THE TOTTENHAM TROTS

Lasagne.  Great big dollopy plates of it.  That’s what I say to the doom-mongers and schadenfreudsters – those who have Tottenham not so much suffering food poisoning as already dead and buried.  Oh, it’s not that I disagree with the nay-sayers, this is more an indication of where the current sickness from which the side suffers really started to kick in.  For this, dear reader, is one of those relentless bugs that needs more than hardcore antibiotics to prevent it from becoming life-threatening.

The disease is a chronic one at The Lane that a couple of recent fifth place finishes were never going to hide.  Those infamous events of 6 May 2006 were significant but shouldn’t really fool anyone: Spurs may have succumbed to some dodgy catering ahead of that crucial last-day fixture at West Ham, but this wasn’t what really handed that final Champions’ League slot to rivals Arsenal – even if Wenger’s disciples still love to chant ‘we laughed ourselves to bits when Tottenham got the sh*ts’.  A couple of years before even this, we were already seeing self-destruction on a regular basis, with commanding positions thrown away on a regular basis, in particular two lots of three-goal leads squandered to the mid-table Cities of Manchester and Leicester.  This was clearly the Tottenham Trots seen in microcosm, a ninety-minute version of the greater ailment that now runs rife through this once-great club.

In 2008, even a sniff of fresh silverware cannot stem the brown tide: the sense of desperation and inferiority at Tottenham has reached epidemic proportions.  Blame Ramos?  Well, he came in with a pedigree (back-to-back UEFA Cups with ‘the Spurs of Spain’, Sevilla), but seems unable to communicate with his players, doing little more than muttering Spanish oaths and shrugging at the sheer mystery of it all, while refusing to share his Alka Seltzer with anyone.  Blame the players?  These are young men who themselves don’t so much babble in their variety of languages as not actually utter a word to one another: even the body language seems straight out of a phrase book that offers nothing – well, nothing other than fifty versions of ‘my stomach hurts’.  Blame Comolli?  The man at the head table doesn’t seem to want to risk his own illness by breathing the same atmosphere as manager and players, Ramos handed a shopping list and the players told to get on with it.  The transfer deadline was an absolute shambles unseen before at Tottenham.  For instance, if one feels any sympathetic loyalty for Ramos when he mithers about the last-minute confusion caused by ‘Berbagate’, then it’ll always be stemmed by the fact that the rest of us knew the languid Bulgarian striker was on his way over a year ago.  Robbie Keane’s move to Liverpool was ‘good business’ perhaps, but bizarre.  Even more foolish still was the earlier sale of Jermain Defoe to mid-table rivals Portsmouth, where the nippy England man continues to make hay.  Meanwhile, new boys David Bentley and Vedran Corluka have not bedded in at White Hart Lane as expected, while Euro 2008 stars Roman Pavlyuchenko and Luka Modric look out of their depth both seeming unable to deal with the inevitable knocks that the 100mph Premier League is always going to dish up.  The result is that Spurs, deep in their own do-do, sweating bullets and looking a wretched bunch of invalids, must now wait until January for any kind of miracle cure.  And with the door locked until then, this is desperate stuff…

So, the ailing soldiers march to Stoke, in the hope that their relegation buddies might this afternoon offer a spoonful of medicine at least to take the edge off the fever.  But, with defeats to Hull, Middlesbrough and Sunderland already recorded this season, even this hope appears a forlorn one: the Football Focus and Match of the Day pundits may think it’s simply a matter of time for a squad full of internationals to come good, but if these players are doing little other than infecting one another, it’s hard to predict anything but more immediate misery.  And ‘time’?  There simply isn’t any – not at ‘this level o’ the game’.  This trip to the Potteries quite plainly represents a hugely important fixture in the history of Tottenham Hotspur FC – lose this one and the season descends into crisis level: unlike thirty years ago, when the club last went down a level, relegation is not an option.   

So will we return from the Potteries having smashed plates in celebration or anger?  Suffice to say, if it’s the latter, we can forget anything as ‘exotic’ as lasagne.  It’ll be a diet of cold humble pie down in the chilly canteen of the Championship...    

Jeremy Simmonds

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