Daniel Levy, the Tottenham chairman, will be held to account by the club’s shareholders at their annual meeting next month after his second managerial sacking in the space of 12 months.

Levy has never been forgiven by Spurs supporters for the maladroit way he handled the dismissal of Martin Jol last season. The chairman can expect calls for his own removal by the crowd at the match at home to Bolton this afternoon after ditching Juande Ramos late last night. Ramos and his assistant, Gus Poyet, were told to clear their desks, as was the sporting director, Damien Comolli, and the other first-team coach, Marcos Alvarez. The club announced on their website that Clive Allen and Alex Inglethorpe would be in charge as caretakers for Bolton’s visit to White Hart Lane but that version of events was contradicted within minutes by Harry Redknapp, who said he would meet the Spurs players this morning and be in the dressing room before this afternoon’s match.

For much of October, Comolli had been widely expected to be the one who would pay the price for an expensively assembled squad’s appalling start to the season, but Ramos has been sent packing, too, with Spurs bottom of the Premier League and still without a win after eight matches and only two draws.

Levy had intended to give the Spaniard a little longer to improve matters but felt compelled to take action after Thursday’s 2-0 defeat by Udinese in the Uefa Cup had been accompanied by criticism of the management from two of the team’s England players. Jonathan Woodgate admitted Spurs were worse than his old Leeds United team, who were relegated in 2004, and David Bentley said confusion over tactics and muddled selection were behind what he described as “s***” form.

Acclaimed last season for winning the Carling Cup in a memorable victory against Chelsea, Ramos will be remembered for flattering to deceive. He leaves behind him a team devoid of confidence and morale, underachieving on a massive scale.

As Bentley, who was dropped in midweek, put it, nobody knew from one match to the next who he would be playing alongside, and all the changes proved counter-productive. In the year in which Ramos was in charge, Spurs spent £90m in the transfer market, recouping two-thirds of it, principally from the sales of Jermain Defoe, Robbie Keane and Dimitar Berbatov. They ended last season in 11th position, down from successive fifth-placed finishes under Jol, but with Bentley, Luka Modric and Roman Pavlyuchenko on board this was supposed to be their season, with a concerted push for a place in the Champions League confidently predicted. Instead, results have been disastrous.

Since their Carling Cup triumph in February, Tottenham have played 21 Premier League matches, winning just three. Defoe, Keane and Berbatov, all proven scorers, have not been properly replaced, Bentley, Modric and Pavlyuchenko have all been disappointing, and the reputation Ramos established in Spain, where he won the Uefa Cup twice with Sevilla, has been crumbling by the week.

Woodgate admitted after Thursday’s defeat in Italy that the unthinkable could happen and that Spurs could be relegated — a point another former Leeds player, Aaron Lennon, made in these columns recently when he said: “People up there thought we were too big and too good to go down, but that’s been proved wrong a lot of times, and this team can’t afford to think like that. At Leeds we should have been good enough to stay up, but once your confidence goes, everything goes. It’s a slippery slope.”

There will be sympathy for Ramos because of the way that Comolli, who exclusively was in charge of transfer dealings, saddled the manager with some bad buys, and Levy deserves his share of blame for delaying the inevitable transfer of Berbatov to Manchester United until the final minutes of the transfer window by holding out for an extra £2m.

Terry Venables was not alone in his opinion that the Bulgarian’s consequent sulking had “poisoned” the dressing room. But Keane’s eve-of-season departure to Liverpool had been a bigger blow, Lennon felt. He said: “Robbie was our captain and he’s missed a lot — off the pitch, as well as on it. Not only was he a world-class player, he was a good, strong character to have around.”

Critics also blamed Ramos’ poor command of English and communication problems for Tottenham’s shortcomings. The point was a valid one. Woodgate said recently that the manager’s exact meaning and intentions were often misconstrued by his players. Jol felt his work at Tottenham was undermined when he was saddled with “reinforcements” he did not want, such as Kevin-Prince Boateng, Ricardo Rocha, Younes Kaboul, Hossam Ghaly and Darren Bent. Ramos was known to feel the same way about more recent acquisitions and was deeply unhappy at the sale of Berbatov and Keane when there was no time to replace them adequately.

Only one club, Southampton, have survived in the Premier League after a start as bad as Spurs have made.

How the reign of Ramos unravelled

OCT 2007 Joins Spurs from Sevilla on a four-year contract when Martin Jol is sacked. Ramos had twice won the Uefa Cup with the Spanish club

FEB 2008 Leads Spurs to their first silverware in nearly a decade, with a Carling Cup win over Chelsea

MAY 2008 Tottenham finish the Premier League season in 11th place. Croatian Luka Modric is signed for a club record fee

JULY 2008 Forward Robbie Keane is sold to Liverpool but the club resist Manchester United's interest in star striker Dimitar Berbatov

SEPT 2008 Speculation about Berbatov's future dogs the club during the August transfer window, at the end of which the Bulgarian finally moves to United. Roman Pavlyuchenko signs for Tottenham

OCT 2008 A home defeat to Hull is followed by a loss at Stoke leaving Spurs rooted to the bottom of the League. They then lose 2-0 to Udinese in the Uefa Cup after a lacklustre display

OCT 25 Ramos is sacked 48 hours after the Udinese defeat. His assistant Gus Poyet and sporting director Damien Comolli also leave. Harry Redknapp, of Portsmouth, is appointed in his place