https://www.skysports.com/football/...shu8Uj9PXoxl7eoHq6UlUozjzq6YCMyVGyRnX4S27fdm4 all get voting for Tom Eaves, it's the best goal here by a distance don't let the best supported teams distort the vote - vote for the best goal not a hit and hope
Nicked from The Times Daniel Levy: is he Tottenham Hotspur’s star man? Look beyond pitch and dugout — the man who made Spurs a force is in the boardroom A few days before the first Christmas of the millennium, Daniel Levy bought control of Spurs. Not everybody reacted with festive cheer. Cornelius Sierhuis, chairman of AEK Athens, warned: “I hate to say this, but the deal does not bode well for Tottenham.” The Daily Mirror carried his quotes in a story headlined: “Wreckers! AEK Athens boss warns: ENIC will ruin Tottenham.” Fast forward 18-and-a-half years. If you were setting up a football club from scratch and could pluck one person from the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, the smart choice would not be Harry Kane, Christian Eriksen or even Mauricio Pochettino. It would be Levy, the biggest star of Tottenham’s journey from a club so comic it coined its own word for fecklessness (“Spursy”) to Champions League finalists and envy of every rational football investor. As the Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish wrote in these pages, under Levy and his backer Joe Lewis, Tottenham have been transformed to a club with “the smartest transfer policy in football, the best youth system, probably the best training ground and now the world’s best stadium”. ENIC originally stood for English National Investment Company. In fairness to Sierhuis back in December 2000, when ENIC bought 29.9% of Spurs from Alan Sugar for £22m, it was reasonable to have doubts. Lewis, a billionaire currency speculator domiciled tax-free in the Bahamas, was no football nut. He founded ENIC initially to buy into textiles. Levy was the thirtysomething Cambridge economist and family friend whose dad founded the budget menswear store, Mister Byrite, and whose own background was in clothes retail. Levy was brought in to run ENIC in the UK and quickly made Lewis £144m by making a brilliant investment in an internet start-up, but his acumen for the football business seemed flawed — initially. Using Lewis’ funding, he acquired stakes in six clubs around Europe — Rangers, AEK, Vicenza, Slavia Prague, FC Basel and Spurs. Take Rangers: Levy paid £18.9m for 20% and injected a further £21m but found his ideas for moulding the then Scottish champions mostly ignored. His holding gave him no control and the stories in Scottish media circles — whether exaggerated or not — were of him making earnest pitches to the Rangers board only for the majority stakeholder, David Murray, and his circle to dismiss them. Rangers spent and spent but dipped on the pitch, and when Levy sold his stake back to Murray in 2004 it was for just £8.7m. Vicenza had just won the Coppa Italia when ENIC bought in but were toiling in Serie B by the time it sold up. Slavia went into debt. AEK won three successive titles before ENIC but just one trophy, the Greek Cup, in four years after its arrival, and ENIC’s exit was acrimonious. Sierhuis’ complaint was, “ENIC’s investments in clubs have largely failed because of an inability or unwillingness to fund in accordance with its stakes.” Seen from 2019, though, things look different. Levy was ahead of his time. The vision of building an international family of clubs has been adopted by Manchester City, Red Bull and the Pozzo family who own Watford. Levy was right, too, about the need to move away from the old “benefactor model” of club ownership. Unless you have sovereign or oligarch wealth, or a golden brand such as Real Madrid or Manchester United, structured, strategic and careful spending is the only sustainable way to navigate the inflationary riptides of modern football. It is also clear, now, that Levy spent those early years investing in the game with open eyes and ears, learning lessons he would subsequently implement. Football acumen? How’s this: while ENIC’s buyout was going through Spurs were finalising the £180,000 purchase of an East Fife striker, Stevie Ferguson, who never played for them. The first post-Levy recruit was somewhat better — Teddy Sheringham on a free — and transfers have gone on from there. The overall net spend on players in Levy’s 18-plus years of stewardship is around £240m and over the past 10 seasons it stands at a sensational £15m. In 2016-17 he raised £45m from selling squad offcuts Ryan Mason, Nacer Chadli, Alex Pritchard and Tom Carroll; in 2017-18 £43m from Kevin Wimmer, Nabil Bentaleb, Clinton N’Jie and Federico Fazio. Sir Alex Ferguson, after being taken right down to the final hours of deadline day and made to fork out £30.75m for Dimitar Berbatov, commented that negotiating with Levy “was more painful than my hip operation”. On the other side of the table Levy can be cold. The Club by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg contains the story of Levy antagonising smaller clubs at a Premier League meeting when he pitched to get the Big Six a greater share of TV revenue. Levy announced: “We only want what’s fair,” and repeated those five words to every objection raised. But read Pochettino’s memoir, Brave New World, and a different chairman emerges. To Poch he is always “Daniel”. There are tales of wine-tasting mini-breaks together, dressed-down work retreats at Levy’s home in the French Alps and a bonding trip to Argentina for chairman and coaching staff with quad-biking, horse-riding, paintballing and a river trip. The boat capsized and Pochettino pulled Levy to safety. “The chairman’s wife says I’m the third member of their marriage,” Pochettino writes. It would have been impossible for Levy to build Tottenham without there being soul and warmth at the heart of the project. He is a Spurs supporter who was always working towards owning the club when ENIC began in football. He forged personal connections with managers. One of them, Martin Jol, said in 2007 that it was tough getting his way on transfers, but Levy had a far-reaching strategy, to one day have a new stadium, be a Champions League club and for Spurs to be worth half a billion pounds. It was unlikely then but has all been realised now except the valuation. Forbes valued Tottenham at $1.237bn last summer — and the club will be worth a lot more now. Pochettino’s bond with Levy has been important in keeping him at the club and is one of Spurs’ main hopes for retaining him further. He needs personal connection. With extraordinary candour last week he said, “Football is a context of emotion and emotional state. The emotional level you arrive at [for the final] is going to be decisive and you’re going to have the capacity to win or lose. It’s not tactics, it’s not physical. It’s about how the emotion triggers your talent and quality.” That he cried in Amsterdam when Spurs reached the final was nothing unexpected. “My mother said to me you are a llorona, a person who cries often and a lot. I am strong but I cry. Maybe I take my car to my house, 20 minutes to Barnet, and listen to some music and it translates to some moment in my life. I start [to cry] and when I arrive home my wife says ‘what happened?!’” Should Spurs win in Madrid Pochettino says he will “cry one week.”. Don’t be surprised if Levy also sheds a tear.
While takingg refuge from Baku last night I saw a programme where they spoke about table football, turns out that the earliest patent was in 1923 by a Mr Harold Thornton a Tottenham supporter , so began thousands of fights in youth clubs and bars because someone spun the bar
Sad to see anyone die so young, but if he really was driving at nearly 150mph in a 40 limit, then it's a really stupid way to go. Feel very sorry for his friends and family.
Is that the case!!! Did not know that. Also took a relative with him. If that is confirmed then he was an arsehole endangering so many people.
If that's even close to the case, that's tantamount to playing Russian roulette with his life and others. Mrs B has moved from Child Abuse Investigation to traffic this year. At her rank, when she's on call at weekends, she is advised of every fatality and serious incident on the roads in London. I can vouch that they are a distressingly regular occurrence and she has to go out to some of them. It's a tough life, so drive carefully boys and girls!
Just had a quick browse and it's being reported that he was doing 147mph on a 70mph motorway. His former Spain teammate Santiago Canizares has said this about him: “Speeding shows a reprehensible attitude. “There were victims in the accident apart from the driver. He does not deserve a tribute as if he were a hero. “But that does not mean I regret what happened and I pray for their souls.” Damn.
A friend of a friend joined the fire brigade and had to work on a busy motorway as part of their local area. Far too many stories about cutting injured crash victims out of wrecks...
147 mph is way too fast without the skills to handle those speeds - although slightly different to a 40mph limit. You are one unexpected reaction from another driver away from catastrophe. It seems he killed at least one other person driving stupidly, so on balance I share the view of Canizares. Not sure he'll be thanked for expressing that view though.
