Lee Mason is to retire as a referee at the end of the season. He's going to become a full-time VAR official.
Good piece. There is so much wrong with the club it us difficult to know where to start. I imagine an early appointment of a good, forward thinker manager will be a start but recent developments may well make it a non-starter for some possible candidates. Over to you Mr. Levy. Smell the coffee!!!
Except he didn't. His family were friends with Sonny and Cher and she babysat for him. He says he watched her get changed in another room and they slept in the same bed, but no sex. I think many 13 year old boys would claim to have had a nightmare in the circumstances. There are definitely and wrongly different standards here though. With a 13 year old girl most people would be horrified, with a 13 year old boy the reaction is just lucky bastard.
Just checking, it wasn't a secret room hidden behind another bedroom? No, wait, that's Neverland Ranch...
Every Spurs fan I know would echo the sentiments in that as to why we support Spurs. But ESL apart, all the things that are mentioned as negatives have been necessary to ensure that we can continue to have the positives. Without the new stadium and the bars, the gigs and other sports and strengthening the brand (horrible to have to write that) we simply can't have all the other stuff because we can never compete with better funded rivals. So it isn't an either/or. There are only three ways of making Spurs a genuinely big club. One is the way ENIC are trying.....gradually improving everything and investing in long term assets. The second is the Chelsea and Man City way which is essentially cheating through laundering dubiously acquired wealth. The third is for some billionaire who has acquired his wealth ethically to lob £1b or so into the pot by buying the stadium and renting it back to the club for close to nothing. Don't hold your breath on that one. If ENIC sell we will most probably lose all hope of getting the club we love back. The only people who are going to buy us will be like the Glazers, Abramovich, or a front for a dodgy foreign government.
More than anything else, this is the thing which has me throwing up my hands in resigned frustration with the moanier section of our fanbase: one moment they're saying they don't care about that stadium or the events the stadium hosts before spouting off one conspiracy theory or another, the next they're demanding we sign three or four £40m+ players in the same window as if there is no connection between A and B Do I like how we're not longer "fans" but "customers"? No, bloody hell no, but the obvious point with that is the process of turning fans into customers isn't unique to our club or indeed any club in the Premier League or Football League, it's a process that has been in place since the 90s or, to point the finger in a more specific direction, is a process that Sky turning into football from something you watch at the ground to something you watch at home or down the pub which has, in turn, created a split in club fanbases. Case in point, if you watch Sky's coverage, if there's a player they single out every week (David James being the one who immediately springs to mind) the people on the sofa/down the pub will join in, yet at the grounds the response can and often is very different as fans will get behind the player entirely because they're being singled out by the pundits, as happened at WHL with Gomes a dozen or so years ago when Sky were making a thing of slagging him off weekly. Or, to be trite, Sky has replaced The Bloke Behind Me with The Bloke On The Halftime Sofa, and they can be remarkably similar in that regard I've gone off on a tangent here, haven't I? Commercialising football is clearly a bad thing, entirely because it cares less about fans and more about customers which is why club shops have gone from shirts and scarves to all manner of bewildering products (seriously, who the hell has ever bought a Spurs dog bowl?) but it also means the parameters have changed: in the 70s all a club needed to mount a title challenge was a canny manager, a couple of smart signings, and a good run of form - but in the 70s there wasn't the same 4-6 clubs occupying the top positions in the league every season, something which has happened in pretty much every single league in Europe in the past thirty years entirely because of the commercialisation of football, and to make a dent in that we have to adjust The real question is what are we willing to give up? Because this is the thing that gets me about the moaners saying they want an American owner as if there aren't enough red flags from Man Utd, Arsenal, Villa, Sunderland or Swansea about American owners being either asset strippers or having less patience than The Bloke Behind Me when their preferred lightning rod miscontrols a pass, because if we did happen to get some billionaire chucking money about every summer would that really be "their" club that they keep banging on about? Or would it be an extension of whichever billionaire wants to have some bragging rights by saying "Look what I can do!"? That being said, if Elon Musk buys the club, I'm out
ENIC aren't going to sell us before Lewis dies or the London NFL franchise is awarded to someone else. That's a fact. We can put pressure on them to make the football club are much higher priority by withholding support and protesting about Levy's penny wise pound foolish leadership. The door is very much open to change, ENIC and Levy are in trouble and they know it. £We need to keep the pressure up and make them run the football side of their investment with the some of the attention to detail and investment that has been applied to a load of other matters. I am certain that Lewis could invest money to address debt incurred to build infrastructure or buy land and that it could be used to rebuild the football team but if people swallow Levy's snivelling programme notes, the football will continue to be a lesser priority than it should be. Rant ends.
