What is about Spurs that produces so little love in the media? The current saga with Harry Kane follows almost a campaign from the media for the last couple of seasons. Kane will have to leave Spurs for trophies! You could say the media has turned Kane's head from someone who was deeply embedded in Spurs to feeling he would look stupid if he didn't try to move on to a 'bigger' club. Following the infamous interview with Neville on the golf course the media has almost been beside itself with glee at the prospect of Kane leaving. Spurs reported role in this is to be obstructive and a general nuisance for not easing his path to City where he obviously belongs. If Spurs don't stop being difficult City will not buy him and then where will Spurs be? It does of course go much further than this, it clearly annoyed the media when we made the CL final with a collective sigh of relief when Liverpool won. Compare this with the warmth dished out to Leicester when they break into the top 4. This season Spurs are not even mentioned in terms top 6 and little has been discussed about Spurs in a post Kane situation or even how will Nuno do. They're not interested. Last season it was all about Jose and of course the continuing description of Levy as a hard man. Spurs are accused of shirking investment and that's why Harry should leave. Ignoring the small matters of 100 million on two players and another 50 million player just in and a small matter of a billion pound stadium. So what is it about us? Is it just that we have few Spurs supporters writing copy or appearing as pundits? Is it all in my mind and the media are in reality fair and balanced? Are they jealous of this London club with fantastic facilities? What do you make of it all?
The simple reason is we have committed two grievous crimes 1.) Routinely get in the way of the media darlings 2.) Not rolled over and sold our players to the media darlings Take our two title challenges for obvious examples of the former: the first one had us painted as the villains for trying to prevent The Leicester City Fairytale™ in spite of the fact we were also trying to win our first Premier League title, while in comparison in the 1995-6 season not a single pundit said a word about Man Utd seeking to deny Everyone's Second Team™ their first Premier League title, and there's no denying the pundits were patting Leicester on the head for the season in the expectation that they'd bugger off back to midtable soon enough, hence the lack of any criticism of Chelsea swooping in to sign Kante once that season ended, and the next summer we had headlines of Leicester not honouring their "gentleman's agreement" with Mahrez (sound familiar?) As for our second challenge, how often were hacks and pundits weaponsing the word "Spursy" throughout the season? No talk of fairytales, no talk of breaking our hoodoo, instead it was all about how we were going to blow it sooner or later. Same goes for "bottling" getting weaponised, a phrase never used when Liverpool have bottled the league at various points in history (most notably 2013-14) or Man Utd in 1997-8, yet we have Skyte Sports pundits throwing that word at us live on air, all in an effort to see how long before we cracked - and the fact is that, at least that season, we didn't crack and Chelsea were just an unstoppable killing machine in the last third of the season, as our points total that season would have won us the league most years I dread to think what the plan was if we mounted a third straight title challenge, although I suspect Rachel Riley and Tracy Ann Oberman would have been involved somewhere...
Not enamoured of "grievance studies" , but the reality is that Spurs have been the persistent threat to the incumbent PL darlings over the past 10+ years. Each step upwards (PL performance, new WHL, CL finalists etc) irritates them immensely. For 8+ years (Bale 2013) they have had to wait for the opportunity that the last season has presented, in order to vent their spite. In fairness, if Lesta for example get their act together a la Spurs 2010 and beyond, they too will experience similar. What I find most amusing is the cognitive dissonance that Citeh causes (hence the 'messiah' hack narrative that surrounds Pep) .
Lazy journalism for me. The media want access to the teams that get the biggest viewing figures, listening figures readership numbers or clicks. In the past 20 years that is generally, City United, Chelsea, Liverpool and up until 2 or 3 yrs ago Arsenal. If journalists and pundits talk up and write about how a player should be joining w, x, y or z club then they will get higher viewers and better access to those clubs. Arsenal are on the downside of it since they fell out of the CL league and you can see how their coverage has changed as a result. In 2016 virtually none of the media pointed out they were top of the league in February after beating Leicester yet "bottled it"....compare that to us, who had never been top. Even worse happened the following year when we won 10 games on the trot before losing to West Ham effectively ending any hope we had of catching Chelsea. A sky presenter claimed spurs bottled it. Compare that to never hearing any criticism of he who must be called Pep spending £200m in his first season and only coming 4th. Or buying Bravo for £16m as his first choice keeper but having to ditch him after just one season. Or spending £10m on Delph, £10m on Douglas Luiz, £36m on Danilo, £16m on Nolito, £20m for both Angelino and Pedro Porro, £40m on Ake, Can you imagine the piss taking of most other managers for that? Like said, very lazy journalism for me.
Spurs are seen as the most likely threat to the media`s darling clubs (those who generate them the most money), they know that the financial doping at City and Chelsea means they are as good as nailed on for a top four place, which leaves just two places up for grabs. Obviously they are desperate for the best two supported clubs, Varpool and Penited, to take those two places, they will not want Spurs pooping their party. Hence why the media has an agenda to unsettle Spurs and are desperate for us to sell Kane, they know it will weaken us and almost certainly remove us from the top four equation, leaving the door wide open for their darlings. Add to that, a media infested with former players of Varpool, Penited and Woolwich, and well, you see the results.
The media rightly praising Spurs fans for their treatment of Saka today though - applauding him when he came on he pitch.
This won't be popular, but we've got to a point where we are going to have to address the loss of our best player. That's what happens whenever a football club ****s up to or underperforms, as we have done. Like it or lump it, we've ****ed up massively since 2017, and we're going to pay the price for that. There are plenty of posters who will pretend otherwise, but they're just deluding themselves.
So why was there a media Narrative of us being a "selling club" that was quite conveniently doing the rounds around 2017 when the likes of Walker and Dier were being tapped-up? A Narrative that, for comparison, is never chucked at Arsenal in spite selling Adebayor, Toure, Clichy and Nasri to The Sheikh Mansour Team, or van Persie and Sanchez to Penchester?
You read the mirror? Sub heading says... "Spurs fans so giddy they even cheered Arsenal player" In the article, they goes on to say... "It (cheering the Nuno's name when introduced at his first home game) was a remarkable show of optimism from the Spurs faithful given that they face losing Harry Kane to Manchester City. They even applauded Arsenal's England international Saka's introduction in what appeared to be unexpected support following the abuse he suffered in the aftermath of Euro 2020 That is a ****ing disgraceful bit of reporting which ignores fans taking a brilliant anti racist stance . No picture of the fantastic banner (shown below) in the article either. If That had been City fans doing it about a united player or Liverpool fans doing it for Rashford we'd never have seen such a mean spirited, mealey mouthed, piss taking response. ****ing disgraceful. Compare this to the slaughtering we take for using the y word to describe ourselves in response to racist ****s hissing at us and chanting other anti semitic filth. Compare it to the accusations we still face from the incident with Rudiger in December 2019. Although the old bill fans, the fa, stewards, TV cameras, radio crews and the state of the art cctv cameras found no audio or visual evidence that the crowd were making racist chants it is still stated as a fact that it was racist chanting. They fans yesterday do not deserve ridicule for doing the right thing. Not a dig at you by the way ... just irritated by a ****ish bit of reporting.
We're treated differently because we are different, in my opinion. We're not one of their favoured clubs in red, who are all renowned for cheating and we're all supposed to bow down to. We're not propped up by rich crooks sportswashing their image with blood money. We're not a plucky little underdog who they can rely on to give it a go and then collapse back to the second tier in a few years. So where do we fit in? We don't, really. Everton are in a similar position. We're both expected to tick along in the background and not disturb things for everyone else. Look at the reaction they got when they brought in a proven manager and some decent players. People took the piss, then did it even more when it didn't work out. They're not fitting their role. How dare they?
I just watched the TV reaction; I tend to avoid reading papers especially tabloids. I’d read Mike Atherton’s piece on cricket etc but find football journalists lacking as they don’t have any greater insight or experience than me. I accept many journalists pander to stereotypes; the stereotypical view of Spurs over the last 30 years is of being bottlers, heroic failures etc. Unfortunately the team often reinforces that view with results if not always performances. But just ignore it. Whatever the history of any club may be, it doesn’t dictate what they are now or will be in the future. I don’t think the media hates Spurs but you are patronised based on preconceptions, which is just lazy.
If anything the media goes out of the way to point out our cheating. So many reports about Bale diving and more recently Kane. Despite the facts that (1) if they dive at all they do/did so far less than the teams in red and (2) this isn't even subjective it's factual as you can see how many penalties we haven't been awarded for all this diving.
It is astonishing how little (no?) criticism that Citeh/Pep get. For example professional WUM/**** Durham at TalkShite will wum almost anyone/anything for the slightest reason (and often no reason at all) yet never wums citeh. Why? There's so much there to get your teeth into which is really wrong/distasteful you wouldn't even need to make it up. And as for Pep the Messiah (TM) he's never managed a team which isn't full of superstars. As for his true level in his first season at Citeh didn't he come 4th? And hundreds of millions of expenditure later he gets plaudits for recognising the problems and addressing them. Wow. It hardly takes a genius to recognise problems, but it takes unlimited (and dodgy) funding to address them. Point is that doesn't take a genius manager to recognise issues and play good football. A lot of them could do that if they didn't have to stick to a budget. How would Pep manage without those finances, that's the question. Meanwhile Citeh carries on with revenue "generated" by sort of sponsoring itself and if you mention such things you are accused of sour grapes.
Not too sure about newspaper journalism being bias against us , having said that I'm not sure the last time I purchased a newspaper and the freebies picked up at rail stations hardly rate at news papers TV and radio are a different story , this has come about from the Sky years and talksh*te ,so called pundits brought in on the old boys network former players of Utd,Arse,Liverpool and a scattering of ex Villa,Blackburn and city player all willing to come on and vent their spleens for the sky money Sky got so anti Spurs over the last 5 years that I only turn on the game 2 mins before kick off and switch off immediately after the final whistle due to the likes of Sourness and Keane Danny Kelly and Ali MCcoist are the only two I can bring myself to listen to on talksh*te, Kelly due to the fact he is first and foremost a journalist from the old NME and Q magazine days and secondly he is a Spurs fan but always recognises class whatever team they played for The two on late evening Cundy and the other clown , **** knows what we did to him when he " played " for us but he hates us like no other and are there to entertain the drunks and nutjobs Michael Dawson is the 1st ex Spurs legend to have a go on Sky so it will be interesting to see if he gets a fair crack of the whip
Our own fans need to take a look at themselves too I recall being a lone voice in feeling irritated whenever the term ‘punching above our weight’ was mentioned. I never bought that…we were doing what we should be doing, where we should be…it’s football the moment is always now. For me that reiterated the fact that we have a small club mentality running through the core and it’s a struggle to shake it off even if we are/were on the cusp of glory. If we don’t think like a big club then certain groups or organisations in the game will milk it and keep on pushing us back into ‘our place’. Doesn’t help that Levy isn’t as ruthless as his reputation demands. Example: public statement stating the price and cut off date for Kane…all parties like it or lump it. I see no damage in that unless Levy wants to remain open for business up till the last minute just incase. We claim to be top 6 and a big club etc etc but you don’t get too much big business for established stars between the top 6 clubs…but with Spurs…certain clubs have got a chance…mainly those in the North.
According to the club's unofficial mouthpieces and the manager said something to the same effect. Even David Ornstein, who's an Arsenal journalist primarily, has said as much. City made a bid, Spurs said he's not for sale and they've done a lot of talking in the media since. Could they be negotiating behind the scenes? Of course. Everyone seems to believe that our position will change if and when City bid some magical amount. Whether they'll do so and whether Levy will accept it remains to be seen.
