to Hull. And it’s no one’s business except ours, Arsenal’s, Sol Campbell’s, and possibly Portsmouth’s. It’s like some busybody sticking his nose in when you’ve found out your wife has been having an affair with your arch enemy to point out that the word “slut” is misogynistic. You’d have reasonable grounds to punch their lights out.

 

“It’s homophobic! It’s racist!” they scream. “Tottenham fans are vile. This abuse is horrific. Something must be done!”

 

Well, for starters, it’s not racist. “We won’t give a fuck when you’re hanging from a tree” is a reference to suicide, which is quite obvious from the reference to lunacy and to Judas, who hung himself, as well as the context in which the song arose, which was Campbell’s half-time substitution and subsequent disappearance with mental health issues.

 

The Guardian should well know this. They ran a silly piece on this song when it first arose back in 2006: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2006/feb/08/comment.gdnsport3. They got the lyrics wrong then and Tatchell appears to have used that piece as his source because he’s got them wrong too: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/06/gayrights. It’s “Not long not now ‘til lunacy”, you ignorant, bandwagon-jumping pricks. Try going to a football match before you pontificate about what football supporters say to each other.

 

Tatchell has another song up his sleeve "He's big, he's black. He takes it up his crack. Sol Campbell, Sol Campbell." That song is admittedly racist, but I’ve never heard it sung. Have you, Peter? Or have you never been to a football match?

 

That’s not to say there isn’t racism amongst football fans. Football supporters are as ignorant and prejudiced as the cross-section of society which they reflect. I’ve pointed out before that the song about Adebayor’s father being a valet for elephants crosses the line. But, in general, racist chanting has been self-regulated out of the terraces, or seats as they now are. At least that’s my experience at Tottenham. Certainly, the racist element, at least towards blacks, disappeared from London crowds before it did at some of the stadia of our northern brethren, due, presumably, to the multicultural demographic and liberal culture of a major international conurbation. So the idea that we should be held up as pariahs on this count really sticks in the throat. That said, I do recall us chanting “Upton Park-istan” at West Ham a few years ago. Quite witty, if very racist, I thought.

 

Some will argue that we applauded Defoe, another black man, in the same game, or that our club captain is black, or that we had the very first black player in English football, Walter Tull, or that we ourselves have been the target of racial abuse towards Jews, which we have turned on its head, just as the gays have adopted the term “queer” as their own. But these arguments are superfluous. The point is that the song is not a racist, we are, in general, not a racist crowd, in a multi-ethnic area, with a multi-ethnic fanbase, and the allegation of collective racism is highly offensive and defamatory to us all.

 

The homophobia allegation, in contrast, can’t be refuted, of course. But homophobia is the last great taboo that is still acceptable and Spurs fans again just reflect society in this respect. It’s playground humour. If the gay rights brigade want to use this as a stick with which to beat their drum, well, good luck to them. But it’s not just the gay rights brigade. It’s every hypocrite out there, as well as the anyone-but-Spurs brigade, which is really rather large as a consequence of being London’s biggest club, in stature if not achievement.

 

But more to the point, and this is where the likes of Tatchell have really missed the point, Campbell isn’t actually gay. Well, not as far as I’m aware. In which case, it isn’t homophobia. It’s just teasing. Playground humour. To compare it to racism is like saying it would be offensive to call a white man black, or a black man white. Whichever floats your boat.

 

And if the fact that this is an absurd bandwagon on which idiots are lining up to jump wasn’t obvious enough, what about the Wenger chants? Have the press been oblivious to the plethora of chants about Wenger’s apparent penchant for the chronologically limited? Of course they haven’t, but that’s just too unpalatable to write about. Whereas homophobia gives them a nice label with which to stereotype Spurs fans in their quest to stamp out stereotyping.

 

A word about Tottenham – sacking Ramos is unthinkable, if not for the supporters and the press, then for the management. Levy has gone on record to praise Ramos’ intelligence and obsession with winning, as well as undermining him by selling his best players, so, politically, he has little scope for manoeuvre. The Sporting Director, in contrast, is staring down the barrel. Levy made a point of saying that Ramos was Comolli’s appointment and left the Frenchman to carry the can for the failure to land a strike partner for Pavlyuchenko.

 

This is probably a good thing. Comolli has been a disaster. The downside is that Levy has pinned his tail to the Sporting Director donkey so when he goes we can expect a replacement rather than an acceptance that the whole structure is based on a flawed theory of management. Having a director of football is no substitute for directors who understand football.

 

 

30th September 2008 – No means yes

If you look around the internet today, there are quite a few people calling for Ramos’ head. Presumably, these are the same people who, from time to time, bemoan the club’s penchant for sacking managers on a regular basis. The reason is that he apparently doesn’t know what he’s doing.

 

To be fair, I don’t think he does know what he’s doing. He’s trying to find the best way of playing this team of midfielders that has been bought for him, and, for the moment, it’s a case of pinning the tail on the donkey (insert your own Didier Zokora joke) or, perhaps more aptly, throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks.

 

Let’s get some perspective here – Ramos is not a bad coach and has the trophy cabinet to prove it. But he’s also not Jesus Christ and he can’t turn water into wine. If you look at the side that got outplayed at Pompey, what’s the difference from the side which got Jol sacked? The answer is not a lot, except it’s missing its five best players in Keane, Berbatov, Defoe, King and Bale, and Assou-Ekotto is playing.

 

If we’re going to look for scapegoats, the board have got to carry the can. They were the ones that decided on the sporting director formula and the collective responsibility which Ramos shows admirable restraint in sticking to. The point of it was apparently to ensure continuity of playing staff where there wasn’t continuity of management. And yet the result has been quite the opposite.

 

It’s not that there wasn’t a fair amount of deadwood in the squad. The problem is that they didn’t just sell the deadwood. They sold everyone they could get a good price for. And that doesn’t just include Keane and Berbatov. We would have a stronger squad if we still had Chimbonda and Malbranque.

 

And then there’s who they bought. The most pressing needs were a goalkeeper, a holding midfielder, a left winger, and a number 10. We got the goalkeeper but the other positions haven’t been filled. Bentley, Modric and Pavlyuchenko have been bought because they were expensive and available, not because they filled positions in the team that needed filling. So it’s no surprise that Ramos doesn’t know what his best XI is, or what his best formation is. He’s got two right wingers, two number 9s, three attacking midfielders, no left winger, no number 10, and a host of inadequate options as a holding midfielder.

 

Of course, if we still had Keane and Berbatov, everything would be fine. We’d have more options and a strikeforce to boot. At the risk of going over old ground again, whose fault is that? Is it Berbatov’s fault for being a sulky git? Is it Keane’s fault for being a lying toe-rag? Or is it the board’s fault for not sticking to their guns? They could have just said “No means no” rather than “No means everybody has a price and we’re just waiting for someone to meet it”.

 

It’s probably a little naive to think it was that simple. The problem is one of wages. The reason players want to move is not because they have a dream. Or at least what they are dreaming of is a 50% wage hike, more than anything else. Holding onto your best players doesn’t come cheap, as the wage bills at The Big Four will testify. Or just ask Robinho. Spurs are not going to be able to compete with that until they increase capacity at White Hart Lane, an issue which the board have shown no sign of addressing in the near future. The alternative is to attract a takeover from an energy billionaire, or better still, a consortium of energy billionaires. The problem is that the price that ENIC are asking for is too high. There’s an easy solution to that, namely relegation to the Championship, for which you can still get a very generous 16-1 with Corals.

 

If you’re looking for omens, Keith Burkinshaw got relegated in his first full season in charge and Spurs bounced back to win three cups!

 

23rd September 2008 – A long week

It’s been a long week for Spurs match-goers. The unthinkable defeat against Villa soon became a reality; a scratchy win against FC Poland lightened the gloom a little; before a guileless display against Wigan reminded us of how much we have lost.

 

The Villa game is a bit of a blur now but what sticks in the memory is the sheer number of chances that the opposition created. We were outplayed at home by a team any one of whose players we could, at some stage, have bought for ourselves at the fraction of the cost of our own squad.

 

Martin O’Neill revealed that he turned down the Tottenham job before Santini got it because he didn’t want to work under a director of football. It was probably not the best timing for the beleaguered Damian Comolli but served as reminder as to the state of Daniel Levy’s masterplan, devised over nine, tortuous months back in 2003/4. The plan, of course, was that a director of football would provide the stability of tenure and therefore personnel that the revolving manager’s door at Spurs had failed to provide. A couple of points spring to mind – firstly, we already had a director of football, one who had undermined the authority of the previous manager, and who, I am reliably informed, is still enjoying the club’s hospitality on a regular basis. Secondly, we have, under that plan, signed 62 players, most of whom have already left the club.

 

It would be trite to suggest that the extraordinary number of transfers in and out of White Hart Lane demonstrates a failure of the Director of Football template. The club has set about improving the quality of the squad, window after window, and that inevitably leads to frequent changes until the squad is of the required standard. And as players reach a certain age, or wind down their contracts, or put in transfer requests, as the case may be, even a relatively successful squad may need an overhaul. As Comolli put it, “We decided to make these changes because we feel we're beginning a new cycle, so we had to think about building a team with a future, and that's exactly what we've done. We are younger, there is more depth, and we know that everyone we have brought in is absolutely committed to the club.”

 

So, of course, the new players need time to gel, and in the meantime we’ve just got to trust in the judgement of the powers that be. But something just doesn’t quite ring true. If you look at the team that struggled so ineptly against Wigan, there were many, perhaps too many, familiar faces. Only the goalkeeper could be said to be an improvement on last year. Corluka was filling in for King, whose chronic knee problem appears terminal. Bentley, who has so far looked off-form, overweight, and one-paced, was presumably preferred to the on-form Lennon with a view to the crunch Carling Cup tie on Wednesday. And Pavlyuchenko is only getting in the team because we’ve lost two strikers, or three if you count Defoe, and because he, at least, isn’t on loan. Meanwhile, Assou-Ekotto put in a surprise, and unwanted, appearance so that Bale could play midfield instead of Giovanni, who’s looked the pick of the new signings so far. Perhaps again, one, at least, hopes, it was with Wednesday’s game in mind, but it raises alarm bells about another Comolli signing, Gilberto, who can’t buy a game under Ramos.

 

The upshot of it all, as was so glaringly apparent as Spurs struggled to create a shot on target against a Wigan side that looked more likely to score, is that we have squad that is, at best, of much the same quality as last season, less its 50-goal-a-season strikeforce, creative hub, and match winners, a reality that is not inaccurately reflected by the league table. Still, at least we got a clean sheet.

 

Ramos still doesn’t know what his best team is. I don’t blame him for that - nor do I. But it was easy enough to identify what Spurs needed during the close season. We needed three new strikers, and we only got two, one of whom is on loan. Comolli has acknowledged the club’s failure in this respect. We needed a goalie. We got that, and despite his blunder against Villa, he looks like his telescopic arms make up for his dodgy feet. We needed cover, or a replacement, for King, and we got that in Corluka, though he’s not in the same league.

 

But, above all, we also needed a defensive midfielder, and yet we got three attacking ones in Modric, Bentley and Giovanni, leaving Ramos with quite a selection headache.  So far, he’s tried Modric, Zokora, Huddlestone and O’Hara in the holding role, with Jenas fleeting around as needs require. It’s left the squad imbalanced not only up front, but in midfield too.

 

What’s particularly galling about it all is that we’ve been patiently watching the club build in the hope of  cracking the Premier League cartel, only to find that just when we thought we had the squad and the manager to achieve it, we seem to have gone and undone it all in a summer of transfer madness. In Modric, Bentley and, previously, Bent, we appear to have spent £50m on players simply because we could, rather than because we needed to. Perhaps it’s a reflection of our limited wage structure and our lack of ability to attract the best players, that we’re signing players whom our rivals don’t want and who don’t command the highest wages, and yet whose large transfer fees reflect a reputation of which the reality doesn’t quite match the hype. You might, I fear, add Pavlyuchenko to that list. It’s not a reflection of a lack of ambition, just a lack of intelligence, or maybe just desperation.

 

I keep renewing my season-ticket thinking that this season might be the one, but I’m now reaching the point of no-return, quite literally. It’s one false dawn too far, and if the board think it’s time to rebuild for the future, I fear it’s time for some youngster to take up my mantel and go through 15 years of false dawns rather than living through it any more, and paying through the nose for the privilege. In any case, you can catch virtually every game on TV or through the internet these days.

 

And the matchday experience is getting a little tiresome. Leaving aside the football, or lack thereof, the players who don’t give a fuck about the club, or only do until a better offer comes along, and the bullshit board which wants us to believe that we’re on a bubble that isn’t going to go the same way as the property market, I’m fed up with the agro of it all. The short or cancelled trains, the suspended underground, the over-bearing policing, the watered-down pints, the club’s media machine and the general idiocy of it all.

At the Wigan game some jumped-up twat behind us, using someone else’s season-ticket, decided to launch a volley of expletives at one of my friends because he was having a moan at Darren Bent. Then another friend received similar treatment from someone trying to push in front in the beer queue. And I think I was in a minority of one in not giving a damn about the presence of Krakow fans in the home areas on Wednesday. It was the most interesting thing that happened that night. I’m just not up for it any more. I might change my mind if Spurs could somehow turn this around but I fear that last season’s Carling Cup win is going to be the highlight of my Spurs-going life.

 

As an aside, I recall that Gazza once said “They should rename the club Tottenham Venables after all he’s done for the club.” Was he right, or did he have a serious mental health problem?

 

 

13 September 2008 – A filler before Villa

After the disappointment of the deadline day debacle, and having to stomach listening to Berbatov and Fraizer “Frazier” Campbell talking about our great club as some sort of stepping stone, I was filled with renewed vigour for what lies ahead by watching Liverpool defeat ManYoo All-Stars. When Berbatov coolly squared the ball for Tevez, I felt sick to the stomach, but the Bulgarian sulkster disappeared after that, as did his team mates. Their cause wasn’t helped when that red-faced gimp Fergie replaced the injured Carrick, a holding midfelder with Ryan Giggs, a winger. But still, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Rooney toil on the right flank and am left with a strong sense of glee at the possibility that not only have we taken United to the cleaners over the fee for a player who thinks only of himself and whose classy contributions are rarely more than fleeting, but also that he’s going to disrupt United’s double-winning system in much the same way that another £30-odd million flop, Juan Sebastian Veron, did.

 

Wishful thinking, of course, but it’s nice to see the pre-ordained order of things disrupted once in a while. Not that I have any affection for Liverpool and it was an added bonus to see Robbie Keane once again huffing and puffing without reward and fluffing his lines when he got the chance. Looking at the bigger picture, £50m for that pair might look a marvellous piece of business, as long as Tottenham can find a way to perform without them. But we are, as the venerable Jim Duggan has often pointed out, Tottenham Hotspur supporters and not accountants. The bottom line is not the balance sheet but whether we can go into every game with the expectation of getting a result.

And so to Villa. If I may digress a little, when I was at school, there was a kid who nicknamed them Aston Gorilla because they had several black players, such as Ugo Ehiogu, Ian Taylor and Dalian Atkinson. It was terribly racist, of course, but it was “ok” because the kid himself was Pakistani. This week we’ve our very own race storm, provided by Spurs legend himself, Sergei Rebrov. "I wouldn't go for a walk on my own around White Hart Lane. A lot of dark skinned people live there. So naturally, the crime rate is higher than anywhere else.” Fellow blogger Harry Hotspur decided to report these quotes under the headline “Rebrov – Not Racist?” and tried to justify it with some stats about crime in Haringey and deciding to treat the line “so naturally” as though it didn’t imply some causal link. He wanted to stimulate an intelligent debate about race. And presumably boost his ad revenues a little bit. What a turd. I don’t deliberately frequent his site but I occasionally click on the Newsnow links to fulfill some morbid desire to see what excrement he is producing through his keyboard. If you’re reading this, Harry, please fvck off. And while I’m at it, to those of you who think the Adebayor song about his dad washing elephants isn’t racist, it is. So stop it.

Anyway, last season I would have had this down as a home win. A must win. We didn’t, of course. This time around, I’m less expectant but, after the performance against Chelsea, I’m quietly optimistic about what we might get. Gone are the days of goals galore at White Hart Lane. But what we might get instead is a more measured, clinical and intelligent tactical approach that sees us comfortable in possession, hard to beat and dangerous on the counter-attack. It might not be as pretty, but I’d rather see us nick a tight game 1-0 than trade punches in a 4-4 draw. White Hart Lane needs to become a fortress again from where every team is pleased to come away with a draw.

 

Hopefully, we’ll see Pavlyuchenko’s debut. From what I saw against Wales in midweek, he’s got a striker’s eye for goal, and the confidence to chip a penalty and follow it up by pulling a munter in a nightclub. Fingers crossed.

 

Defeat is unthinkable.

 

04 September 2008 – Review of the Transfer window

Reading between the lines of Spurs’ statement yesterday, the writing is on the wall for Damien Comolli. Levy left it to him to explain why we’re short of strikers, and his explanation, which didn’t make perfect sense, seemed to suggest he’d been duped by some dodgy agents, which is no way for a well paid director to spend, or fail to spend, the budget of a multi-million pound high profile business.

 

The Daily Mail have produced an article suggesting as much: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1052281/Comedy-Comolli-faces-Spurs-axe-bungled-transfer-attempts.html

 

Their story, that Spurs failed to sign their “nailed-on” target of Sergio Garcia, and yet that Comolli had negligently failed to tie up a deal for Kevin Doyle doesn’t quite add up, but the gist of it has weight. Whatever the ins and outs of what went wrong, it was a massive cock-up, which the club have pretty much acknowledged in as far as the club ever go in taking the blame for anything, as another columnist put it “when spin isn’t even an option”.

 

On the subject of spin, apparently executive director Paul Barber is replying to emails from fans justifying our transfer business. After explaining that we had replaced Berbatov with Pavlyuchenko and Keane with three attacking midfielders, on taking a United reserve on-loan without an option he said: “We have signed Fraizer Campbell on a 12 month loan deal. We do not have a specific option to buy him at the end of the loan period. We all need to remember that we also make loan arrangements with other clubs for our players fully expecting a promising young player to return to White Hart Lane.”

 

Does this mean we are to United what Leyton Orient and Gillingham are to us? It certainly looks that way. Of course, we only took Campbell because we were absolutely desperate and the reality is that there’d be little point of urgently haggling with United over a buy-out clause for a player who we won’t want to sign permanently anyway because he isn’t good enough.

 

It may well be Comolli’s fault but the bottom line is Levy’s responsibility. At the end of the day, quite literally, he had to make a decision whether to proceed with the Berbatov deal despite the club’s failure to secure an adequate replacement, or two, if you take the cup-tied issue into account, and he gave it the go-ahead.

 

He could well have taken the view that, unfortunately, he couldn’t sanction the deal and delayed it until January, if United would still be interested. That would have meant Berbatov returning to Tottenham with all that that entails for the player, the manager and the dressing room, and a substantial financial hit. Other clubs have taken similar lines on transfers, but, then again, other clubs don’t have to deal with Dimitar Berbatov.

 

So we are left with what Levy optimistically described as “a team we believe we can forge into a strong competitive unit”, while Comolli says “we are building a squad for the league and future seasons”. In other words, they’ve written off the UEFA Cup and, effectively, the whole season.

 

3rd September 2008 – Spurs speak

Spurs have put out a statement on the transfer market: http://www.tottenhamhotspur.com/news/articles/summerwindowroundup020908.html , and fair play to the board, they’ve actually given us an insight into the goings on at the club and responded to what we were all thinking. It makes for some interesting reading.

 

First of all, on the Berbatov saga, Levy states:

 

"I have already stated my opinion on the manner in which our players were approached and the nature of the negotiations surrounding Robbie Keane and Dimitar Berbatov. Yesterday's events were further evidence of the need for the Premier League to review the system.”

"I have also previously said that we had no need to sell players on long contracts - this no longer remains practical. The decisions we took to allow the transfers of Berbatov and Keane were made after close discussions with the coaching staff. Juande was clear, and I believe correct, in not wishing to embrace any player within the dressing room that had no desire to play for the badge of this club and for his teammates. Under these circumstances we had no option but to sell these players.”

 

I don’t know if the powers that be read this site, but Levy’s acknowledged the inconsistency of our actions with our stated policy on selling players, something that we’ve recently highlighted. Intriguingly, the reference to “yesterday’s events” is presumably an acknowledgement of the newspaper reports that Fergie indeed met Berbatov at the airport without permission, an astonishing notion.

 

Levy is right that the system needs reviewing. The biggest problem is the transfer window which forces clubs into this sort of economic blackmail. Football has become a capitalist food chain like any other industry and, if it were properly regulated, the competition authorities would be all over this sort of thing. Self-regulation is failing, both on a national and international level.

 

It’s a pity that Spurs took the money and ran, rather than fight for the cause, but they have to do what’s in the best interests of the club, and unfortunately we’re not in a position to write off a £31m windfall and dump Berbatov in the reserves. And the almost gloating media coverage of how Fergie got his man, as though there was something worthy in his bare-faced cheek, just adds to the feeling that the system is failing from top to bottom.

 

There is a common law doctrine of economic duress. I hope that the club’s lawyers can use it to unravel the agreement not to pursue their claim against United further. Something needs to be done.

 

Next up, Damien Comolli:


"I am particularly disappointed that we were unable to make one additional signing, another experienced striker. The deal was agreed but fell through in the final moments due to agent activity. It is all too often that judgments are made on how these deals are or are not concluded and the reality and the reasoning that happens is often very different and highly unpredictable.

"Two of our new signings, Vedran and Roman are cup-tied for the UEFA Cup and whilst this is not ideal, we shall work with the whole team to produce good performances. We are building a squad for the league and future seasons and we are all looking forward to getting on with playing football now."

 

Of course, he doesn’t tell us who that experienced striker was. I hope it wasn’t Emile Heskey, Carlton Cole, or Kevin Doyle, but at least we know the club wasn’t happy to comprise our UEFA Cup campaign and did have something lined up.

 

I would have thought, with only two main strikers at the club, we could have afforded to proceed with a deal if funds were available as suggested, and still play hardball over Berbatov. We’ve had four strikers at the club before and any loss in negotiation position on the Berbatov deal as a result would be offset by the potential losses of being left without sufficient numbers for the season, which is the position we’re now in.

 

At least though, the club is taking a long term view on squad building and that it’s not all about the next twelve months. Levy added: “I know that there is a terrific team spirit amongst them and that, whilst young, we have a team we believe we can forge into a strong competitive unit.”

 

Whilst it doesn’t fill one with expectation for the season ahead, it is a sign of progress. The downside to that is, of course, that if you take too long, you breed the next generation of players with a “dream” of something else, especially when another billionaire enters the game. Berbatov has given an interview to the Bulgarian press tonight. He was asked “- Is it true that you no longer dream of going to Spain?” He replied, “While I was playing in Germany, I felt good. I had a dream of going to play in Spain some day. I liked the style they have there, but it so happened that I came to play in England.”

 

I’ve never come across a more self-centered, unprofessional footballer. I’m very glad he’s gone.

 

 

 

2nd September 2008 - A showcase for talent - ManYoo's talent, present and future

When one door closes, another one opens. Unfortunately, it’s a transfer window, not a transfer door and it’s staying shut until January. The door at Tottenham is a revolving one. £75m worth of talent has come in, and £75m of talent has gone it. Now, I don’t blame the board for needing to balance the books. They’re not sugar daddies and until we get our own energy baron in need of a hobby, there are worse owners out there than Levy and Co, like their chum, Mike Ashley.

 

But you do have to wonder what the grand plan at Tottenham is. It always seems to be one step forward, two steps back. Some people at Spurs must have worked awfully hard to arrange the 23 deals that were completed during the summer, not to mention all those that weren’t. And the result of all that endeavour? A flawed, if not a weaker squad.

 

Sure, there have been some improvements. Certainly, a better goalkeeper. And more quality and options in midfield. But this doesn’t nearly compensate for what we have lost up front. The need for a new striker wasn’t dependent on Berbatov’s inevitable departure. We already needed a replacement for Keane. So to spend the final day of the window apparently making enquiries for the likes of Carlton Cole and Emile Heskey, and then ending up with Frazier Campbell, a target for Hull City, on loan, and apparently without even an option to buy, and from Manchester United of all clubs so that we can showcase their talent, or rather lack thereof, is a massive disappointment. Especially since Roman Pavlyuchenko is cup-tied for the entire UEFA Cup campaign.

 

And even if this is still a better squad than last season, our rivals have strengthened too. The standard of the league gets higher every season. And despite the creditable draw at Stamford Bridge, the squad lacks that creative spark that we h