Desperate, Knackered, Without Hope. But Enough About Me
In solidarity with my beleaguered football team, today’s piece is rambling, incoherent and smacks of desperation.
Sunday’s performance against Everton was a new low but then again, that statement applies to every match we play these days. How low can you go? Spurs’ response to the mess we’re in is to become more disjointed, not less. Players lose connection with each other. Mistakes proliferate. There’s no steadying hand, few moments of peace as we can’t keep the ball or stay tight at the back to absorb pressure. It’s constant, respite coming only when the opposition choose to take a breather. We’re in heaps of trouble and nobody knows what to do.
That’s the team. Re-read the last paragraph, and think how it applies to the board’s stewardship of the club. Fits like a glove. I didn’t intend to write it so. If only I had been so clever, but I’m bothered and bewildered too, trying to write above the inner voices that are bellowing, ‘not again, how could it come to this?’.
But there it is. I mean, I know the answer. This is the outcome of two decades of misguided leadership from the board. A lack of direction and consistency, where as I’ve repeatedly written before, it is beyond the chairman’s ability and understanding to align the three forces that fuse to create a successful football club – the manager/coach, recruitment and finance. Still, we’ll always have the Spurs dog of the day. Something we can all get behind.
Not going to go over that in detail again. Suffice to say that we have a chairman who wants a seat at the top table but is at pains not to upset his hosts by unseemly behaviour, such as winning trophies. He instructs his managers to aim for the top four without providing the resources to take that additional step towards a title challenge, or for that matter squad depth to take a proper tilt at winning a cup too. He rewards his players with a watch, provided by a sponsor naturally, for reaching a final, not winning it. He wants to take part in a European super league, just to be there. For the money.
Anyway. Look elsewhere for coherent thoughts about what to do now. My head is as jumbled and confused as Dragusin on Sunday. So here are some things. You will have others.
I would not dismiss Ange at this point. The prospect of another caretaker has no appeal. I can’t see how a coach appointed in the short-term could change significantly with this squad and this injury list. I don’t see what else he can do with the back four, and if that sounds hopeless, then that reflects how I feel. There are longer term issues about training, and let’s be honest, fans have absolutely no idea whether training has had an adverse impact on the players’ health. We can see, however, that the lack of squad depth shows we were inadequately prepared for this busy season.
One thing we can dismiss is the narrative pundits, the real ‘football men’, have constructed around Spurs. We’re not the only side to play a high line by any means. Ange does have a plan B, and a C, D and E. He’s adjusted tactics, notably the positioning of the full-backs, a better pressing game and we’re willing to go long these days too. What we still can’t do is adequately tie up the midfield for any extended periods. Players we rely on in that area like Sarr, Biss and Bentacur, cannot keep the ball for long enough, which is a major plank in our defensive construction. Players are prone to errors when the pressure is on and lose the ball at crucial moments. Plus they are knackered. We can demand more effort but there’s a physical limit that many have reached. The press has worked well, again it’s key to our defensive shape this season, but they run out of steam.
What we don’t have is a plan F, where everybody’s back, low block, backs to the wall lads eh! That’s the classic response when teams come under pressure as we are. We simply don’t do that well, for long enough. Coaching? We don’t have the players for it, not with that mindset.
Plus of course Ange came up with a plan G on Sunday, three at the back. This worries me, not just because it was a disaster but because it shows he’s rattled. We could not have possibly trained with that formation for any length of time. Gray is excellent but still only young. Frankly it smacked of desperation. And if that message gets through to the players, we’re sunk. Remember these players didn’t sign up for a battle at the bottom of the table. That’s not what they’re here for.
Levy has to take decisive action in this window, not mess around negotiating some cunning loan with an option to buy to protect the club and save a future fee. Rumours suggest we are looking at defenders and forwards. Nothing yet. Any chance of a defensive-minded midfielder who can pass the ball a bit? There’s no time to waste.
And by action, I mean buy players. The action he usually takes in situations like these is to sack the manager. Will he or won’t he? His previous form suggests he will, regardless of whether or not he has a replacement lined up. I wonder, though, if this time circumstances may be different. Certainly the word from “well-placed” journalists is that he has no immediate plans to do so, and I’m assuming this comes from something deliberately fed to them by the club, because that’s how these things work.
So has anything changed? After those decades of failure I mentioned, to be fair we do have a plan and Ange is integral to that. Attacking football and player investment, especially in younger players but not exclusively, supported by a developed and much-needed club infrastructure in recruitment and a head of operations to run the club day to day. And what are these people saying to the board? Levy tends not to respond to outside interference, but he may be listening to these people he has employed to advise him. We don’t know, but at the very least this is a different element to the process.
There’s also another, new element to the Spurs story, a prevailing view that the structural, long-term problems evident at Spurs are down to him. Many supporters, including me, have long held this view, but there have been several big pieces in the papers that have been extremely critical of the board’s performance. Levy says he takes no notice of criticism, and if that takes the form of personal abuse, I don’t blame him at all, but this is different, a far greater focus on him, and it must have an effect.
Finally, Ange remains fairly popular amongst the fanbase, albeit it may represent clinging on to forlorn hope rather than wholehearted support. Dangerous to generalise, but certainly his name is sung at games, although I gather things got nasty post-match at the away end on Sunday when he and the players came over. No songs towards the end for his three predecessors, though.
Sunday will be the test. Home game, we have 75% possession when Vardy slots his second, three down after also conceding from a set-piece. It could turn ugly.
So I predict we’ll mess around at the bottom of the table for a while, with some respite when our players return but not much. I’ve written about the short-term, but this could have a serious harmful impact on our medium and longer term plans, just when we have something in place, which is much more worrying.
Here’s a perfectly plausible scenario. We finish mid-table and don’t win a cup. We look to build in the summer, after all team building takes several windows and we have some cracking young players, but without European football we’re less attractive to classy, quality players in a competitive market. Plus the board will be even more reluctant to pay high wages because income will fall, so recruitment is tough.
Then, it could be hard to keep our best players. Romero and Kulusevski certainly will be in demand, VdV maybe. Also, this season has exposed the deficiencies of some players we do have. Recruitment at this point in the cycle should be about upgrading, whereas we need to replace some relatively recent signings who were supposed to be part of that development. Dragusin and Werner aren’t up to it, and we’ll have to wait to see how close players out on loan, notably Donley, Vuscovic, Devine, Dorrington and Phillips, can get to the first team.
Plausible therefore that all the progress we’ve made goes out the window and we’re team building again for the 23rd successive transitional season. There may be trouble ahead.