The weekly column for those among us who support the Premier League's "Oh do we have to?" club.
Another week, another crisis of confidence. The most surprising thing about Spurs getting beaten 2-0 at Fulham on Sunday afternoon was how unsurprising it felt. The team in eighth place beating the team in 14th place in the Premier League is, put simply,not a surprise result. Fulham were the better team, as the pre-match table already indicated.
There seems to be no end to the coughing and spluttering, so who knows what the future holds? It feels very much as though Ange Postecoglou’s future with the club now rests entirely on winning the Europa League, and that seems like a tall order. Their opponents in the quarter-finals are Eintracht Frankfurt, who are currently in fourth place in the Bundesliga and who beat Ajax home and away in the last round of this competition. Ruh-roh.
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So while it’s not a done deal yet, open talk of who the next chump will be to follow Ange has already started. My own personal choice had been Andoni Iraola, primarily because he looks (and often talks) as though he doesn’t even really want to be a football manager in the first place. Could there be a better fit for this club than that? But as per previous, I do also have to add the significant caveat that I honestly wouldn’t really wish the Spurs manager’s job upon everyone.
Of course, all this talk accelerated in a stratospheric direction this week with talk restarting concerning a certain person wanting to return to the club.
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
Thomas Wolfe, 1940, You Can't Go Home Again
The above sprang immediately to mind when the chatter about Mauricio Pochettino kicked off. In a sense, it’s nice to know that he still has fee-fees for the club. Ego-stroking, in a roundabout way. But then when you actually start to think about it in any detail, it starts to fail the sniff test. This would probably not be a good idea for either him or the club.
It’s not that Mauricio Pochettino isn’t a talented coach. It’s true to say that neither of his high-profile club jobs since Spurs have been very successful. The semi-finals of the Champions League and runners-up in Ligue Un to Lille was never going to be good enough at PSG, and Chelsea would likely have been a disaster area no matter who had been managing them last season as they sorted through the rubble of their hyperactivity in the transfer market following their sale to Clearlake.
But he proved himself at Spurs and he proved himself prior to that, at Southampton. And he’s won five out of six as the head coach of the USA team, with the only defeat being a 2-0 friendly defeat away to Mexico in October, which doesn’t seem that shocking.
And it’s certainly not that there wasn’t a solid emotional bond between him and the supporters, either. There were, by the time of his departure, a few who felt it had ‘gone as far as it could’, and the team had gone from second to third to fourth in the three seasons prior to his departure.
But then… they’ve only finished as high as fourth once since, and if they do finish as low as 16th this season—a position that they are currently only separated from on goal difference, it will be their lowest league position since they were relegated in 1977. It seems absurd to even think that Spurs supporters wouldn’t want Poch to come back, turn the clock back, and make everything alright again.
The problem, of course, is that every part of that description needs to happen for it to be a success, and as Thomas Wolfe helpfully points out, the past is gone and there’s nothing to be done about that, whether for good or ill. You can’t go home again, whether to the childhood of your memories or to Amsterdam on the 8th May 2019. And while yes, there have been examples of managers who’ve returned and been successful again, there have also been high-profile failures. Surely no-one wants to spoil that bond, do they?
There are different types of manager, and it feels as though following the abandonment of the Projecttino Daniel Levy went for short-term fixes instead (either side of a brief and ultimately unhappy fling with Nuno Espirito Santo), like someone on the rebound after a worthy but failed relationship. Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte were never going to fit at Tottenham, though it was entertaining to see the fundamental Spursiness of the club overwhelming both of them in the end.
Sacking Mourinho a few days before a cup final was a masterstroke, while Conte seemed to be driven clean round the twist by the very concept of this particular football club, though he did manage to get them briefly back into the Champions League. But these two, who play pretty much the leastTottenham football imaginable, were clearly brought in to placate an increasingly disgruntled fanbase.
Eventually, Levy settled back into project mode; only problem is, this one has gone badly awry already. 14th place with a very distinct possibility of 16th place is lower than any of the other ‘Big Six’ clubs have managed in their ‘off’ seasons over the years, to the point that it’s probably time to formally call time on that phrase being used. It seems somewhat futile when two of its members are in the bottom half of the Premier League. When do Spurs get swapped out for Newcastle or Aston Villa? End of this season? The rules aren’t clear.
Just as with Ange Postecoglou, I’d love for it to work, but I just don’t see how it does. There’s too much work to be done elsewhere within the club from an institutional perspective for a winning mentality to be bred into a Spurs team at the moment. It needs rebuilding from the ground up. That, of course, is a project coach like Pochettino or Postecoglou’s job on the playing side of things.
The problem is that this project requires a far broader scope. It needs to start from the head down, and there still doesn’t seem to be too much likelihood of that happening at the moment. And it also requires patience and the possibility that success may never happen. The nature of the modern game makes getting a ‘project’ right increasingly difficult. There are simply more moving parts to football clubs than there used to be. Changecan be quick, but it requires the institution as a whole to be running smoothlyas a football clubas well.
And there are very few of us who think that it is at the moment, are there?
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