There’s the hackneyed phrase in business the customer is always right, and after too many years in retail, I can confirm that this is complete hokum put up in order to make the customer feel welcome, feel involved. The truth is that punters are invariably wrong and many many things that are far worse. If you give away free ice-cream with every purchase, the first voices you will hear are not those saying thank you, but those moaning they either don’t like the flavours that you are offering, or they are lactose intolerant. The salesman’s job is always to be prepared to overcome the obstacles, and not mistake the obstacles for legitimate instructions, or invitations to join Goose Chases.
Some Tottenham fans aren’t just hard to please, they are nigh on impossible to please. Some just want to win, and some (a new, post Internet breed of customers) want to be entertained. Is that wildly inaccurate? Because when I was I consuming football as a teenager, IF I WAS VERY LUCKY occasional highlights would be televised, and 95% of the information I gleaned was from the radio coverage and via the printed press, which in those days was produced by grown ups on salaries, opposed to Millennials getting what they can squeeze out of programmatic advertising models. So quite how the modern fan would fare if they had to rely upon a vidiprinter final score update, then a day later, a match report in a newspaper. Enough of the dark old days, and let’s deal with the troublesome now, eh?
Mourinho is here and the metamorphosis from Nice Boy losers, into “clever [rude word], not stupid [rude word]” is proving painful. That’s not up for debate. But just how seriously we take the narration of every single game buy some customers who don’t understand what they are looking at?
Make no mistake, context is our friend and if we banish it, then we aren’t having a conversation, we’re listening to dissatisfied people who continuously repeat themselves. The context tells us that Pochettino was great for a few years, but the last few years were horrible, because he was not supported by Levy. That’s not opinion, that’s fact.
The context tells us that both he and Jürgen Klopp were both given similar amounts of time in order to create their squads. It’s not opinion, but fact, that the German got a better deal from Fenway than the Argentine did from ENIC. The proof is one guy won nothing and was fired, while the other guy became the champion of England and the champion of Europe.
As per the latest #KeepItTottenham podcast, José is in the process of getting the squad where he needs it to be. You’ve heard all this twaddle about building before, so let me cut to the chase, so you understand I’m not selling you anything. I’m sadly having to explain to some of you how football works.
PHASE ONE The new coach comes in and has to make assessments of what he’s dealing with. We saw in the All or Nothing documentary that Mourinho ran into am expert on chocolate bars, and a born leader who couldn’t understand where the collective responsibility was.
PHASE TWO The new coach identifies who needs to lose, and who needs to add, and gets that business done.
PHASE THREE is in many respects, the last chance saloon, because in any professional sport, the metric is winning. So this is the final adjustment of playing staff where, by the time his second summer window closes, the gaffer is ‘there, or thereabouts’.
After this, the coach embarks on a constant process of fine tuning and refinement. If that is blocked, then you get staleness that eventually did for Pochettino.
Quite why some customers are bleating when we are at the end of phase two and yet to complete phase three is tiresome, but it doesn’t shock me. We live in an age where after virtually every game articles are published with unsubstantiated hate in their headlines, such as “Get him outta my club!“…
Mourinho is in the process of repairing something that was horribly broken, yet some appear to convinced themselves Pochettino-ball was all about the Ajax comeback. It wasn’t. In the last two years of that failed reign it far closer to the dismal Champions League final performance we served up.
So far, Mourinho has been backed, and the sooner he is allowed to further free up the colossal salaries being wasted (Danny Rose £60,000-pwk, Gareth Bale £250,000-pwk, Dele Alli £100,000-pwk, plus whatever Gedson Fernandes and Carlos Vicinicus are on) which currently sits in the region of half a million pounds a week – the better.
Whatever your gripes with Mourinho might be, the process is not over and if we were to use Liverpool Football Club as a success yardstick, then if this season ends with us having won nothing, but better than 14th in the division, then that’s better than where we were when Poch was fired. So, we’ll be ahead of schedule. If you have a problem with the ice-cream, I hate to break it to you, but I’m focused on bigger picture stuff, over here on the grown-ups table.