whitestreak
SC Supporter
- Dec 8, 2006
- 833
- 3,417
21st June 2013 - The Sharks are Circling
There’s almost always something inevitable sad about a revolution. They always look fantastic on television when you’re miles away and the characters involved are remote enough to be presented to you in the most simplistic terms, with the general narrative being that the establishment is conceited, intolerant, greedy, power hungry, nepotistic and oppressive. This is generally spot on. It’s when the revolutionaries appear that the truth begins to get in the way of a good story for the perennially imperiled but adrenaline addicted foreign correspondent.
Ten years later a much duller brand of journalist arrives to find tentative peace. The revolutionaries wear suits now, and have taken up residence in the Palace (which has been renamed the ‘People’s Palace’ but remains off limits to the public). They have replaced their predecessors’ nepotistic appointments with those of their own, halted persecution of one group while prompting the lynching of another, and become generally disdainful of anyone outside their own circle which they insist remains closed.
So what has this got to do with anything? Looking at the bi-annual asset stripping that one percent of football conducts upon the rest, I can’t help but feel like one of those revolutionaries; I want upheaval in the game, but more specifically upheaval that will end with Tottenham Hotspur in the one percent.
Indeed it would be a nice time for things to be turned on their head, what with the rich getting richer like never
before and a new breed of Champions League super elite emerging. The gulf that is opening between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have mores’ has become excruciatingly wide; the divide between the ‘have mores’ and the ‘have our health’s’ would now be measured in the sort of numbers associated with astrophysics and the distances involved are equally impossible. It is to the point where any fancied player plying his trade outside of this cluster of superclubs has become offensive to football’s collective consciousness, like a Van Gogh left hung beside the dart board at the Rat and Trumpet. The things that must be whispered in Daniel’s Levy ear right now; I imagine when he looks at Gareth Bale all he sees is Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal.
In addition, every time I succumb to tabloid gossip I find that a club which I had previously given little thought to is willing to offer a sum equivalent to Greece’s national debt for a player whose value I had considered only on par with Ireland’s. Chelsea set a template for this money fisted instant rise, a template itself well known within the entertainment industry; act as though someone has always been a star and sooner or later the public will cease to recall that this isn’t actually the case. It’s forgotten now, but in the instant aftermath of Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea takeover there was an outpouring of discontent that this skint club (that had blown so much money on hotels that even Champions League qualification could not pull them from the mire) were suddenly given a free pass to success that once required a bit of patience and know how. In fairness football clubs had bought cups before, but in a quaintly regional and always temporary manner, the last exhibit being Blackburn Rovers who in a different era perhaps could have managed a decade or so of challenging. Chelsea are a different beast, but one no longer criticized for being so.
When Manchester City, PSG and Monaco became new money, commenting on the unfairness of it all seemed like a hopelessly naïve position. Like with banker’s bonuses, outrage has gradually softened into doe eyed cooing, perhaps because underneath the anger many of us secretly hope that we can emulate one of the otherwise unremarkable people who stumble almost oblivious into high paying finance jobs in the manner chronicled in Michael Lewis books. Likewise, for all our jibes on the traditional and historical shortcomings of these yuppie clubs, we discreetly wish that some shadowy figure from a country somewhere either inside or bordering Asia will elect not to build the schools and hospitals and reservoirs that would change the lives of millions of his countrymen, but instead pour his money into buying our middling club and decking out the team with previously unimaginable quality. This is, of course, after first fulfilling the obligation to stick with whatever jabbering wreck of a manager is inherited and allowing him to spend a year pursuing a transfer policy analogous to standing over a shredder with bags of fifty pound notes.
Would we want this? Of course we would. But it does not come without a cost. Ageing lottery winners sometimes recount the melancholy that sets in after the euphoria, as the unsettling realization dawns that the life they lived beforehand, and all the agonized decisions and labored enterprises that defined it, has suddenly become utterly trivial in the grand scheme of things. The Mr and Mrs Jones who spent the winter deliberating over whether a holiday in Devon could be justified when the loft needs insulating, effectively no longer exist.
Likewise, in the event of an affluent takeover, decades worth of experiences supporting a club like Spurs are reduced to a ponderous footnote, if they are not discarded completely. All those distracted hours spent debating seemingly salient issues such as the potential of John Bostock, the latent (or otherwise) ability of Tom Huddlestone or the correct utilization of Adel Taraabt are no longer happily pointless, but absurdly so. If Vladimir Putin were to flee Russia tomorrow and use Tottenham Hotspur as a vessel to store the not insignificant proportion of the country’s GDP he had taken with him, you would scarcely hear the names of Stephen Caulker and Tom Carroll again and barely notice that Aaron Lennon and Michael Dawson had been given away to charity.
Like the frugal Mr and Mrs Jones, the Spurs fan who would have cared about such things ceases to be.
I suppose to the powers that be, in a game where the cost of an acclaimed player is nearer and nearer to that of an international airport, these fans have ceased to exist anyway.
So without further a due, the player ratings
The Good;
Hugo Lloris has had a good first year in English football, particularly considering that continental keepers struggle when entrusted with the supervision of large mammals such as Andy Carroll or Jonathon Walters. Friedel too retained his quality, although I believe the two keepers are too different in their games to rotate; the defense, edgy at the best of times, clearly struggled to flip between Lloris’ sweeper keeping and Friedel’s line hugging.
Jan Vertoghen, our cultured centre back and sometime inconsistent left back had a strong debut season too, although must improve next season to be truly one of the division’s best defenders. A superior player to Michael Dawson, but he shares the captain’s tendency to sully good performances with unnecessary mistakes, and the two are also prone to inexplicable poor performances in otherwise rich veins of form. Jan is adapting and this is not a concern as yet, but Dawson needs to cut out the handful of errors which just cost him the mantle of ‘rock’ season after season; nonetheless, to emerge as captain from the trapdoor of an enforced transfer to QPR he deserves credit.
I can’t say Stephen Caulker has made any impression on me, which I suppose is a fair result for a developing centre back.
Kyle Walker was somewhat of a scapegoat this season. It is true that his positioning can be poor and his offensive play lacking nuance, but there is not the decline that some have suggested and he improved after Christmas. He is a young, and these fits and stops are almost inevitable.
This seems to be a reoccurring theme in the development of a young player; so chuffed are we with this new thing we’ve found that we suppress all our misgivings up to a point where they can no longer be contained and erupt uncontrollably. Some of these players will progress beyond this point, and the criticisms become a humorous footnote in their career. Others will not, and the praise that preceded the bile will be forgotten with the player. Walker is at this crossroads now; he could follow the demise of Michael Duberry, but I believe he could still have a Micah Richards renaissance in him.
Aaron Lennon had a stop start season and there is cloying inability to put a run of form together lasting more than a few months. Lennon is somewhat of a catch-22. He drifts in and out of games (and seasons), has an inconsistent, if underrated, final ball, and scores a fraction of what he should. But then if he rectified all these flaws in his game he would be valued similarly to Gareth Bale; to put it another way, if we were to replace him with a player who brought all of his qualities and none of his weaknesses, we would have to at least double our record transfer fee in the process. Aaron cost approximately a quarter of a Ben Thatcher.
In midfield Sandro cruelly had his season cut short just as we were beginning to understand what all this beast stuff was about. A player I must admit I do not love to the compulsory level is Moussa Dembele. For a small number of games I witnessed the man described by Martin Jol as the best player on the ball he had ever seen. I was impressed; he did not have the range of passing Luka Modric provided, but his all round game was more developed and arguably more suited to Premier League football. Of course there came an injury. The Dembele I had seen before – dynamic, probing, physical, dominant, dangerous- was replaced by a player I would describe as an upgraded Jermaine Jenas; tidy, reliable, competent.
It is now irrelevant to describe Bale, so I won’t. Without him we would have fought Liverpool for respectable mid-table for the sake of respectable mid-table.
The Somewhere In-between
Kyle Naughton has pulled off that trick of being a couple of years older than everyone thinks and having the benefit of doubt accordingly (Jermaine Jenas (again) was a master of this, being about 28 before he was no longer valued for his potential). He seems a decent sort, but the kind that you want as a squad player without ever caring to see in the team.
There is a cohort of players whose heads I believe have proved immune to Villas Boas’ pro-active modern business executive demeanor. One is Benoit Assou Ekotto, whose always languid style has now descended beyond nonchalant; he increasingly reminds me of one of those peripheral rap singers who has about three lines in a song, and so spends the vast majority of his time walking up and down the stage, looking into the distance and nodding casually at nothing in particular.
GyfilSigurðsson and Lewis Holtby look like variations on the same theme. Perhaps spared criticism for his youth, no player has amassed as many anonymous minutes as Sigurðsson, but then when he looks like class he looks like class. Holtby, in contrast, never disappears, but can often seem immature even when his age is taken into consideration, dashing around aimlessly like a schoolboy league player whose teachers really quite hope will make it, seeing as academics will not be his path to a fulfilled life, suspecting Attention Deficient Disorder but not quite sure how to suggest it to the parents. Both he and Sigurðssondeveloped an irritating habit for impressing as substitutes, being rewarded with a starting place, and blowing the opportunity.
Tom Carroll has been talked of kindly, and deservedly so, looking neat, composed and forward thinking in his cameos, even if still needing a defining contribution to announce his arrival. Whether Villas Boas thought last season was too soon for him, is more conservative about youth than he likes to let on, or simply is not all that sold on Carroll will become apparent over the coming months.
Scott Parker, for all there is to admire about him, joins Robbie Keane and Edgar Davids in having his age catch up with him seemingly overnight.
It is almost out of politeness that Tom Huddlestone is given a mention. Its not that he has played badly, and in fact had one or two outstanding spells. It’s more that he is one of those unfortunate footballers that missed out by a generation or two, like Jamie Redknapp or Andy Reid before him. You can’t help the feeling that had he been born thirty years earlier he would be a star, but the landscape of the Premier League midfield has never been the same after Patrick Viera. Tom can hit a wonderful pass, but he inherently takes his time to do so, slowing the game down and telegraphing in the process. He reminds me of a very old computer game called World Cup Italia 90 where all the players were a horseshoe shape and would have to receive the ball, stop, and rotate in the direction they wished to pass it. To the best of my knowledge it’s considered one of the worst games of the nineties.
Clint Dempsey is the biggest anomaly in a Spurs shirt for some years. Goals, assists, and must crucially, goals again, but season defining goals. Mostly awful performances mind you. Statistics also spare Jermaine Defoe from the barbs that would be otherwise forthcoming. If he does not score he does little, and he scores too little goals, and far far too little important goals, for this to be an acceptable compromise. Villas Boas proclamation that he was as good as Radamel Falcao suggests our manager has attended the same PR school as Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf.
The Bad
I remember reading an interview with a member of the Rolling Stones, which one I’m not quite sure, Keith I think, who shared a secret of the trade; no matter how badly a gig goes, make sure to give it socks cut from the skin of an all but extinct animal on the last number and then the crowd goes home happy, their memory wiped of the preceding two hours of banality. Perhaps Adebayor read this interview too. A miserable failure.
And next season? Ah, that’s a whole rant onto itself.
There’s almost always something inevitable sad about a revolution. They always look fantastic on television when you’re miles away and the characters involved are remote enough to be presented to you in the most simplistic terms, with the general narrative being that the establishment is conceited, intolerant, greedy, power hungry, nepotistic and oppressive. This is generally spot on. It’s when the revolutionaries appear that the truth begins to get in the way of a good story for the perennially imperiled but adrenaline addicted foreign correspondent.
Ten years later a much duller brand of journalist arrives to find tentative peace. The revolutionaries wear suits now, and have taken up residence in the Palace (which has been renamed the ‘People’s Palace’ but remains off limits to the public). They have replaced their predecessors’ nepotistic appointments with those of their own, halted persecution of one group while prompting the lynching of another, and become generally disdainful of anyone outside their own circle which they insist remains closed.
So what has this got to do with anything? Looking at the bi-annual asset stripping that one percent of football conducts upon the rest, I can’t help but feel like one of those revolutionaries; I want upheaval in the game, but more specifically upheaval that will end with Tottenham Hotspur in the one percent.
Indeed it would be a nice time for things to be turned on their head, what with the rich getting richer like never
before and a new breed of Champions League super elite emerging. The gulf that is opening between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have mores’ has become excruciatingly wide; the divide between the ‘have mores’ and the ‘have our health’s’ would now be measured in the sort of numbers associated with astrophysics and the distances involved are equally impossible. It is to the point where any fancied player plying his trade outside of this cluster of superclubs has become offensive to football’s collective consciousness, like a Van Gogh left hung beside the dart board at the Rat and Trumpet. The things that must be whispered in Daniel’s Levy ear right now; I imagine when he looks at Gareth Bale all he sees is Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal.
In addition, every time I succumb to tabloid gossip I find that a club which I had previously given little thought to is willing to offer a sum equivalent to Greece’s national debt for a player whose value I had considered only on par with Ireland’s. Chelsea set a template for this money fisted instant rise, a template itself well known within the entertainment industry; act as though someone has always been a star and sooner or later the public will cease to recall that this isn’t actually the case. It’s forgotten now, but in the instant aftermath of Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea takeover there was an outpouring of discontent that this skint club (that had blown so much money on hotels that even Champions League qualification could not pull them from the mire) were suddenly given a free pass to success that once required a bit of patience and know how. In fairness football clubs had bought cups before, but in a quaintly regional and always temporary manner, the last exhibit being Blackburn Rovers who in a different era perhaps could have managed a decade or so of challenging. Chelsea are a different beast, but one no longer criticized for being so.
When Manchester City, PSG and Monaco became new money, commenting on the unfairness of it all seemed like a hopelessly naïve position. Like with banker’s bonuses, outrage has gradually softened into doe eyed cooing, perhaps because underneath the anger many of us secretly hope that we can emulate one of the otherwise unremarkable people who stumble almost oblivious into high paying finance jobs in the manner chronicled in Michael Lewis books. Likewise, for all our jibes on the traditional and historical shortcomings of these yuppie clubs, we discreetly wish that some shadowy figure from a country somewhere either inside or bordering Asia will elect not to build the schools and hospitals and reservoirs that would change the lives of millions of his countrymen, but instead pour his money into buying our middling club and decking out the team with previously unimaginable quality. This is, of course, after first fulfilling the obligation to stick with whatever jabbering wreck of a manager is inherited and allowing him to spend a year pursuing a transfer policy analogous to standing over a shredder with bags of fifty pound notes.
Would we want this? Of course we would. But it does not come without a cost. Ageing lottery winners sometimes recount the melancholy that sets in after the euphoria, as the unsettling realization dawns that the life they lived beforehand, and all the agonized decisions and labored enterprises that defined it, has suddenly become utterly trivial in the grand scheme of things. The Mr and Mrs Jones who spent the winter deliberating over whether a holiday in Devon could be justified when the loft needs insulating, effectively no longer exist.
Likewise, in the event of an affluent takeover, decades worth of experiences supporting a club like Spurs are reduced to a ponderous footnote, if they are not discarded completely. All those distracted hours spent debating seemingly salient issues such as the potential of John Bostock, the latent (or otherwise) ability of Tom Huddlestone or the correct utilization of Adel Taraabt are no longer happily pointless, but absurdly so. If Vladimir Putin were to flee Russia tomorrow and use Tottenham Hotspur as a vessel to store the not insignificant proportion of the country’s GDP he had taken with him, you would scarcely hear the names of Stephen Caulker and Tom Carroll again and barely notice that Aaron Lennon and Michael Dawson had been given away to charity.
Like the frugal Mr and Mrs Jones, the Spurs fan who would have cared about such things ceases to be.
I suppose to the powers that be, in a game where the cost of an acclaimed player is nearer and nearer to that of an international airport, these fans have ceased to exist anyway.
The Good, the Bad, and the Somewhere In-between
Player Ratings 2012/2013
Ah, Tottenham Hotspur. We can’t just be politely not quite good enough in the respectable manner of Everton. Instead we have to be not quite good enough in the tragically comical manner of Del Trotter. Spurs really are like an extended nine month episode of Only Fools and Horses. Up to April the club is an embodiment of Del Boy; wide stance, sheepskin coat, cigar dangling, hands rubbing together giddily, everything coming together, lovely jubbly. By the end of May the head is stooped forward in disbelief, the eyes bulging, mouth open, seeking some explanation for the seemingly impossible twist of fate. Gordon Bennett.So without further a due, the player ratings
The Good;
Hugo Lloris has had a good first year in English football, particularly considering that continental keepers struggle when entrusted with the supervision of large mammals such as Andy Carroll or Jonathon Walters. Friedel too retained his quality, although I believe the two keepers are too different in their games to rotate; the defense, edgy at the best of times, clearly struggled to flip between Lloris’ sweeper keeping and Friedel’s line hugging.
Jan Vertoghen, our cultured centre back and sometime inconsistent left back had a strong debut season too, although must improve next season to be truly one of the division’s best defenders. A superior player to Michael Dawson, but he shares the captain’s tendency to sully good performances with unnecessary mistakes, and the two are also prone to inexplicable poor performances in otherwise rich veins of form. Jan is adapting and this is not a concern as yet, but Dawson needs to cut out the handful of errors which just cost him the mantle of ‘rock’ season after season; nonetheless, to emerge as captain from the trapdoor of an enforced transfer to QPR he deserves credit.
I can’t say Stephen Caulker has made any impression on me, which I suppose is a fair result for a developing centre back.
Kyle Walker was somewhat of a scapegoat this season. It is true that his positioning can be poor and his offensive play lacking nuance, but there is not the decline that some have suggested and he improved after Christmas. He is a young, and these fits and stops are almost inevitable.
This seems to be a reoccurring theme in the development of a young player; so chuffed are we with this new thing we’ve found that we suppress all our misgivings up to a point where they can no longer be contained and erupt uncontrollably. Some of these players will progress beyond this point, and the criticisms become a humorous footnote in their career. Others will not, and the praise that preceded the bile will be forgotten with the player. Walker is at this crossroads now; he could follow the demise of Michael Duberry, but I believe he could still have a Micah Richards renaissance in him.
Aaron Lennon had a stop start season and there is cloying inability to put a run of form together lasting more than a few months. Lennon is somewhat of a catch-22. He drifts in and out of games (and seasons), has an inconsistent, if underrated, final ball, and scores a fraction of what he should. But then if he rectified all these flaws in his game he would be valued similarly to Gareth Bale; to put it another way, if we were to replace him with a player who brought all of his qualities and none of his weaknesses, we would have to at least double our record transfer fee in the process. Aaron cost approximately a quarter of a Ben Thatcher.
In midfield Sandro cruelly had his season cut short just as we were beginning to understand what all this beast stuff was about. A player I must admit I do not love to the compulsory level is Moussa Dembele. For a small number of games I witnessed the man described by Martin Jol as the best player on the ball he had ever seen. I was impressed; he did not have the range of passing Luka Modric provided, but his all round game was more developed and arguably more suited to Premier League football. Of course there came an injury. The Dembele I had seen before – dynamic, probing, physical, dominant, dangerous- was replaced by a player I would describe as an upgraded Jermaine Jenas; tidy, reliable, competent.
It is now irrelevant to describe Bale, so I won’t. Without him we would have fought Liverpool for respectable mid-table for the sake of respectable mid-table.
The Somewhere In-between
Kyle Naughton has pulled off that trick of being a couple of years older than everyone thinks and having the benefit of doubt accordingly (Jermaine Jenas (again) was a master of this, being about 28 before he was no longer valued for his potential). He seems a decent sort, but the kind that you want as a squad player without ever caring to see in the team.
There is a cohort of players whose heads I believe have proved immune to Villas Boas’ pro-active modern business executive demeanor. One is Benoit Assou Ekotto, whose always languid style has now descended beyond nonchalant; he increasingly reminds me of one of those peripheral rap singers who has about three lines in a song, and so spends the vast majority of his time walking up and down the stage, looking into the distance and nodding casually at nothing in particular.
GyfilSigurðsson and Lewis Holtby look like variations on the same theme. Perhaps spared criticism for his youth, no player has amassed as many anonymous minutes as Sigurðsson, but then when he looks like class he looks like class. Holtby, in contrast, never disappears, but can often seem immature even when his age is taken into consideration, dashing around aimlessly like a schoolboy league player whose teachers really quite hope will make it, seeing as academics will not be his path to a fulfilled life, suspecting Attention Deficient Disorder but not quite sure how to suggest it to the parents. Both he and Sigurðssondeveloped an irritating habit for impressing as substitutes, being rewarded with a starting place, and blowing the opportunity.
Tom Carroll has been talked of kindly, and deservedly so, looking neat, composed and forward thinking in his cameos, even if still needing a defining contribution to announce his arrival. Whether Villas Boas thought last season was too soon for him, is more conservative about youth than he likes to let on, or simply is not all that sold on Carroll will become apparent over the coming months.
Scott Parker, for all there is to admire about him, joins Robbie Keane and Edgar Davids in having his age catch up with him seemingly overnight.
It is almost out of politeness that Tom Huddlestone is given a mention. Its not that he has played badly, and in fact had one or two outstanding spells. It’s more that he is one of those unfortunate footballers that missed out by a generation or two, like Jamie Redknapp or Andy Reid before him. You can’t help the feeling that had he been born thirty years earlier he would be a star, but the landscape of the Premier League midfield has never been the same after Patrick Viera. Tom can hit a wonderful pass, but he inherently takes his time to do so, slowing the game down and telegraphing in the process. He reminds me of a very old computer game called World Cup Italia 90 where all the players were a horseshoe shape and would have to receive the ball, stop, and rotate in the direction they wished to pass it. To the best of my knowledge it’s considered one of the worst games of the nineties.
Clint Dempsey is the biggest anomaly in a Spurs shirt for some years. Goals, assists, and must crucially, goals again, but season defining goals. Mostly awful performances mind you. Statistics also spare Jermaine Defoe from the barbs that would be otherwise forthcoming. If he does not score he does little, and he scores too little goals, and far far too little important goals, for this to be an acceptable compromise. Villas Boas proclamation that he was as good as Radamel Falcao suggests our manager has attended the same PR school as Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf.
The Bad
I remember reading an interview with a member of the Rolling Stones, which one I’m not quite sure, Keith I think, who shared a secret of the trade; no matter how badly a gig goes, make sure to give it socks cut from the skin of an all but extinct animal on the last number and then the crowd goes home happy, their memory wiped of the preceding two hours of banality. Perhaps Adebayor read this interview too. A miserable failure.
And next season? Ah, that’s a whole rant onto itself.
