“Thus ever to tyrants!”
~ John Wilkes Booth
The morning after the appointment the night before.
What is now clear is that Daniel Levy has gone rogue. A mulltimillion pound business that dismisses a vital executive on a whim is risible. Dismissing a vital executive without having a replacement lined up is even less funny.
Dismissed on a whim.
Whim?! Whim?! I hear you cry. Well, let’s look at the facts. We were frequently playing some very dull football under AVB. But if that was a sackable offense, then you could you could not only cull 89% of UK football managers overnight, but you could justifiably serve winding up orders on the clubs themselves.
We all knew modern football was rubbish, but the dismissal of AVB sent out a chillingly cold message.
You don’t need to be nose diving towards the relegation zone to lose your job anymore. You can be at the top end of the table, with more points than you achieved last season. Nobody is safe.
So it was a whim. There was no perceived rational explanation. There was clearly no strategy in place.
If the chairman had been found pissed up, daubing “I LIKE ELVES” on the pitch in 50 foot high letters, with the white line marker, at least he could have said “Sorry, I was drunk” and it could have been hosed off.
Instead, this irrational act is something that cannot be quickly corrected. The impact will continue to unfold until the season end. That’s what happens after seismic disasters. You watch, you try to cope.
Levy is a man who many including me, always regarded as sharp businessman; a welcome rarity amongst the morass of nut nuts such as Vincent Tan and all the other 5th rate Bond villains that have somehow seeped into the game.
Not any longer. He’s now officially as daft as the daftest out there.
My problem was that I confused Levy for great businessman. He certainly looked like one. Steady ship, shrewd in all the markets. That sort of thing. But all plaudits evaporate when you see that his contributions are ultimately self defeating.
Yay! We made a net profit of £XM! Ohhh! We had to pay off £XM to another manager.
Joe Lewis must be asking himself why a major investment has overnight become a laughing stock. If AVB was genuinely putting the business in peril, then of course that had to be prevented. But there is no evidence to corroborate that. Rather, all have here is a black ops of whispers, nudges, inferences and assertions based upon nothing.
Joe Lewis must be asking himself how a problem so big, so dangerous, flared up in such a manner that there was no time to construct a contingency plan.
A multimillion pound business and the contingency plan was a bloke so dedicated to his art, that he hadn’t in a decade of coaching, bothered to do his Pro License.
Levy must be on borrowed time. Underachieving with the resources and support he’s been given simply isn’t good enough. Making irrational decisions make his position untenable. Joe Lewis must be weighing up his options.
And to the fans.
There are those out there that still can’t grasp that being saddened by AVB’s sacking isn’t an emotional thing. It isn’t a “fan boy” thing. It’s a rational thing. You can whine all you want about getting thrashed by City and Liverpool. If you don’t understand how to read a league table, I’m afraid I can’t help you.
There is some talk of the “Spurs way”, much of which I have to say, is brushed with more than a touch of casual xenophobia. Good ol’ Tim, cut from the same cloth as Arry. Knows his way round a greasy spoon menu.
The Spurs way is winning with style. Note I say winning. Anyone who tries to clout you about the head with Danny Blanchflower’s quote about playing with style is living in cloud cuckoo land.
I never left a game we lost, basking in the after glow of how we played. Never. It’s been of crumb of comfort, but nothing more. I like it when we play like gentlemen, I like it that when we don’t cheat. I like it when we play in a spirited manner, but these pompous arses who tell you that they’d rather watch us play in the Championship, than watch us not play the “Spurs Way” want sectioning.
The hope of the sane fans, is that we can still be a club that Van Gaal or someone else with an actual CV would want to manage come August.
What will Sherwood offer? Who knows? It looks like the next 9 months could be a tad 442ish with a smattering of stand out development squad talent for good measure, based upon what we’ve seen so far.
Fingers crossed.
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Martin Cloake is this week’s extra special guest on HHH!
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