The first thing that comes to mind is how when we first signed up Poch a Southampton fan came to the Harry Hotspur site saying “well done, he’s great, but he uses substitutes far too late in the game, and he has no plan B”, exactly what we would tell any fans of our glorious ex-managers new club.
A stubbornness that any pro-Poch man could not deny but a man possessed of a stubbornness to love the game and believe in its fundamental traditions that football is in its very essence ‘good’, no less.
Thank you Poch for bringing tears and delight into our lives – today feels like a death in the family and what better face for a caped ghoul holding a scythe than that of the incoming Jose Mourinho.
We live in a time when we attack those who try to do their best for us. Where the innocent are guilty and the guilty innocent. ‘Should have backed him not sacked him’ Jenas said it the best last night.
I have called for Levy Out on these pages for 15 years or so, since we sold Carrick in fact. There’s nothing more ’Spursy’ than that, the slow death of making money over glory whilst selling cheap shirts with Latin quotes about a glory we struggle to feel.
Never winning anything and then sacking the manager. Poch dampened that call for the end of ENIC at times by overachieving and somehow making that shambolic club we love tick.
The good times are gone and now we are a reality TV show in a shopping mall. I won’t tune in. I won’t tune in until ENIC are gone.
I stopped watching the games and only read about them now. Only track results. The combination of VAR and watching Poch seethe at our dream imploding was too much. ENIC horribly neglecting our squad has come to pass yet Levy gave himself a pay-rise and decked out his office like some cruel and ostentatious dictator.
Contemptuously low balling on player contracts doubling the build spend on a stadium that does not benefit us. Money we and our children will continue to owe.
He takes our money, he channels our love for the club, and he turns that into profit for him and Joe Lewis.
The NET spend is so far below teams like Everton and West Ham, yet we are rich in profit. It’s all siphoned away to the Bahamas, and we sit there in the new spaceship built on holy ground sat next to tourists eating pop corn.
Eyes bedazzled by the LED screens flashing up VAR and Chinese bank adverts and outside in Tottenham whoever they choose to vote for they will lose because there will be more austerity and more new builds and more displacement.
More money siphoned away, the rumble of dread and NFL trucks, and all I can think about now is what Keith Burkinshaw once said as he walked away, and Poch on his knees crying and slapping the turf as we got to the Champions League Final.
He wasn’t perfect, but he was all we had. At least we knew what he stood for, and he was never ever backed. No matter how hard he implored.