I don't think it's that nothing sticks, it's just that there are far, far worse chairmen out there and that we're kind of stuck as a club right now. We can't really advance dramatically, as the FFP rules would kill any major investment on players, but we could easily go backwards horribly, a la Villa. Levy does a lot of things right, but he's also made a number of major errors. Sherwood's one of them, for me.
A club sticking to its ethos . "The Spurs Way" a distant dream. Managers appointed with no aspect of playing entertaining flowing football in the tradition of our once cavalier past. A little , little , little more investment in the team. Over the last 13 years our average yearly net spend is around 3 million and the last 5 under 1. This is not commitment and purpose by our owners. This is why we are one almighty cock up .
Our spending seems to have been cut by investment in other areas (training ground, stadium) and only Villas-Boas seems to be a deviation from cavalier football. Given his Porto side's goalscoring record and Zenit's since he joined, that may be down to our lack of a playmaker during his time at the club, though he was rather functional and boring. Calling us an almighty cock up is something of an exaggeration too, in my opinion. We've had a poor season and made some bad mistakes, but we're roughly where we should be. There's one side above us who've got a smaller budget and one that's currently below us with a much, much larger one. Compare that with Newcastle's drop from 3 points behind Liverpool on Boxing Day to their current dire form or Villa's fall from grace and we're not looking too bad.
While it may have been turgid viewing most of the time, AVB's defensive football seemed a better fit for the players he had available than some of the ineptitude displayed since Sherwood took over. At the very least, AVB played Sandro at the heart of midfield, Eriksen as a number ten and Chadli on the wing - which seems to elude Sherwood.
This is why I've always wanted to know for definite whether the players that played under AVB were "his" players, before blaming him. Our football may have been boring and defensive, but maybe he felt that with what he had available to him, that type of football was the only way to get the results.
And you know what? When the "boring" comments which we were pretty much all a part of started gaining critical mass and we started trying to force out some nice football what happened? We got spanked
This is probably worth nothing as it's from spurs community, but here's what's being said: Levy and Sherwood are barely talking Ade is off to Monaco. Lloris wants out and we've been approached by PSG .
I'm talking about the larger rather than the smaller trends. Things went very well for us from the time Harry took over until Harry for England. Since then, while there have been a lot of small pieces of good fortune, they've been part of a larger unlucky trend. The team held on to fourth spot only to have the wildly unlucky fate of not qualifying for the CL thanks to a non-top four team winning it. Last year we missed the CL spot on the last day of the season after, incredibly, not getting a pen all year. This year you could make a case we did better than our quality of play indicated. I don't suppose I'd argue, but grabbing sixth, which we'll apparently do, hardly seems very lucky to me. A team that met its objectives with a record and GD like ours would be described as clutch; able to come back and win the close games, and hold on to leads. I will grant you our problems this year, unlike the last two, seem to be essentially self-inflicted. Where the line is between bad luck and bad judgment is never clear, though. Someone once defended one of Napoleon's generals by saying he wasn't a bad general, he was just unlucky. "But being unlucky is the worst thing a general can be," Napoleon answered. That also goes for managers.
How often have we heard that Levy and X are barely talking? Surely Joe Lewis has to realise that 'hang on, our last 3 managers fell out with Levy - maybe the problem is with Levy and not the managers?' It's not rocket science is it? Still - I would be happy for Adebayor to go as I've said earlier.
I can see where people are coming from with the "let's lose Adebayor" comments. But for me the thing is that I don't want to see too much upheaval again and really if you get rid of Adebayor you're either expecting something from Soldado that we've not seen (ability to play up top on his own or ability to form a partnership with Kane or ability to form a partnership with some other new, unbedded-in striker) or you're needing the whole team formation to change (maybe 433 works best for Soldado in which case no place for Lennon - no bad thing perhaps). So it's a bit slash and burn for me. Get rid of Ade and a lot will have to change. Which, tempting as it is, seems risky. We ready for our strikers to be Soldado, Kane and some other newcomer? Maybe it depends on how well-experienced in the EPL the newcomer is. maybe. With the season we've had and the previous turmoil that has led to it I just want to keep one of the very few players who has come out of the season with any amount of credit.
I would be all for keeping Adebayor if he played as well as he could all year. Instead, all we've had is about 4-6 weeks of effort (which was just to prove a point to AVB). It was much the same last season as well. For a man with as much a talent as he clearly has and for the wages he is on, I expect so much more. It's not as if this is new behaviour either with him going off the boil like this - he did the same at Arsenal, the same at Man City and probably the same at Real Madrid. He has come out and said he thinks next season will be better because he'll have a preseason - maybe so. If he puts his head down and works hard, scores us 20 goals in the prem next season then I'll hold my hands up and say 'fair play' - can't see it though. Not based on his previous behaviour.
Isn't Ade's contract up next summer? If so i'm not sure I could see Levy wanting to renew a contract on a 30 year old striker on big wages, whose attitude at best is flaky.
