You can be sure that some time before the end of the season you will hear some "informed" pundit, maybe more than one, say that Spurs have underachieved because they did not get top four having spent over 100 million. Whether we underachieved is debatable, but the unqualified statement saying that we spent so much without pointing out the facts on this thread (well done to the OP) is par for the course.
"You can be sure that some time before the end of the season you will hear some "informed" pundit, maybe more than one, say that Spurs have underachieved because they did not get top four having spent over 100 million. Whether we underachieved is debatable..." How many times has a club on the fringes of becoming a CL regular, sold a world-class player for a huge sum, replaced them with 7 new players, and immediately integrated them into a team that at the very least improves by at least one league place ?? The answer appears to be once. Man City in the summer of 2010. Assuming you are calling Robinho world-class of course. And deem 22m as "huge" .
The pundit I absolutely detest the most is TalkShite's very own Mark Saggers. He is a twat of the very highest order. I detest him more than Adrian "Oh, aren't I hard!" Durham. Mickey Dim talks pure bollocks, but he's basically rendered harmless by his sheer and utter stupidity. But Mark "No, I will have a ****ing argument with myself!" Saggers is a different piece of work, altogether. His bias towards 'Pool and United is so great and so all-embracing that he refuses to see what is before his very eyes. His love of those two sides is almost as great as his distain for Spurs. When he is forced to talk about us, he sounds as though someone has suddenly placed a very smelly turd under his nose.
As I have said, the Sky 4 habits are hard to break in the media. Even Citeh get a rougher time of it, yet they are a Sugga Daddy FC like Chelsky. I would hate to think of the meltdown in media land if both Man Utd AND the Poool did not get a CL slot next season.
The table doesn't show that at all. It shows that we sell a lot of valuable players but since we break even on transfers we must buy a lot too. Bill would be a bit confused as to why we don'y just buy and sell one player a season like he used to though. It's actually quite staggering that a club of our means can compete with the bigger ones like this.
"It's actually quite staggering that a club of our means can compete with the bigger ones like this." We are in the vicious circle of not being able to retain our best players long-term because of success and wage constraints. Meanwhile Levy clears out the deadwood, and those who have served the club well in the long term but have little more to give, for near-zero loss on the balance sheet. If he could sort out the first as well as the second, things would be very much better at Spurs.
Players, if they are to stay any length of time at a club, need to be confident that the club's chairman is ambitious. The greatest "statement of intent" that a chairman can make is who he appoints as manager; appoint a no-mark and your best players will quickly become disillusioned and look to leave to work under a better manager; appoint a good manager and the players will rally round and come up with that "dressing-room spirit" bollocks that they always spout when things appear to be going their way. Both us and United have been stymied with a no-mark manager, so it can come as little surprise that the better players in our two teams (a) seem to have lost interest in playing for their respective club, and (b) have been leaking stories to the press saying that they are looking to leave in the Summer. With us, I have come to expect this, but I think all of us were taken by surprise that United plumped for a no-mark appointment.
So who is your target audience with all this bollocks HIAG? Surely you are not trying to wind up your fellow Spurs fans are you?
Adebayor, Eriksen, Soldado and Chadli all love playing for Sherwood and you can't ask for a bigger compliment then the backing of these four players to Sherwoods man management skills.
Ouch! No one else is available to wind up, Spurf! United fans are too full of their own self-loathing, at the moment, to be bothered by my gentle barbs. Gooners are doing a far better job at winding one another up, with the rift between the pro- and anti- Whinger lobbies deeper than at any time over the past 4 or 5 years. And 'Pool FC is flying so high that I currently feel churlish trying wind up Mousers. I've got to practice on someone, mate. Skills like mine atrophy very quickly without continual practise.