Strange times
It’s in these quieter moments that I find time to reflect. I’m reminded of how I started out blogging in the first place. Andy Reid. I’m serious. He is the single reason this blog exists. I did some banter on a football message board and the rest is history. Mostly in letters addressed to the chairman. The Glory Glory days.
Mary mother of Christ, we signed Andy Reid.
The amount of dross we’ve acquired in my lifetime, it’s a wonder how spoilt we have become in recent years. We must have got something right somewhere along the way.
A toast to Andy then. Make that twenty slices, eggs, bacon, beans, chips, pot of sugary tea.
Thank you for the satire your transfer saga acquisition birthed. Thank you for Michael Dawson.
Thank you for DML. Thank you for making me the most dominant, sexy and arguably greatest Tottenham blogger that has ever lived. Born on January 26th, sharing my birthday with Bill Nicholson (and ffs lol Jose Mourinho). I’ve never won a blogging award though. Spursy that.
Anyways…
So what’s up ye olde faithful in the comments section? We all good? All healthy I hope.
I’m not. Have I ever? The past two years have been fairly horrendous but I finally had some luck bestowed on me, only for it to be snatched away. So I’m back living every day as it comes. Adding to the vibrancy is this chest infection/virus I have. No, not that one. At least, I have no idea if it’s ‘that one’. The doctor suggests it’s a chest infection. This after three weeks of enduring a common cold. I mean, come on, when it rains it pours.
I’ve looked at that graphic of the symptoms. In the past three days I’ve literally had every single one of them. I mean, come on, is ambiguity part of the fear mongering? Do I self-isolate? Do I ask for antibiotics? Do I queue up at Tesco’s at 6am in the morning to get loo roll? Seriously, today, I went into my local store and there was practically nothing on the shelves. Dregs. This was at 4:30pm. I asked whether they stocked up daily and obviously they do. But I have to queue up at the crack of dawn (or just after) to then run into the store like it’s Black Friday and I’m gunning for a cheap OLED.
I would love to know if it’s the same customers, every day, going fully 1950s Americana with their nuclear fallout shelter sensibilities. The people are more interested in wiping their backsides than they are considering their community and those less fortunate.
Bog roll is the new gold bar in commerce. Don’t congregate in groups of people…unless you’re queuing up at Costco. The ever so subtle narrative of this crisis is pushed into the conscious mainstream of media consumption by the 24/7 media outlets churning out fear. You know, ‘cause bad news is another form of entertainment. The worst type of reality TV. All this after the editor has filtered out all the balance like an Insta-influencer stood half naked, bum airbrushed to perfection, begging for likes. Except the more fitting analogy here would be volcanic hives terraforming the crevice with horrific stretch marks.
It’s surreal. Things are so bad that the sports journo’s have conjured up a ‘Dejan Lovern to Spurs’ article.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?
Work from home. Don’t go to the pub but the pubs can still open probably because the government only wants to bail out the banks (and protect insurance companies getting a wallop) when they cheat and lose all our money, rather than stick in a contingency to help the proles.
I was quite cynical about this pandemic before we went mad with the supermarket sweeps. Watching the PM on his daily update, it seems maddening now. I thought only the snow stops us Brits. I remember the tabloid headlines back in the early 2000s detailing the imminent future when SARS kicked in on our shores. We got told 100k would die. In the end we had 7k-8k reported cases and just under 800 deaths. Which is still 800 loved ones gone. I would never have predicted the lock-downs across Europe and the slow moving strategy we’re currently living through. I can’t watch to watch viral videos of northerners on their estate balcony singing Vindaloo to each other. Ah, the demand for toilet paper makes sense now.
We want transparency and we want straight talking but I’m beginning to suspect even the scientific experts do not know the answers. It’s a new strand of the coronavirus, which means a new vaccine will take anywhere between 12-18 months to become available on a mass scale. It’s unnerving. More so when you see companies shutting stores and going into administration. Twisted irony that a biological inception is about to play havoc with our digital world.
It’s a time of discomfort. It’s also a time when the primal fears cloud instinct and judgement. The stockpiling. The re-selling of ordinary every day products that are now vital essentials (that are unlikely to run out so STOP STOCKPILING YOU LUNATICS). Everyone is panicking that the supermarkets will empty out and never refill. What’s that often repeated and altered quote about society being twenty-four hours and two meals away from absolute anarchy?
I don’t pretend to understand the finances of the world banks and first world governments. I can barely wrap my head around ENIC’s ownership of a football club so dropping soundbites like ‘…can’t we spare the odd half billion from our trillion pound military budget’ sounds logical but I’m certain the impact is far more complex and near enough impossible to navigate with my chimpanzee brain. Even if I do think the finance sectors of the world make it up as they go along.
edit: I stand corrected, Boris has delivered a £330 Billion pound safety net (government loans) for businesses (that’s more than the bank bail out - so that’s me put in my place). That’s one step. The Tories finally letting go of the slogans and soundbites. Progress. And yes, I do appreciate this staggered approach is there to protect the NHS and its workers. Comedy bits aside, this is hardly an easy process to plan and predict. As for the people losing their jobs (and the ones that don’t have one * cough *), I have not a clue what becomes of them.
Not sure I have any words of wisdom other than for everyone to just look out for themselves and perhaps try to consider others by disconnecting from the individualism and self-preservation - and consider community. I know, tricky to do so when we all might have to self-isolate soon. It’s coming, isn’t it? It’s going to be enforced. Then we see how far people bend the rules, from the outside looking in. Thank what ever created the universe that we’re not stockpiling bullets like our American cousins.
One thing I would point out, just as an extra salty nugget of thought, is that the professors - the experts - predicted this would happen years ago. The virus will always mutate and create a new set of conundrums for public health to deal with. Look into Michael Osterholm; an expert (and professor) in infectious disease epidemiology. To truly confuse matters other experts (David Heymann - check out his TED talk) has a more anchored and less dramatic outlook. The suggestion here concerns media manipulation. Amplify the worst case scenarios and hold back on the defining (boring) truths. All we can do is wait and see how it plays out.
So, what to we do? Football wise? Honestly, I was finding it difficult to care when there were actual games to watch. It doesn’t really matter does it. Nah, of course it does. Normally we love it. We love to hate it. But now is not the time to concern ourselves with silly questions about when the season can re-start and finish. Still, it’s worth having a muse about this, that and whatever else takes our fancy…
Here’s me dumping. You can clean up the mess with your own toilet paper, yeah.
Amazon documentary is gonna play out like This is Spinal Tap. A proper sh*t sandwich.
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Now that Spurs are in a right proper state, it’s time to side step Jose Mourinho and look towards Levy (again) and blame him, much like ‘we’ (the royal) have done for 20 odd years. Except when we’ve done okay and challenged, then we only blame him when we fall short.
There is certifiable reason and arguments to be had in our favour, in terms of decisive ruthless action to consolidate, that our chairman has not delivered. But that’s been done to death. One thing that is quite fancy, talking about media manipulation, is the way the supporters distort the reality of the football club, ripping it from the space time continuum of context and chucking vital arcs into a black hole.
“We’ve won 1 cup in 20 years m8, bloody disgraceful”
Now factor in, three cup finals. Countless semi-finals. Then appreciate how many of those twenty years were spent trying to catch up to the Top Four elite. Arguably, we’ve been on a trajectory since 2006. Would you disagree? And it took a fair while to puncture the upper echelons with our cock(erel). From a chicken on a ball to the fighting cocks.
Now take the pre-Levy era. What did we win? A fair bit, right? Let’s take the 20 years before ENIC rolled into town. So that would be 1981 - 2001.
Three FA Cups and two League Cups. One UEFA Cup. Runners-up three times (correct me). Six. On paper, it’s a fair difference.
This is where football supporters and their arguments, for and against, get muddled. Are we really going to compare the 1980s to the 2010s? Really? There is no debate from me that Poch’s side at its very best was every bit as iconic as that early 80s Spurs team. But football was a simplistic experience back then, in every-way conceivable. It wasn’t necessarily easy to win silverware but the playing field was more on a level pegging than it is today. Meaning it was possible for anyone to win something, as long as they had sustained quality and luck going in their favour. Much like Liverpool and all the farmers they beat on the way to their European Cup successes during the 70s and 80s.
We also had to recover from the Scholar/Sugar/El Tel mismanagement on and off the pitch.
Levy has got many things wrong. I have something to share in the very near future that you will think is pure satire. It isn’t. I just have to work out the legal logistics of posting it and if it’s the ethical thing to do. He’s also got many things right. In the long term, Spurs will always be competitive. What that looks like might be what we’re seeing today. Two or three clubs in the mix, cycles of success lasting 3-4 years, everyone gets a turn at winning something. Perhaps there’s 5 or 6 super powers in England that will deliver. Now and again, during shared states of flux, we’ll get another fairy-tale. It really is nothing like the 1980s.
Put it this way, Tottenham as a club in the 1980s is every bit akin to most of the former ‘top clubs’ playing Championship football currently. Compare Spurs 20 years ago to Spurs today. In my lifetime, the Levy era, I have actually believed we could win the title. That’s winning the title in possibly the most difficult era of football that has ever existed (thanks to pre-bloated financial ethics before FFP was introduced). Do not sleep on this.
Alas, we have to move on and we have to retain that sense of contending and not pretending. Over to you Mr Chairman.
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The Premier League suspended. Euro 2020 delayed until 2021. The debate remains whether Liverpool should be awarded the title even though they haven’t mathematically won it ‘yet’. It would have taken a society denting incursion to stop them and…oh wait. That’s actually happened. NULL AND VOID YOUR HONOUR, NULL AND VOID. At least Kane will be back for England and rival fans will have a ready made scapegoat. 2021, the summer of love! Can’t wait.
At least we don’t have to watch Spurs struggle with no recognised forwards. No nucleus in the centre of the field. Centre-backs with their best days behind them. A keeper, a great servant, that keeps dropping the tray, champagne all over the carpet. Too many wingers. Too many injuries. Tottenham has been in self-isolation for a good 12 months tbf. It’s like Lasagnagate without the runs in the box.
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So we wanted Poch out because of the miserable football and we’ve got in a serial winner to turn things around quickly by…playing miserable football. Okay. I’m half jesting, but there’s question marks all over the place. Imagine a heat map covered in them. Which is a bit funny as we appear to have a fair few question marks in our first team. Jose is no longer special in the eyes of the media (breaking news that).
They love a hatchet job on him. So do our fans. And I can’t blame them. He’s Chelsea, he’s a destroyer of souls. He’s past it? Some of the criticism is worthy of some introspection for sure. But, was he really expected to turn things around quickly? Aside from the vocal minority that were adamant replacing Poch would turn us into cup winners.
The worst ever Tottenham side under Poch got to a Champions League final. Regardless of the revisionist blurb about papering over the cracks, we lived a dream. For a bit. But this isn’t a Jose team. It’s Poch’s failing/failed/burn out squad.
So if (LOL) Daniel Levy backs his manager we might see progressive improvement when the new season starts. We might see some compact, solid, effective football. It will still be miserable to watch no doubt, but hey, you wanted a serial winner’s mentality. The only question that needs answering is whether Jose is still special whilst I scratch my head (Hoddle style) and pose another question; is he magic?
Thanks for your time. Please be gently with typos and grammatical clusterf*cks. I’m ill and I haven’t edited this article more than once.
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