If you tried to sell all of them at the moment. You still wouldn't have enough money to buy Bale back!..
Players are well paid and many command huge transfer fees, but they are still human - and most are young and inexperienced in football terms and in life. Like all of us, they invariably do better when things around them are stable. They need to know their face fits, they are valued, they have a role to play etc; they gain confidence from certainty. It also helps to be working with the same people - staff and managers. It helps build trust and confidence; you get to know your own and others' strengths and weaknesses better and consequently can prepare and adapt better. It's not rocket science. In team sports, it is rare for a team to be newly assembled and be instantly successful for any sustained period. What breeds success is the closeness of the team built over a period of time - the building of relationships off the field and partnerships on it. Often, but not always, it is the manager who is pivotal and brings it all together. That can't happen if the manager changes every year - and the incoming manager knows he doesn't have time and tries to find a quick fix.
People have got to get all of this "Harry" worship out of their heads. Redknap just happened to be in the right place at the right time. He's a very, very ordinary EPL manager, as his career has proved. A great man-manager, but certainly no technical whiz-kid. He was great for the press, but an embarrassment to his club and most of his players. He was hamstrung by his own principles - if you were in his little clique (no matter how ordinary or old a player you were), great! If you were not inside his little clique (no matter how gifted a player), tough ****! When Redknap took over, the club was massively under-achieving, mainly due to managerial mistakes and mishandlings, made by Levy. Simply removing Ramos was worth 10 points to us; putting in his place a half-decent manager was all the impetus the players needed to go on a great run. And Redknap is a half-decent manager, but no more than that. If Redknap had taken over just after Jol had got us 5th for our second successive time, and we had, in the very next season, made 4th, I'd hold my hands up and say, "Redknap was the difference," but that is not how it happened. Redknap was not the difference - getting rid of Ramos was the difference. Sorry to keep popping bubbles, but, please, let us get this "Redknap" thing into perspective. How do we move forward? Firstly, define for me what "forward" amounts to. I presume people mean "regular top 4 and CL footy" as our immediate goal towards advancement. Well, if we want that, we need a top 4 manager (and Sherwoodie is not it), and we need top 4 players (and at least half our squad isn't that). Who was responsible for appointing the manager, and who was responsible for signing the cheques to buy our players? He needs to go, too. Sorry, but we are exactly where we deserve to be, at this moment in time. It is pure delusion to believe otherwise. I can accept that. What I cannot accept is that we have a bunch of clowns running our club, bumbling around and hitting one another with rubber planks, performing prat-falls for the general amusement of our rivals, and making us fans looks like complete twats. There is no leadership in the club, and there won't be any leadership whilst we have Levy in charge, making scapegoats of others for his own failings. It's a ****ing shambles, at the moment. If it stays the same, the only way is down for the club, not up. Drastic measures - from top to bottom - are required to get things back on track, and I have serious doubts that anything comprehensively constructive is going to happen any time soon.
Luke's right about stability and consistency, but we need to adopt an overall vision for what the team should be trying to do on the pitch in order to achieve either of those things. Clubs like Barca and Ajax have a system that's used throughout the club and over a period of years, regardless of who their manager is at the time. That allows youth players to join the first team set-up fairly seamlessly and everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing and the sort of player that they should be signing. We seem to have chopped and changed a million times and signed players without having any notion of how they'll fit into the squad or the managers' preferred system. We went from Redknapp's fairly cavalier and free approach to the stifling, almost robotic approach and then switched to Sherwood's attempt to give the fans what they wanted, followed by a complete aimless mess. It's hardly surprising that the team look so disjointed and disorganised. Leaving aside the long-term planning of the club for a minute, we're still picking sides that don't make any sense. Picking a side with balance would be Sherwood's best bet in the short term, but he looks like he's totally lost it, to me.
Find the right manager! That is the difficult bit and the conditions must be right for that manager. We are judging Sherwood from game to game which is daft. Is Sherwood the right man or not? we will probably not find out because the pressure is already on to sack him. Then we get the next 'right man' and so on. There will have to be a time unless we are very lucky when somebody has to stick with somebody for a couple of years and put up with some poor results. There always seems to be a reason to get rid at Spurs and even when we do find a manager who produces results we then find non football reasons to get rid. Venables, and Redknapp. We are serial flops.
True. But, once again, there is a common denominator in all this - Levy! He has been responsible for virtually all the disastrous managerial hirings, and **** ups over the last decade or so. I don't know for sure who the right manager is right now. I know that, had I been in charge there, I would have hired Rodgers or Martinez before AVB, and I'm a relative layman. That's not 20/20 hindsight, I never wanted AVB. However, we need to locate that manager, tell Levy to give him full control, and give him time to put things straight. The problem, again, always seems to come back to Levy. That's why I agree with you - we are serial flops, and will remain so, until Levy is relieved of position. I get the idea that even if we did find the right manager at last, Levy would find a way to screw it up.
Sorry, but it's true. If you were Bale, would you want to come back to this ****ing shambles, anyway. He'd have to be desperate, wouldn't he?
I said Matinez at the time, i think we should go and get him now,it might take a lot of talking to get him,but if we did,we should give him the players HE wants,and give him time to sort things out
I actually think we should stick with Sherwood. We need someone for the long-term and he should be given a chance to develop his managerial career. Can you see any other potential managers such as Van Gael staying for the long-term?! Sherwood is not brilliant at the moment, but he perhaps has the potential. I'm stating my views on the assumption that he has the players onboard with him. If not, then yes, he must go. ENIC however, and Levy, are not prepared to play the patience game. They want instant results etc, hence the constant sacking of managers. This approach has obviously failed since ENIC bought Spurs.
I would agree with that. However, this thread is about "moving forward." Levy has proven, time and time again, that he cannot move us any further forward than he has. Yes, let's be thankful that he got us to where we are, now. If people are happy with that - to settle around 5th - that's fine, let's stick with Levy.
Removing Levy would be counter-productive. Reducing his role to that of a normal chairman would probably be the best way to progress.
The one thing about Levy is,he was a Spurs fan when Enic took over Spurs and had he not been there we might not have a team today,removing him might not be a good idea
As I put in another post, I can accept that financially, he hs done well by the club. But his hiring and firing selections have been disastrous. If he can be kept away from that side of things, that would be a great start.
WE talk as though Levy makes all these decisions on his own but we do not know that. There is a board, it's more than likely that it is the board who make these decisions or at the very least influences Levy in his decision. Levy is not a hide bound man he has already admitted mistakes and changed his plan (too often) and that is the crux of the matter. It smacks of desperation to want Levy to go! Who for? have you considered what the majority of these chairman are like in the PL? From meglomaniacs who tear up the history of a club to suit their own ego, changing colours, changing names, sacking good managers, nightmares most of them. IMO Levy has and continues to do his best for the club and remain faithful to our traditions. There are only two clubs in the division with long term managers (1 now) does that not tell you the difficulty of finding this magic man who will make all our dreams come true.
True we were worse but that was under another pompous egotistical businessman . Sugar's ratio of meagre silverware is now slightly better than Levy/ENIC . Both have been our worse decades since Hitler topped himself so we should not judge by such poor standards. Apathy has set in with a realisation that we will hardly win any thing . Nothing will change without total change.
In fact the one thing Spurs have got right in recent times is the stability Levy has brought to the club. We are exactly the kind of club that can be very vulnerable to going bust. Like Leeds. A club on the verge of competing for the top prizes is easily tempted to spend more than it has. Just consider how Levy made possible the ploughing straight back the Bale money. How it is spent is open to arguemnt but you can't argue with Levy's intentions.
Looking in from the outside there appears to be a few factors that add up to the whole problem. On the pitch though, since selling Bale I just can't see who Spurs' 'go to' players are. All over the pitch you've got good players but not much in the way of special players who make the difference in the tight games that over the course of the season probably amount to 2-3 league positions. Liverpool for instance probably have a weaker squad than you but they have a system they have worked on for 2 years so the whole team is pulling in the same direction. You've changed so much so soon this was never going to happen this year. Liverpool also have at least one special player in Suarez plus Sturridge's goals and moments from Gerrard, Coutinho etc. City have Toure and Aguero, Chelsea have Oscar and Hazard, United have Rooney and RVP (when in form). I'm just not sure who your best players are. A lot of 7 out of 10 but no 9 or 10 out of 10.
