Spurs Can’t Find Redemption
Business is bad for the jerk chicken bar-b-ques in the Park Lane. It’s raining, and the crowds surprisingly sparse even though kick-off is only half an hour away. The aroma of succulent curried goat is tempting, the warmth and dry of the ground more so and fans scurry past. The speakers blast out Bob Marley, singing songs of freedom, but there’s no redemption to be found for Spurs fans in the shelter of the stadium.
I concluded last week’s piece with the ominous comment that there may be trouble ahead. I take no pleasure in saying my prediction for Sunday’s game was on the money. Vardy scores on a breakaway, Spurs are disjointed and directionless and the atmosphere is more toxic than a nuclear waste dump. More telling perhaps even than the chants directed at the chairman was the lack of enthusiasm in the stands, the absence of any concentrated vocal support for the team a grudging acceptance of the inevitability of this outcome. People have had enough.
Protected by the thickest skin in English football, impervious to criticism, even our chairman must be feeling the heat through his cloak of invulnerability. Yet in response, the club have thrown out a couple of titbits that won’t sate our appetite of some robust, overdue and utterly necessary urgent action. Ange is safe, for now, and we hope to sign at least one player before the window closes, something Ange referenced in a press conference. These reports go on to say that we’re not after a midfielder.
I’m struggling to work out the strangest aspect of this. Is it ‘one player’ when the squad is on its knees? Strong competition from, ‘before the end of the window’, when they’ve had 28 days to respond to an urgent need. Both trumped for me though by ‘not a midfielder’. I realise we need reinforcements up front and at the back, but our defensive midfield is a tumbleweed void, a canyon of nothingness. There’s more material in the vast and endless vacuum of space. We’ve recruited some talented young players, no question, but this is at the expense of, rather than alongside, a search for experience, resilience and leadership, qualities essential for success.
For Leicester’s second, the bloke was out for a Sunday stroll, ambling across vacant grass, a touch here, another one to get it right, hold up a finger to gauge the windspeed and direction, pull up his socks and clean the mud from his toecaps before slotting into the corner of the net. He put more effort into his endless celebration than he had to do to score.
Spurs now have a managerial infrastructure to run the club. Yet their current strategy in the face of crisis is to let Ange carry the can as the only public face of Tottenham Hotspur. Daniel Levy – nothing. Donna Cullen – silence. Scott Munn – schtum. Johann Lange – shh! The whole operation geared, at enormous expense, to not carrying the can.
Ange to his eternal credit is prepared to front up, and all he gets for his troubles is, this week, media snark for being occasionally snippy with them. As if no other manager ever has taken umbrage with the media. One paper suggests that one reason they aren’t sacking Ange is that although that will be embarrassing for the board, appointing Mason as caretaker for the third time looks even worse. This is the stage we’ve reached. This is how one of the richest clubs in European football is being run, judging degrees of embarrassment.
The idea that Ange doesn’t have a plan B has been thoroughly debunked, although many pundits still trot it out because cliches and second-hand opinions are good earners. What he doesn’t have is a plan to tighten up when we’re under pressure from player exhaustion and a make do and mend team. For me, the big worry is that we don’t have the players with the skill-set to offer this option.
On Sunday, Bentancur had a poor game but he was essentially left to police the back four on his own, as well as build attacks when we get possession. Sarr was awful but we hear subsequently that he wasn’t fit. I admire the fact that he wanted to play, it shows the commitment the players have retained, but Ange should have been stronger and left him out if fitness was the issue. Then again, this reveals the real problem, there’s nobody else to play there. And so we’re back to the fundamental problem of a manager having to work with a squad not fit for purpose.
My dire warnings of the consequences of the board’s baffling negligence stretches back on this blog for at least a decade. The media have finally caught up. It is a football club and football clubs should be geared to performance. The board have their heads in the sand, refusing to fully invest in the team at a time of crisis and denying any responsibility for this, a crisis that was waiting to happen. 24 years of making the same mistakes, of an wilful inability to understand how to create a successful team, of denial that it requires substantial, sustained and strategic investment in top class footballers.
Or indeed investment in their support and supporters. They have created a vast gulf between themselves and the fans. Get behind the team. The Spurs family. The game is about glory. No wonder there is so much anger around. And it impacts adversely on the team, another deleterious consequence of the board’s attitude. They simply do not get us at all. As one banner said on Sunday: ‘Our game is about glory. Your game is about greed.’
This week, inconveniently for the board, figures around the wages/income ratio for the Premier League have been published. It’s a table that Spurs top. The opposition fans I know read this blog can insert their own joke about our trophy cabinet at this point. The only thing I want to add now is my continued bewilderment that in his own terms, Daniel Levy and the board have been hugely successful. Wages to income the lowest in the Premier League. The ground brings in an estimated £5m per game and the club is in an excellent financial state. This includes our position on PSR. Good. Well done, genuinely. This is the springboard to success as promised when plans for a new stadium were discussed nearly twenty years ago, yet we’re fast sinking to the bottom of the pool.
Spurs are not so much sleepwalking towards a relegation battle as marching resolutely towards it, eyes wide open as if on some speed-fuelled bender. I’m old enough to remember the relegation season, and subsequent years that we spent near the bottom of the table. There’s something here about drift, about how a team with decent players but not strong enough as a whole internalise a defeatist mentality and can’t find a way to win, teams that wanted to play open football the Spurs way and got punished for it. This team isn’t ready for a relegation fight.
The idea that everything will be ok once the injured players come back is a fantasy. Before they return, best estimates still mean several weeks of playing two games a week. The glory glory nights of European football at the Lane now reduced to wanting a win on Thursday to avoid further fixtures. It takes time to get up to match fitness, more time still to reach the athletic intensity our tactics require, a period when players are vulnerable to further injury due to over-exertion. We’ve lost to Leicester and Everton, with Wolves, Ipswich and Southampton still to play, plus all of the teams at the top apart from AFC.
In response, on January 28th, no new outfield players. The world famous Hotspur, rotten to the core.