What’s happening at Tottenham right now is simply a continuation of what has been taking place since Levy declined to back Pochettino in successive transfer windows, during his reign. For those that can’t cope with such easy apportioning of blame, let me try this analogy on you for size.
SCENARIO 1 A man goes to his dentist because his tooth hurts. The dentist tells the man that the tooth needs to be drilled and filled and is the result of bad oral hygiene. The cost is, say £62.10. The man gets the work done and improved his brushing and rinsing, and moves on with his life.
SCENARIO 2 A man goes to his dentist because his tooth hurts. The dentist tells the man that the tooth needs to be drilled and filled and is the result of bad oral hygiene. The cost is, say £62.10. The man says that he’ll ride it out with ibuprofen and Happy Shopper scotch.
This ‘solution’ is something that he essentially pursues for the next twenty years. Eventually, he realizes that things have deteriorated so badly, that every time he meets people face to face they are always staring at his mouth, a ghastly graveyard of tombstones.
Sick of the embarrassment and realizing he’s come to live with discomfort as if that was a normal way to exist, he goes back to the dentist. The dentist tells him that at this stage, there are very few teeth that can be saved. The best solution would be to go for implants because his gums are too far gone for dentures. When he asks for the price, the dentist hands him some financing application forms.
You’ll note that at no point did our old man Steptoe in the analogy blame his toothbrush or his toothpaste. That’s because he was only bad at looking after his teeth, not terminally stupid.
I have neither will nor energy to trawl The Athletic stylee through the last 20 years of Levy’s transfer activity. Being the only club in any of Europe’s top 5 leagues not to spend a nickel in back-to-back windows and leave Poch swinging in the breeze tells us all we need to know. Buying cheap alternatives only adds to the depth of the misery.
With just a few exceptions, these are the same players that watched Pochettino get fired. Teeth watching other teeth gradually fall apart, in between bouts of painkillers washed down with cheap booze.
Problem is we can never shift any dead wood as Levy always wants too much for them.That is the main problem at this club.Levy needs to get real and stop trying to be clever
Mourinho developed loads at Chelsea, Lampard, Robben, Terry, Joe Cole, Drogba was unknown to the world until Maureen got hold of him at 25. He gave loads of graduates a chance at Madrid, debuts for 17, and is credited there by many players for helping their development… That theroy is a myth peddled by certain papers like the daily mail.
A rotten onion invested with maggots.
Ha. Superb!
He won nothing with them.
I think we are screwed. Spurs is like those banks that in 2008 were too big to he allowed to fail. ENIC/Levy would only sell the club for a sum that no-one could pay.
Remember Irving Scholar’s disastrous ground developments that had to be bailed out by Sugar and Venables buying in and then selling players? That was for a few million. Who has pockets deep enough these days?
Better pray that interest rates stay low.
Disgusting from Rangers and their sainted manager Slippy G. They got two red cards, should’ve had more, and punch a player? They imploded, and now try to sweep it under the rug.
Kolar (Slavia GK) was lucky to escape with just a broken forehead.
Quality is one thing, another is freshness, determination etc.
Our squad has been neglected into staleness, passivity and an overall lack of enthusiasm.
Huddlestone is the guy who spent the best part of his last years out injured? Bentley’s contributions are also dubious. I remember a lot of Crouch bashing too.
Anyway, many of Harry’s players were limited, but there was a togetherness, and at least some transfer activity to keep things fresh. But then he wasn’t backed and you know the rest…
…and after he’s eventually worn through the toffee glaze, there’s an onion where an apple should be
Not so much a tune, but I don’t think Bentley contributed anything more than two notes… that goal, and the mid-interview ice bucket challenge before ice bucket challenges became a thing.
Starting 11 most couldn’t complain about game minutes
Didn’t old Peachschnapps get a tune out of the World betters of Gallas, Lennon, Muddlestone, Bentley, crouch, corluka, super Pav
He died
Our players are so tired after playing loads of pointless games in the Europa.
To throw it away like we did last night is ridiculous
Its worse than the same player we had with Poch, a lot of these players were burnt out by Poch, if youre unsure about that look at sides multi year performance when they play a high energetic press.
The transfer window of last summer which most fans thought was good in hindsight sticking plasters (we spent less than City spent on a defender). Jose has been managing that and trying to get a tune out of that.
But the issues with the playing squad is performances are all to familiar, and fundamentally the clubs culture. We keep repeating that we cannot do it like all the other successful clubs doesn’t, mean how high and mighty morally we are, its a naivety that will always hinder the club and restrict the level of success in winning things as we have had since maybe even 1984.
Changing players doesn’t do much we as 7 new faces in last summer, changing the manager well 13 in 20 years shows something. Changing the stadium and training ground has given not much difference (we did better at Wembley). Youth players coming through we’ve always had but no drastic uplift in recent years with the manager saying the 16 year olds are better the the groups above.
We are the specialists in falling short. It’s not just the players its not just the managers, its not even just the owners. It’s a lack of a blueprint for the club to win something. Even City had to step back after Pep’s first season (and whilst they spent their way out of it) we seem to be stuck on this plan that isn’t giving the winning formula which is Joe and Daniels fault.
Ouch😨
A frozen toffee apple
Hahahahahaha
Agreed. This is still the same thing – some will blame Jose even if there’s bad weather. He needs to shoulder the blame but the onus is firmly on our squad or lack thereof, no matter the manager.
Dier-Sanchez is a CB axis I never want to see again, much like Sissoko-Winks in CM. Starting these two and Dele meant we were effectively three men short, as they offer nothing at all.
Is it the manager’s fault that these players can’t be trusted even to finish off a tie where we were 2-0 up from the first leg? They should be chomping at the bit to prove they’re good players worthy of a starting 11 spot, but what we got instead was…that.
No desire, no invention, nothing. Winks will sideway-pass his way to a mid table Championship outfit soon, Dele will still be branded “an exciting prospect with a lot to offer” in his 30s, and Dier will make a long-awaited switch to a subpar CDM at age 34 under new manager Alan Pardew.
😀
It’s that or bbc for sport….they’re not an option.
Good analogy. Scenario 3: Levy pays another person to smash out their teeth and then gives em a toffee apple.
I think that’s unfair on Eddie Howe. We’ll appoint Ledley or go and get Scott Parker – Levy will try and bring a feel good factor back by appointing a former player.
Has Goran Bunjevcivic got his badges?
Terrible season for Juve yes, specially after winning the league the last nine seasons or something. But Pirlo is a manager rookie, and still they are in the Italian cup final and fighting for top 2 in the league. Because he has a capable squad. Imagen if a manager like Pirlo had to deal with Dier, Davies, Doherty, Winks, Sissoko&Co…
I agree that Mou and Spurs looks to be a bad fit, but with their transfer budget, wage budget and current crop of players, who in this world could turn Spurs around?
I think our squad is a little older than that if you draw the line beneath the regulars and the 16-yr olds with two or three games under their belts – not knot picking for the sake of it – but our average gets whacked by those 2/3 kids.
Yup!
Well, since AVB was booted I prescribed a calm path of building a football team.
Old-fashioned I know, but we’re too far beyond that, and now have a space-ship-sized debt.
We’re pretty much screwed.
Shocking, isn’t it? If only there were other radio stations one could listen to.
Technically it’s shape-shifting – not slinking
Yep. THFC have alllll the debt. The ENIC reptiles can just slink away scot free.
👍
Poch ended it when he stated that he’d leave if Spurs won the Champions League. That may be because he knew the funds weren’t there to invest in the squad, but Spurs are not going to throw vast sums around just yet. They have built the infrastructure to enable that to happen in due course. That side of things is good and long term hopefully will give Spurs an advantage if the pandemic can be sorted out.
Where Levy has been bad is getting involved with on pitch issues. Bale signing has been a disaster. Dele should have been loaned out to get game time and find some form. I suspect that’s all down to Levy.
Levy will never shift players on at the right time or money so we will always be playing player catch up in an endless cycle…yet again half the players that need shifting will have devalued so much that little resources will be available for new recruits…
Pirlo isnt doing a good job at Juventus
They have been knocked out by Porto and are 3 third (10 points off in the league).
This is a terrible season for then.
Ultimately for a manager to succeed they need to be in tune with the club and management. Mourinho would do a great job at Juve, he is experienced, they spend money, they have always been built on a strong defensive base.
Mourinho isn’t the right manager for Spurs, he hasn’t got the tools he needs and will not get the financial backing he needs.
He was always doomed for failure
There probably needs to be a statement by Levy along the lines of a recycling of players, which will be reflected in club expectations. The biggest problem with this approach is the amount of debt we have, which will clearly take longer to clear than would otherwise have been the case
Slavia have 4 or 5 black players so why would that player start that kind of nonsense??
Well said, and I will top that up by adding what other business would Levy have got away with a large construction build where he over run the project by a year and over spent by 300m without getting sacked….thats right, its free money borrowed against fans loyalty and asset management with low risk…ENIC are still buying land and building property under THFC and are accountable to no-one….
No, you’re right, he’s not a bad manager, just an unlucky one. Time and time again the poor lamb ends up with players who don’t or can’t follow his instructions. He’s paid more than 40k a day. That’s hardly beer money.
Talk about the giant hefalump in the room. I’ve been listening to TalkSport last night and this morning and there’s NO WAY their calls ain’t vetted. There’s been Spurs fans calling in in their droves and I’ve barely heard the names Lewis or Levy or ENIC mentioned, only one call where a young prune “congratulated” Levy for the usual off the pitch guff before saying “it just hasn’t worked”….I thought it was sarcasm and even Cundy and Goldstein did but it wasn’t. Truly incredible. They clearly are making sure their little elite mates are not called out. Same this morning with Redknapp spouting the usual cack about “the quality squad” “look, they got triffic players, internationals…Dele..Lucas, Bale, Vinious scored goals for Benfica “blah blah blah….BALE? It’s not 2010 H, Dele hasn’t had an impact for 3 years, it’s codswallop….disengenuous , evasive, swerving of the issue, which is and ALWAYS has been ENIC Lewis/Levy.
Also more racist allegations. If it was, the players an idiot but I notice Slavia Prague have vehemently denied the “disgusting” accusation. It seems like Rangers are making an attempt to take the focus off a home failure and the fact the Slavia GK got his face dismantled by one of the worst challenges in history, plus a Slavia player was punched. It’s always the team losing who make these claims and nothing ever comes of it in way of evidence of charges.
The squad has been allowed to fester, it needs surgery.
The one thing though: this season has shown the massive impact getting rid of an ill-fitting manager can have.
Chelsea. Half the players Frank had on the scrapheap now look like worldies under Tuchel. Where before that looked like a squad with massive holes in it now there are none.
The squad is a massive problem but also you have to concede someone might be better placed to rebuild at this stage than Jose and right a couple of players heading in the wrong direction.
It is a good analysis but what do you see happening to get out of this cycle we are in. Musical chair managers doesn’t work. Selling elite players-Modric Bale doesn’t work, European cheapies and loans doesn’t work, proper support for any manager hasn’t been forthcoming and now a property project around our necks.
If only the reason for our decline was merely the two barren transfer windows under Poch. What made it worse was that Levy assured the fans that the finance for the new stadium would not impede our ability to spend in the transfer market which was a blatant lie. To rub salt into an open wound, he then proceeded to ask season ticket holders for their money for the new stadium in the knowledge that it was not going to be ready. If I ever had any doubts about the moral compass of Enic, it was dispelled by the furloughing of the THFC staff which was only reversed under severe pressure and by other clubs rescinding their original decision to perpetrate the same mistake.
The facts remain that we have had to suffer twenty two years of Enic and Levy with the sacking of thirteen managers,(how much compensation did that cost the club?) and our sole triumph being one League Cup. Every time we had the makings of a very good team, Levy didn’t back the manager and to complete the felony, he then decided to sell our best players.
Every observer opines that football is a business these days, but being the custodian of a professional football club is much more than that. You carry the hopes, aspirations and emotions of the fans who support their clubs through good times and bad and spend their hard earned money by buying tickets and travelling to away matches. You are not there purely to enrich yourself and your company at the total expense of bringing success to the club.
Levy has reputation as a shrewd and hard headed businessman and if you analyse the asset growth of Enic as a business, it is hard to argue with that. What is not debatable is his track record in bringing success to the football club which is an unmitigated disaster as he clearly knows very little about the running of a successful football club as opposed to an investment company.
I hold no brief for Mourinho, but if we cloned a mixture of Billy Nic, Bill Shankley, Jock Stein, Brian Clough and Don Revie and appointed our clone as the new manager , he would inevitably fail as the manager of Spurs under the anally retentive eye of our chairman.
Nothing will ever change at Spurs until Enic sell up or finally decide that they can do without the stewardship of our incompetent leader.
No they won’t be. He has already been fired by most of the clubs that can afford to indulge the huge transfer spend he needs to achieve anything, and PSG preferred Poch who is on his way up rather than Jose who is on his way down.
I don’t think he is in any way a bad manager, I just think we had a manager who had worked wonders with a budget of a much smaller club. Are there managers who can do a better job with a limited budget? How much investment is there going to be in the next few years? Why get in Jose when he is a champagne manager and we spend beer money?
If we finish 10th behind Arsenal and lose the cup final 3-0 I don’t know how we dress this up as anything other than a season where usually a manager gets sacked – hopefully we get our act together and that doesn’t transpire. We JUST have time to play ourselves back into some sort of form ahead of the final.
Because that will be a low. A serious one.
If that’s our fate Kane and Son should move on for pure reasons of self respect and career protection (not even progression, protection) at that stage and I wouldn’t blame them.
Getting rid of Jose only targets the symptom rather than the cause. All 11 players that started last night are players inherited from the Poch era. How many would you keep? I would suggest Kane is the only one and at a push Moura. I cannot imagine given a choice that Jose would chose to keep Sissoko or Auier. They were absolutely abysmal last night. How is a player like Sissoko who has been dreadful from day one still at the club? Dier, Ali, Winks, Sanchez are all being allowed fester because nobody wants them at Levy’s overly inflated prices.
I think Jose’s days are numbered not because he deserves the bullet but this squad are clearly not playing for him and the rebuild required is too big and too expensive. Levy will look for another patsy happy to take the job. This squad deserves Eddie Howe as manager.
Average age of the Juve squad is 27.21. Average age for the Spurs squad is 26.85. The real difference of course, is that they have spent over 900 mill the last five years and the majority of the Juve players are proven winners. Even a totally unexperienced coach like Pirlo can be a contender with players and a budget like that. If Mou is sacked, who could step in and make Spurs a table topper with the current squad and Levy’s transfer budget?
Not sure in the covid world if anyone could afford to back him. He knows the players he needs but they won’t come cheap.
The tickets aren’t cheap, they are very expensive.
What doesn’t make sense is they bought in a manager that needs to spend big money to succeed. How was that ever going to work?
It was obvious that this couldn’t work right from the beginning.
You couple that with the style of football the manager plays and that automatically splits the fans.
When it goes horribly wrong, the pro Mourinho fans start to waver and the anti say i told you so.
This is a horrific mess, it’s very difficult to see how the manager turns it around. By his own admission a number of times he has said the players arent listening to him. That’s his Job and he is openly admitting that he isn’t doing his job very well.
We will not spend big money
We will lose our better players
We won’t be able to get the money the chairman wants for our bad players
The manager will not change his style of play and while results remain poor that will further alienate him
The players clearly haven’t taken to his managerial style.
It’s not Mourinhos fault he took the job, he was offered 15m a year, of course he would take that.
It was clear from the beginning that this manager does not suit the set up he is working in. Thats not the managers fault.
However performances aren’t good enough, there are huge issues within the squad, much of that blame deserves to be directed to the manager. Team spirit, tactical decisions, training and game management is down to the manager to instill and implement and the players to follow.
When the players stop following then the manager has run out of ideas and leadership. He then needs to go.
Levy has bungled time and time again but when you are the Chairman you don’t often get sacked
I was in total agreement and was supporting Jose’s efforts trying to carry out what seems an impossible task of shaping up this squad.
However…he should still have been able to get the squad to progress and improve at least to some degree this season. He got a window, and a half decent one to boot, Hojbjerg in particular is very nifty, Reggie is useful too, Bale not so much but no donkey, and Vini is an upgrade on the usual Llorente filler signing. Ndombele also turned up this season and sure he’s ‘the enigma’ but still handy on his day. Kane has reached his peak this season too.
We’ve had a worse season compared to the previous one in most regards now, due to our pathetic form (and it is pathetic at this stage) it will take a massive upturn in the league to finish top 7 and then we have the league cup final – if he turns it round from this point and he gets the players looking more confident and playing more consistently, hopefully wins the cup or finishes top 5, then he has earned the belief he should be afforded another season but if he doesn’t this season will be another regression despite the squad improving in a couple of positions.
With a squad shaped slightly more in his image and a world class player, possibly a top 3 quality forward in world football playing the best football of his life, he’s overseeing us going rapidly further backwards. I have sympathy with Jose’s situation but also, whatever the issues, the fact we’re still going backwards at such an alarming rate now can’t help but also reflect at least a little badly on him too. Interesting few months ahead – the cup final is now the whole season, so god be with us.
Poor fellow I know how he feels the dentist can be a bit of a pain but I wish I knew who the dentist was he sounds cheap. Oh wait is cheap good or bad. Hojbjerg was cheap. Doherty was cheap if you take away mendes who is not cheap. Kane was cheap but is not now. Sissoko was never cheap. Jose was never cheap. Winks is cheap always will be. The stadium is and always will be not cheap. I guess it depends what you hold dearest. Some cheap things work some don’t just as expensive things are not always the best. A bit like spurs we used to be cheap but will never be again but then again we used to win things but may never win again.
Other clubs will be queuing up to have him as manager. #provenwinner
I agree with you that it is all on Levy. He was the one appointing Mourinho, and let’s be honest here; we all knew from day one that Mourinho and Spurs are not a good fit.
I don’t want to blame Mourinho for everything. Mourinho is a great coach but only under the right circumstances. For example, Mourinho would be great at Juventus with many experienced players that don’t need to be developed on an individual level.
But at Spurs, you have most of the players aged between 22-28. These players still need to be developed, and Mourinho is not the coach for that.
It is only a matter of time until he gets the sack, and I think it would be best for all parties if it would happen rather sooner than later.
My best Spurs night ever was watching “Sha-la” lift the UEFA cup.
I actually fancied an FA Cup this year but began to buy in to the Europa dream even though I dont like it due to the number of games/long journeys to FC Cheeky Metalurgist Klnj..
It’s the hope that gets you.
Oh well I see that although far from fact atm thoughts are forming that maybe it is time to move the useless one on (and I dont mean JM)
The problem here is that this philosophy has made ENIC loads of money and made the club so valuable in its infrastructure that they’ll reap a nice tidy profit should they decide to sell. The football is ancillary to that, as are we, the Spurs supporters. Levy claims to be a Spurs supporter, I really hope he’s hurting like the rest of us, but I don’t think he’s got a football heart to hurt.
We were working on the basis that after the filing and advice from the dentist scenario, that was not the case.
Please read before commenting.
No explanations required here, Levy and his cronies need only a one word attachment, and that word is failure !
But the toothbrush and toothpaste DO matter. Sticking a soiled old bog brush in your gob is only going to make matters worse.