Is
Redknapp the right man for Tottenham?
Is
Redknapp a Portsmouth hero or villain?
Martin
Samuel debates a two-tier Premier League.
Anyone that ever worked at the Daily Express would know why Tottenham
Hotspur are in the cart. It is the changing. The constant upheaval. The
inconsistency. No idea is given time to work, each policy contradicts the
last. Muddled thinking is the calling card of many failures and the Express
has long been on a downward trend.
By contrast, though, Tottenham’s board has no excuse. The club have been doing
OK. Several times in the past decade, they have been on the verge of a
breakthrough. Yet once more, this morning, a new regime at White Hart Lane
is starting from scratch.
The Express was old Conservative, then shifted to new Labour. It tried
to become a tabloid with an upmarket style but was then sold to a
pornography baron. Now, as the nosedive continues, it feeds its readers
morbid obsessions and doom about house prices and the weather, while
discarding journalists by the coachload. It exists as a lesson in how not to
run a newspaper, and Tottenham are its football equivalent.
Tottenham have a philosophy, but not one that they stay faithful to for any
length of time. No concept gets the opportunity to flourish. If a plan isn’t
instantly successful, it is dumped and a new one is installed; just like the Express.
Remember when David Pleat was the director of football and the policy was to
buy up the best young English players, relatively cheaply, from the smaller
clubs. That did not last. In May 2004, Frank Arnesen arrived from PSV
Eindhoven to become director of football, soon joined by Jacques Santini,
the former coach of France. The director of football is a powerful figure at
Tottenham, of equal importance to the manager it would seem, and considering
that the club have subsequently had four of these awkward marriages in as
many years it is not hard to see why they have lost direction.
Santini and Arnesen were together for four months before the Frenchman quit,
letting in Martin Jol, who worked with Arnesen until the director of
football jumped ship for Chelsea eight months later, to be replaced by
Damien Comolli who formed a team – in the loosest sense – with Jol for two
years, before Jol was sacked for Ramos, who was out the door in a year,
followed by Comolli. And each of these changes wreaked havoc with
Tottenham’s stability because the only constant thing about the club is the
belief of Daniel Levy, the chairman, that a manager cannot be trusted to do
his transfer business without interference from his unwanted sidekick,
directing football.
Levy sees this model thriving on the Continent and cannot understand why it
causes so much controversy at his club, but he misses the point.
Unless the director of football has been running the operation for such a
length of time that it is shaped to his design, and any manager must accept
that on arrival – think of Dario Gradi as technical director of Crewe
Alexandra – then the most important relationship is between the director of
football and the manager, not the director of football and the board.
Yet apart from Arnesen and Jol, when have Tottenham’s management team ever
been simpatico? Too many managers have left muttering darkly, if not always
publicly, about being out of the loop on transfer business for it to be
coincidence.
The board does not need to be best mates with the director of football because
the board still has the final say. It never truly cedes power, so its
position is always taken into account. This is not true of the manager.
Without a doubt, a director of football assumes responsibility that would
traditionally be with the manager, so unless the two share a philosophy of
how the club are to move forward, there is going to be resentment. Tottenham
have never given enough thought to how this model should work.
And they have therefore ended up with Harry Redknapp, the antithesis of the
previous regimes, an old-fashioned fixer of problems, detailed to look no
further than the match against Arsenal on Wednesday, because Tottenham’s
league position no longer affords the luxury of ambitious forward planning.
And if Levy is sensible, he will keep it that way. Nobody directs football at
Manchester United better than Sir Alex Ferguson; there is no philosophy at
Arsenal more powerful than that of Arsène Wenger.
If the manager is right, a director of football responsible for anything more
than youth development is superfluous. Maybe Levy never thought he had the
right manager; or maybe, like the falling circulation of the Daily Express,
with his policies he as good as ensured it.
And another thing...
Who would be a referee?
There is a reason that schoolboy football teams often find it hard to get a
volunteer to go in goal. It is the fear of the one mistake. All over the
pitch, passes are going astray, chances are scuffed wide, tackles are missed
and life continues; but if the goalkeeper slips up, the ball finishes in the
net and, for that moment, everything stops. It is a dreadful, lonely
position and one can only presume that Keith Hackett was never a goalkeeper.
If the general manager of the Professional Game Match Officials Board had
been, he would know that to abandon referees to the same cruel regimen is no
way forward for football. Rob Styles had already got one big judgment call
wrong this season when, last Monday, he made another that was dubious. So
this week, Styles has been demoted to Football League duty and is said to be
so disillusioned that he is considering quitting. No wonder. It is right
that referees should be accountable, but not that they should be subjected
to a procedure that imposes public humiliation for a performance that is
less than perfect.
Greeting individual mistakes with relegation is dogmatic and narrow rules are
already a problem. The harshness of the penalty given against Newcastle
United by Styles was compounded by his necessity to give Habib Beye, the
defender, a red card for what was, at worst, an attempt at a fair tackle
mistimed by a fraction of a second. Yet there was no shade of grey available
to Styles, no room for rationalisation. In a kinder world, he could have
given the penalty and judged it sentence enough. He could have ruled that,
while committing a foul on Robinho, the Manchester City forward, Beye was
trying genuinely to get the ball and, having already conceded a penalty,
then to reduce Newcastle to ten men would be too much.
Even those of us who thought Styles mistaken, including Joe Kinnear, the
Newcastle interim manager, had some sympathy for him. Sadly, there is no
room for reason in modern football. So Styles was forced to hit Newcastle
twice, increasing the magnitude of his error and the forcefulness of the
sanction against him. In the meantime, the FA publicises its Respect
campaign with the news that 7,000 referees quit each season. Go figure.
Platini stats don’t add up
Michel Platini, the Uefa president, is sceptical that England will win the
World Cup again. He cites statistics, specifically the fact that there are
“hardly any” English players in the final stages of the Champions League.
Not quite. Here is a list of the player representatives in the semi-final
stages of last season’s competition. England 13, Spain 9, France 6, Portugal
5, Argentina 4, Brazil / Holland / Ivory Coast 3, Czech Republic / Slovakia /
Norway / Israel / Germany /Ghana / Ukraine / Finland / Italy /South Korea /
Mexico / Cameroon / Wales / Scotland / Iceland / Serbia 1. Interesting also
that, using Platini’s method of determining the potential for World Cup
success, Brazil have as much chance of winning it as Ivory Coast, and Wales
and Iceland are on a par with Italy and Germany.
There must be some wealthy bookmakers around his way.
The Blair hitch project
Speculation grows that Lord PleasedMan of Hello, Is This Thing On, the
chairman of the FA, is to invite Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, to
join his march-of-the-politicians bid team for the 2018 World Cup. That, as
they no doubt say in Fifa circles, should just about put the tin hat on it.
No laughing matter
When Mark Hughes, the Manchester City manager, was confronted with the latest
gossip about Ronaldo, the Brazil striker, joining his club, it is said that
he almost doubled up with laughter. This is a far healthier attitude than
that which has driven many of the rumours emanating from City since the Abu
Dhabi takeover. The future of the club is not with ageing superstars whose
primary worth is selling shirts in Asia; leave that sort of business to AC
Milan.
Why the law’s an ass
Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr, the owners of Liverpool, intend to use
profits from the club to service interest payments, and this has provoked
outrage. If it is wrong, then, to allow massive borrowing to finance a
company takeover, and to use the profits of that company to finance the
takeover, it is a fault with business law, not with football. The same
Government ministers that pontificate on the state of the game could press
to outlaw it in Parliament, but that would upset the City, so they won’t.
You cannot be serious
It is an open secret that Flavio Briatore, the joint owner of Queens Park
Rangers, intends to have a say in team selection. This makes the speculation
on the identity of Iain Dowie’s successor meaningless. Roberto Mancini and
Terry Venables have been mentioned, but no serious football man would take
the job in those circumstances.
Quest for information
Quest, the investigation company that has spent several years looking for
corruption in football with about as much success as O. J. Simpson had
finding the person that murdered his former wife, has a new client. He is
Max Mosley, president of the FIA, the governing body of Formula One, who has
engaged it in a bid to uncover the conspiracy that he believes was
responsible for putting his colourful private life on the front page of the News
of the World. Interestingly, Quest is run by Lord Stevens of
Kirkwhelpington who, as the former head of the Metropolitan Police, enjoyed
a lucrative sideline as a columnist specialising on crime and security
matters for, you guessed it, the News of the World. This is what is
known as playing both ends against the middle, a practice it is quite
possible that Mosley enjoys in his spare time.
The name of the game?
Greater credibility would be attached to the latest allegations of match
fixing, if the author of a book that claims matches were bent during the
2006 World Cup was prepared to name publicly the teams involved in his
investigation. That he is not suggests there are still loose ends.
Put the debate on hold
Phil Gartside, the Bolton Wanderers chairman, wants a two-tier Premier League
of 36 clubs with no relegation to the Football League. I think the
meritocratic pyramid is the heart of football, and to lose it would be
ruinous. “It is time for a debate,” Gartside said. So have one. Although
you’ll be talking among yourselves for a while as I am on holiday next week.
I’ll get involved on my return.
The Debate
Two-tier Premier League with no relegation? Discuss. To
take part, click here
