Tottenham is burning
Dear Mr Levy,
As you gleefully play your lyre, singing arias whilst watching the death and destruction as Tottenham Hotspur burns to the ground as you look down from the comfort of your own personal Maecenas...ask yourself, when the fire is extinguished...who shall you blame? Who will take responsibility for this calamity? From the ashes, will you build on the devastated land a palace for your ego and eunuchs? Will you blame us, the common man, citing Stratford as a catalyst?
Or will you be overthrown?
What’s that? It’s too late? This is fidelity? It sure is. Faithfulness to your own beliefs to the bitter end.
I can only hope Chirpy is caught in the fire too. I think he’s best served up on a plate with a dab of jerk seasoning and Piri Piri sauce. You see, much like my feathered friend, I have a permanent expression of comedic shock on my face. Is this really happening? Are you truly sitting back in your throne eating grapes and watching this despondency and dismay play out before your eyes?
Why do you not listen to the people and their cries for help? Even your soldiers show discontent with their general. But that’s the crux of it isn’t it? You appointed the general yourself having removed your second in command. No more director of football. A wheeler dealer in his place. But we’re not fooled, then and now. We never wanted him in the first place. Any half decent coach would have kick-started our season when we sat bottom of the table. And now, two seasons later, we look set to return to the mediocrity that almost engulfed us. We are stagnating. Sideways stepping when it’s abundantly clear we should be 10, 12 points better off.
When you look for your scapegoat and make an example out of him be sure to remember that the blame should be shared between the both of you.
You for sticking with him and him for making nothing stick.
Where would you like me to start? How about I just throw one or two statements of facts your way and see how much of it you manage to catch? You may need to place your lyre down for a moment.
Two transfer windows and not an inkling of a world class forward. Instead, we’re left rotating the three stooges whilst we try to accommodate a midfielder who is best played centrally but is instead used in the hole in a tragically flawed 4411 formation that rarely proves to be fruitful. If we had two proper forwards signed in the summer along with a fully-fledged right back, a central defender to cover expertly when Gallas and Dawson are not available and in addition a new goalkeeper and better quality cover for Bale on the wing – we’d be challenging for the title. Instead we are struggling to remain in 5th spot whilst being humiliated in Europe because we have no tactical astuteness to go to Madrid and get a decent result whilst multi-tasking the domestic games.
Don’t give me all this propaganda about the red card and Lennon’s illness. We should have reshaped comfortably and contained Madrid with the odd counter thrown in for good measure. I reckon a 2-1 loss, possibly even 2-2 was more than achievable. If José Mourinho was our manager do you honestly believe we’d have lost 4-0? Do you? Of course not. Harry proving he can’t hack it at the highest level, completely at fault for our surrender and capitulation. Perfect for England.
Let’s go back to the summer again and the New Year. The failure to sign a forward. We get offered a midfielder, rejected from his club, and we lap it up because how can a donkey possibly deny itself from taking a bite out of the dangling carrot? Everybody knows that if van der Vaart had not been signed we’d have been forced to play a traditional 442 system and Defoe, Crouch and Pav would have scored a bundle domestically and in Europe.
Then again, probably not. Neither of them are world class and last season’s fourth spot finish was nothing more than good fortune rather than managerial shrewdness. Because our manager, mugged in Madrid (a second time), doesn’t have the knowhow on how to beat the big teams and inspire the side when the going gets tough. It’s all sound bites with him isn’t it? We’re under achieving and he’s still trying to enforce a down to bare bones mantra to hide the truth and his deficiencies.
In the New Year we should have signed Carroll. He's have been fit and able round about now to make it for the push. £35M well spent rather than sitting in your bank account earning interest.
The form of some of our players has been down to luck and aided by circumstance and nothing to do with his man-management. Bale was always going to come good. Modric was always best suited for the middle of the park. BAE was always a decent left-back. It's more than obvious. The team picks itself unless the team picked loses meaning a different team should have been picked in its place to start with although if tactical changes are made they should only be referenced if they don’t work and ignored if they do work. But mostly they don’t. Which is why we’re 5th with a handful of games to go and about to be (already) knocked-out of the CL in the quarter-finals.
We got rid of dos Santos and Taarabt – two players destroying their respective leagues with their new clubs, be it the former on loan the latter sold. We could have done with dos Santos mental strength and Taarabts composure. It's painful, the schoolboy errors witnessed. Painful.
We’re always playing our Plan B which means Plan B is in fact Plan A which points to the fact that if Plan B is Plan A then what is Plan B if Plan B is A and Plan A is actually Plan B masquerading as Plan A? With better players we’d be in are far better position than we find ourselves in.
We’ve done ourselves no favours with our European adventure which has simply papered over the cracks. What’s the point in progressing in the Champions League when we’re meant to be competing for a top four finish so we can qualify for it the following season? It’s all about the qualification, not the taking part. We’re never going to win it so why bother trying? It’s an absolute mess. And it pains me to witness my beloved club falling apart at the seams with bickering and in-fighting, dressing room afloat, lost in a sea of despair. What with squad trimming immediate, I expect us to lose Bale, Modric and van der Vaart in the immediate summer months – but we won’t fret as the profit will go towards signing that elusive world class striker leaving us with no midfield to create chances for him.
Disaster. Everywhere I look. Disaster.
You wanted back to basics? You got back to basics. This is football 101 and our ploy of ‘running around and kicking the ball a lot’ has finally collapsed in on itself.
The end is nigh. The fire started with a single match lit by your hands, Daniel, with further fuel added to the flames by Harry. It’s criminal that we’ve failed to compete with consistency and cohesiveness. We find ourselves in this position solely because of your mismanagement of the transfer windows and Harry’s player favouritism and abandoned first teams dumped out on loan. At least under Comolli we had direction, drive. All we have now is a manager winging it with battered feathers taking to the air for as long as a penguin can jump above ground.
Still playing your lyre, Emperor Levy? Your arrogance and self-preservation has once more destroyed all hope in N17. The blind leading the blind, you allow your general to march us into an untenable position and yet more failure. A battle that simply cannot be won. The dream is over. It's hart no longer white, but burnt black from the fire.
Play your lyre, watch us burn away. Watch us all burn away.
Yours tragically,
Spooky
