I want to believe
I’ll caveat this blog with the same statement I’m forced to make every time I sit down to write about ye old Tottingham Hotspuds.
I’m in purgatory.
Not in Bruges, more like a feet up sat on the sofa eating a Waitrose meal and watching Netflix purgatory.
We are going through the turbulent rebuild that Mauricio Pochettino spoke about at the start of the season. This is it, buckle up. He stated the obvious and yet we still remain unprepared for what has transpired since. The rebuild that is a consequence of two transfer windows without acquisitions. A rebuild that both Poch and Daniel Levy are responsible for. More on this in a moment. The caveat is, I can’t keep posting the same thing every week or for that matter, keep calling for patience. I’m already bored and uninspired, much like watching our on the field performances (art imitating life, life imitating art). It would be helpful if we had an apparent change in form to spice up the source material. At the moment, it’s the same mistakes repeated for our displeasure.
The reason for this, at the very core of our ‘problems’, is that the rebuild won’t really take shape for a year or so. As supporters, we’ll always have a moan with conflicting opinions. It’s all mostly influenced by form. If we suddenly win ten games on the trot, watch how we universally as a fanbase, switch from downbeat anger to euphoric jigs. Football really is a platform we use to elevate our self-being and vanity. Perhaps it’s too concentric to the immediacies of what is defined as success in this not so brave world of online avatars and blame culture ethics.
Anyways…
Here’s the crux of everything, over-simplified because there’s no point in breaking down the intricacies that we have lived and breathed for the past five years or so.
We over-achieved. It took Poch six or so months to settle into his Spurs tenure and give us the most stunning ascension we’ve witnessed since…well, in my footballing life time. For a moment, just disconnect yourself from the modern day privilege you think is owed to you and let it sink in. Don’t dismiss it, for the love of God, don’t besmirch the achievement of this progression. He gave us belief that wasn’t the usual whimsical delusions of grandeur we often suffered from in the past.
Spurs fans aren’t, for the most part, arrogant. Mainly because we’ve never been spoilt. So we tend to appreciate the highs a lot more when they come about. So when we accidentally and circumstantially found ourselves putting the pressure on (lol) Leicester City, everything we knew and understood shifted and changed. The journey had kick started when nobody quite expected to hitch the ride. Imagine had Jamie Vardy not happened? Imagine. Sure, football is about far shorter cycles these-days and in that season so many top tier clubs failed miserably to show up which gave us all the fairy-tale with the not quite happy ever after we wanted (but had never dreamt about at the start of the season).
The rest is history, ending with a Champions League final defeat. The great pretenders become contenders but remained nearly men. It was still bloody brilliant. All of it. The spirit, the togetherness. The culture. The football. AND IT WAS NEVER A PENALTY!
Oh man, the football at its peak was swarming swashbuckling sex. Harry Kane, the press, Mousa and Vic in the middle, that undefeated home record in our last season at the old Lane. Even the lows were high. The Battle of the Bridge, perhaps the greatest petulance I’ve seen from a Spurs side. Echoes of brutal glory.
If you’re someone that has asked ‘What has Poch actually done for us?’ then you’re an idiot. Certifiably. Oh sure, you’re going to sarcastically quiz me on whether we can squeeze ‘togetherness’ into a trophy cabinet. Haha, okay, ya got me lad. I forget that in today’s digital landscape, supporting a football club is solely about demanding and expecting trophies or else END OF DAYS, WE’RE RUBBISH.
So, this is where the crux gets a bit cracked. A bit fragmented, much like our current transitioning play and defensive positioning. Whilst we over-achieved, you can certainly argue we under-achieved by not grabbing hold of the momentum and holding it hostage whilst attaining a sense of awareness that as good as we were playing, we could be better. Consolidate. Protect the present by investing in the future. That doesn’t mean young potential, it means proper elite players that can complement and combat stagnation.
Alas no. A new stadium and the false economy of that progression masked the reality of what was truly needed. Shrewdness. The irony here is how shrewd our chairman is with negotiations and yet arguably, using hindsight (proceeding hindsight ad infinitum) weighed down the expectancy by allowing Pochettino to function at the budget level he started our upturn of fortunes with. It’s not that we don’t spend big. We just don’t do it enough to refresh and reboot in consistent season to season pockets. A steady drip drip drip of improvement, without the necessity to panic and replace entire sections of our formation and first eleven set up. It’s a bit like Chinese water torture. We just wait for the haemorrhage and then bring in the next prisoner.
Although, last summer, we all agreed it was a good one, perhaps because of the lack of activity in prior windows. But alas, we needed this ilk of change starting two seasons back. Bringing in new players and then expecting them to bed into a team that has fallen out of it is another one of this internal obstacles we like to craft for ourselves.
In the end, our peak cycle of perhaps a core three seasons from the five, wasn’t enough to push through that last obstacle. More irony in getting to the CL with the most disjointed of Poch teams. Our Argentine was magic. He gave us that aforementioned belief. We could win the title, we could win the Champions League. Don’t, please don’t forget how great it felt being Tottenham in the midst of all this. Don’t pretend you didn’t feel the emotional bond. But sure, we should be competing because of our resources. That’s not to say it’s easy considering we are up against certain other clubs and their long standing financial clout.
Never have rival fans ruminated in their hatred and jealously for what we had. We gave them the fear. All of them had it. And we - the fanbase and players - were synergised into this one beautiful glowing star that has now exploded and turned into a black hole, sucking all that glorious light away, leaving us in darkness.
Oh woe is me.
These are first world football problems. It isn’t that bad. Poch remaining or going, the rebuild still has to be lived through. The question some are already asking is whether Jose Mourinho was/is the right person for the job. But what exactly is the job at hand? To rebuild (as Poch stated) or simply get the team stable again and pushing towards a top four position. The hope of silverware is based on a not so special Jose still managing to bag cups at Old Trafford, so surely he could do the same with us? That’s unless a broken Mourinho is broken further by the poisoned chalice that is the ENIC owned THFC.
ENIC by the way isn’t run by an oligarch or billionaire in it for the ego boost, stop lambasting Joe Lewis like the man gives a sh*t about the football. I mean he does in terms of any potential profit to his investment but such a thing would be suitably based on having a productive football club. Which we do. In their eyes. Also, not sure if you’ve seen the breaking news but Financial Fair Play is a thing now. Look into it.
In the end, it had to end.
We - the club as that one single entity of everything - started to eat itself. Spurs channelling their uroboros, forever looped in teasing that moment of breaking the mould. Could we have perhaps kept Poch? Implemented a sporting director? Someone to work with the squad gaffer to acquire players? Poch went from ‘coach’ to ‘manager’ and yet something was fundamentally flawed with how we targeted players. Although competing against other clubs that can pay three times the wages was always going to be a non-starter on some of the fancied players. This might have been a learning curve for Poch in terms of his undying loyalty to his philosophy but Levy has seen it all in terms of varying degrees of upward ‘success’ with managerial appointments. He should know that forcing constraints internally will shackle that extra edge required to do what Liverpool have managed in recent years.
Not replacing the Danny Rose/Kyle Walker dynamic, those two tumbleweed transfer windows…we simply burnt out. We asked too much from our players. We got the best out of them but their best wasn’t enough. Although as fantastically irreverent this next bit is, it’s worth noting; This team during the time period it played in, was up against some of the very best sides of the past couple of decades. The quality is spread across a fair few in the Prem, not like the Sky Sports doped era. This team was as good as some former title winners, better even. But alas, this is, well, irreverent and irrelevant. Such comparisons play no part in the record books. But I’m sure you get my point.
As for Jose, he is the type of appointment that will not only polarise but also deflect and distort how we consume the remainder of the season. He’s a brand. Perhaps no longer Coca-Cola. More like Orange Tango, with the likelihood of him giving us a mighty slap to the head, whether we ask for it or not.
Is it fair to criticise him so early on in terms of the style or lack of we’ve witnessed? Is some of the backwards passing and deliberate (AVB style) movement less about the players attitude and effort and rather a significant nudge towards Jose’s (outdated) tactics? Are the problems fixable over time with the same set of players he inherited? Do we write off this season because it has to be written off because we wrote it off when Poch was still here? Ha, look at is, persistently moving the goal posts hey?
If Ndombele is fit (and not requiring a lengthy lay off to fix a particular issue he might have) then we need to sign a new DM to play alongside him to give him the expression and expansiveness to push into offensive areas. The midfield is the biggest issue right now. That and the fact that Jan looks like he’s lost more than a yard of pace and our defensive line is so bad that VAR refuses to get involved so it doesn’t have to re-watch the agonising footage. Harry injured for six weeks along with Sissoko hurts our options further but this is a common seasonal occurrence we’re never quite ready for even though we sort of kind of expect it. We have to bolster our midfield right? Is it the last hour of the transfer window yet?
Dele looks shattered. Eriksen keeps playing even though he’s been gone in the head for months and months. Winks is being asked to be the centre point, which is unfair considering the way we switch to long balls when our creativity fails to showcase. And you need equilibrium in the middle to allow strengths and weaknesses to balance in favour of the nucleus we set up with and the tempo we attempt to enforce. There’s no spine to any of this. There’s sadly no soul either. Scapegoating is a tad unfair but then that’s me, over protective of the band of brothers that go to war for us. We’ve lacked spine and soul for almost a year, losing our crown as stat kings, our away form gone to p*ss. So can anyone really expect change to suddenly be implemented without further pain?
Yet, still, things could be a lot worse. Or will they get worse?
We’re in January now. Jose is underplaying incoming transfers. I predict we’ll announce Lo Celso on a permanent towards the end of the window if nobody else comes in. Levy must have discussed the short term contingency. We’ll have to wait and see. It's too early to claim Jose has lost it. He might find it again. The odds are against him considering there’s no £300M war chest. What worries me is if he deems certain players (in the short term) to be redundant and gets rid of them just for that bit of silverware then how much does that hurt us in the long term?
To conclude this ramble, I guess we don’t know what the intentions of appointing Mourinho are. If we win an FA Cup with the Poch leftovers, isn’t it a bit like having your Saturday takeaway for breakfast the next morning, straight out of the fridge? I mean, it still tastes nice but it ain’t as tasty as it was the day before. Winning a cup has now become so synonymous with identity that winning the FA Cup will be pinned on people’s chest like it’s the greatest of accomplishments, and yet I can not say that a single day out at Wembley will top the past five seasons of trophy-less pomp. Although I would gleefully adore a day out and for these players to finally be rewarded for their duty in a Lilywhite cockerel shirt.
Right now, all I want is for us to just play a bit decently. We could have won at St Marys and we might have beaten Boro in the cup. We had chances, we didn’t take them. We should have had a pen against Southampton but VAR must have slept into screensaver mode at the pivotal moment. We keep conceding daft goals. We’re getting punished and not dishing out the punishment. But it’s going to be okay. We’re never really going to struggle again, not now, not with our stature and money (if we spend it, lolz) and stadium and brand name. This form right now, this is our struggle. This is the equivalent to our 1990s mediocrity, nowhere near as bad but in terms of expectancy, it’s a hefty discomfort.
I want Jose to prove everyone that doubts him wrong because doing so will make us successful or back onto that long and winding road of progression. I don’t like him or his methods and his nice guy routine is slipping, but if he does manage to win something with this team then that would pretty much be the most Spursy thing ever. To have failed under Pochettino when his team were at their best and to win under Jose, the antithesis of everything Mauricio was, with the dregs of spirit and quality left behind. But more important than stretching to a lucky cup final win is to galvanise our players. To get that soul back.
It doesn’t need to be a deep rooted philosophy or culture changing shift. But it does have to be a mindset reset. A more robust mentality. Jose has the experience for sure. Spurs once led as a single pulsating unit of energy. Today, we lack leadership. We need it back, in abundance. All over the pitch.
COYS though, till the die I die and actually end up in purgatory for real.
Club Statement on Rudiger
I’m going to quote Barney Ronay:
“Police finding no evidence of racist abuse doesn't mean it definitely didn't happen. It also doesn't mean Antonio Rudiger should be lambasted for hearing it. Let's try to be adults: this stuff happens all the time and it is vital people reporting it are treated with sympathy”
One or two tabloid journalists were pretty quick to target Tottenham as a racist club but I guess these people are not journos, just glorified click-baiters that know the value in profit margins when it comes to using anger and hate fuelled content. Spurs are not inherently racist at their core. The fanbase don’t accept it in numbers. It’s not a tribal code we accept. It’s ridiculous when you compare this to say the defence of John Terry and the words he shared with Anton Ferdinand. This institutionalised bias and protection is the most telling of all.
As for Spurs not being tribally racist, it’s not to say we accept individuals screaming out abuse, but I’ve heard it at games. I’ve also seen how easy it is to ignore it and how much of a ruck can kick off if the guilty person is called out for it. These-days, it’s thankfully getting harder to be this socially inept to think football somehow gives you an opportunity to be so inexcusably thick. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen. There are other club fanbases that love to hiss and sing songs about Hitler and use a certain Y word in a derogatory way. Which continues to be ignored unless individuals are snitched on (which some have, to their credit, a Chelsea fan made a complaint and an arrest was made with abuse aimed at Son).
The point Barney is that a black footballer should not feel like he has to question himself over what he believes he heard. It’s a pretty strange standpoint to have, to rejoice in Rudiger being wrong. The boy cried wolf, they said. Then they drum on about the Roma incident. You know, the one where Rudiger said he was abused but no evidence was found. In Italy, the land where racism is combated with dignity and fans rarely abuse black players. Insert a rolling eye emoticon here if you want to. Or continue to lie to yourself.
Have a little think about what it is that grates you with this because sadly there’s a hefty amount of people that are celebrating this - not because Spurs fans have been vindicated - but because their true feelings on the topic can remain hidden.
As for calls for Rudiger to apologise? Give over. It’s better for anyone that believes to have been abused to react in the same way and perhaps next time, we all wait for the outcome to the investigation before knee-jerking. But we know that will never happen because that is the way of the wild west of social media. It’s a commodity that will push those likes and retweets.
If we do wait and if there is no evidence, we move on and make sure that players remain confident in making complaints in the future. It’s also up to us to be vigilante with what we see and experience. Racism is still a social problem, it’s one that will always sadly exist. If it’s not colour then it’s religion. It’s another primal trait we keep holding onto. As for the ‘reporters’ and third rate blogger hacks, perhaps they should find more upbeat agendas to assist with attracting attention and milk money for their cereal.