Manchester City away then.
According to some top ranking statisticians a few harrowing facts have emerged today. Tottingham have drawn their last 23 games and Mick McCarthy’s 11 year old niece Kylie, has scored more goals for her school netball team than Pav, Defoe and 3MP combined.
Going into this game is like waiting on welcome but extremely unlikely news. Ben Shepherd sound remotely convincing when talking about football, your missus telling you that left the bathroom looking emaculate, a lottery win.
This entire Premiership has been below par of course. Manchester United will win the Championship based upon being significantly less profligate than anyone else. Especially Arsenal. To a lesser extent Cheatski. The remaining European places will be scrambled for by those who can at least fake momentum and roll over the finish line.
Spurs look inept and unlikely to snatch even 5th spot. Cue the stock rant about all the points dropped long before we got here. I refuse to indulge anyone telling me it will be close. Close implies some class of neck and neck competition. This isn’t close. This is an asthmatic with a bag over his head lurching towards ‘some’ noise hoping for a respite, a kind word, a chair, a glass of water.
I fundamentally doubt Arry’s nouse to steer us through the 18 games of the Europa. I think he’d find playing our first squad in it irresistible. If we did qualify then the side entered ought be comprised of O’Hara, PSB, Hutton, Dos Santos, Jenas and such. As I mentioned here the other day, this might even make one or two of them look more appealing when it comes to flogging ’em off.
We are in for a long summer my friends. And the few satisfying moments of the season will be meager rations when the stories come stealing in. Modders in exchange for Berbatov and cash would be my favourite. Bale’s stock has fallen of late due to his inability to replicate that hat trick in every game since that game and so this might just insulate us against real threats and just produce random piffle about him being Barcelona’s number one target.
So what of tonight? Well it’s all about hoping we perform. Maxi scored three last night and yet another side in the ascendancy spanked a weakling. We have failed to do this to anyone all season. Defoe scored twice in a game once and that was just the once and aside from that he like all our other strikers has been a virtual no show.
City are uninspiring fare. We really shouldn’t fear them . We are more than capable of beating them. But should we not then it’ll be a salutary business to compare our performance against them at the beginning of the season with this one.
I’m having 5/2 the draw as it represents value. How depressing.
BIOYMCC!
I wonder what price Balotelli to get a hat-trick is?
Top price 40-1 with Stoke City, erm I mean Bet365. If you really wanted to know. Tight, innit? :freu
With Modders apparently a doubt, Bale out, etc., and Harry and Kevin’s assertions that Europa League is pony, and with a patchwork defence, I fully expect we will lose. But not just for those reasons.
Man Citeh are practically nailed on for 4th anyway, but will like to stick one to Harry for his many previous comments. The ones that range from “we could win the League”, all the way down to “it’s hard to compete when they are throwing all that money…” etc. Citeh will also have a bee in their bonnet to win after we nabbed it up there last year. And Harry will have a bee in his bonnet to lose. He doesn’t want European (Europa League) football next year, and he’ll go out of his way to realise this now we’re certainly unable to make a run at 4th without running the high risk of finishing 5th.
Kranjcar likely won’t give a fuck cos he’s been treated shite and will soon be orf, VdV probably is wondering himself, and the strikers? Well, you know the drill.
Ensuring there’s no form of Euro footie will give Harry the opportunity to a) Tell you so, b) Have a less complicated fixture list like last season’s to perfom his “miracles” with our “meagre squad” c) Demand Levy open the War Chest, pay greater salaries and finally d) You think he really cares two shits? He wants the England job. End of.
We’ll lose to Citeh and Liverpool will also secure a result when it’s their turn to run us further down. :cwy:
:unsure: :-| :cwy: All sadly too true, old girl.
come off it, harry never thought we would win the league, he simply said it was possible in the hope it would give the players self belief. So many fans have taken this as gospel its untrue.
Come Mysteriousness my old sword-crosser… It’s not that bad. If three years ago, someone had offered you CL quarter final against Real Madrid in 2011 but the price to pay was having a duff end to the season you’d have taken it like the rest of us… Gladly… And paid.
It is a dreadfully disappointing end but I think that’s only because the highs this year have been so high… And if the side have been capable of them this year then they will be capable again.
As for poor old Jimmy Krankie, I think everyone feels for him but that doesn’t mean that he was ever the answer to our problems. If he was, there’d be a queue of Madrid’s putting comments in the press about him and Whisky breath would be putting a blanket in the back of his car.
The side at the moment are like England after the bloody Ashes… So drained emotionally that they probably couldn’t muster a jog to the bus stop.
I shall respond Astro paragraph, by paragraph.
Nope. I don’t much go for getting beyond the last 16 to get dicked by the lazy five goals. And why should everything be measured by where we were three years ago? Why don’t you measure from where we were three months ago, or at Christmas?
I am afraid I stayed awake and through most of our games (not just the odd CL victory against Milanish and Milanish) to not allow myself to get carried away by these events as we struggled to play with any authority in the League.
Kranjcar may not be the answer to our problems. But he merits a place in the side ahead of a number of players. Plus, I’m talking about tonight’s “crucial” fixture, and his current situation. Something we’ve arrived at courtesy of our run of poor results.
England won the Ashes! What did we win? Seriously?
What? Were we supposed to win the CL in our first season? Or win the EPL in the middle of our first season in the CL? Which are you angry about???
We ‘Won’ a place in the CL (Which seems to be a competition in itself these days), something that had eluded a lot of managers before. We ‘Won’ the respect of the footballing world for the way we carried ourselves in that competition. We have hopefully ‘Won’ the chance for a few players to sign for us rather than option for ‘Pool etc. ‘Because they know the name’.
We’ve gone from being regular mid-table fodder to regular contenders for the top-table. Mistakes have been made and they need rectified, decisions need to be made about the future, yes. But trying to brand this season a failure is absurd not just in my eyes but in those I’m sure of a lot of people in the footballing community – Apart from of course Hammers & Pompey fans who wheel out their axes at the slightest provocation.
I measure things from three years ago because that’s (give or take) when HR started and that’s who most of the arguments are about. I’ve somehow managed to stay awake through dour away draws and home defeats to the likes of Sunderland and Wolves for bloody decades (It used to be Burnley that always caused the problem) but it’s precisely the moments like Milan that I follow Spurs for.
I wouldn’t sit in the pub excitedly talking about us grinding out a 1-0 by playing 5 in midfield including three defensive mids. I love the moments of brilliance that light up this dreadful world and somehow, it just seems the Spurs way to force us through purgatory to enjoy them here and there.
Jimmy is exactly one of the things that sums up the conundrum of the Spurs fan… Like Adel bloody Tarbuck. We love the opportunist, the person who can create something out of nothing once every five or six games but is a passenger and a liability for the rest of them… And yet we DEMAND consistency? Work that one out and you too could be the next manager at WHL.
I bet you’ve missed me :winke:
Sorry pal
Like when the Irish walloped you recently you mean?
Is right… Ouch! :pinch: :blush:
I never said we should win the CL. Calm down. “The Spurs Way” is something you may overly romanticise about and rightly so. To kid yourself into believing we currently play in some “total football” manner is daft. We have some flair, but we’re not quite as easy on the eye as Arsenal, are we? Bothering, but a reality.
We’re badly underperforming. Winning 1 out of our last 13 games is reminiscent of the limp ending by us the 2007/08 season around/after we won the Carling Cup. Since you are talking of “measuring things from three years ago”.
I am going to watch the game in full. I know we lost, just haven’t seen it. Oh happy days. I’ll be postponing commenting on that.
I’m going to be a bit busy for the next 6 months or so… Can I just get in early & start the ‘Sack Ancelotti’ email thread now? HH can you store it and post it later?
You may indeed, sir :daumen: And if you think in 6 months you’ll be less busy I suggest you get a publishing deal for you book explaining how :-D
I’m thinking of having myself cloned in an illegal experiment in Chile. :freu
Spicy
Personally, I think most of our players, don’t give a shit.
I’m so gee’d up for tonight’s game that I’ve dug out me old cotton shorts, woollen socks and me plimsoles and I’m going up the gym.
This season will be best remembered as the season we blew the bestist most shiny golden opportunity we’ve had in a generation.
The players blogs have alternated be between “we’re up for 4th” and “we’re disappointed with the draw” culminating in Dawson’s final “we’re gutted” after Saturdays (inevitable) capitulation. Harry’s ramblings have meandered between ” we can challenge for the title”, “We’re really up for 4th”, ” we can’t compete with City’s cash”, “it’s diffcult” , “we need a miracle” and the final all to often said ( and revealing) clincher ” what can you do?”.
January was farcical (no one remotely of CL quality was lined up is my impression) with the nearest we got was Beckham, Neville and Charlie ‘I didn’t go out to do him’ fuckin Adam.
January was the time to take a punt, take a bit of a chance, spend the money ( borrow some for cryin out loud) and buy a top draw goal machine (or two).
The winners identify problems quickly, fix them quickly, and know where the fixes are gonna take you NOW and in 12 – 18 months time. Given we all knew we had no performing strikers in October Harry did not appear to have any form of contingency / plan / idea. We’ve looked at our most dangerous / likely to score with our two speedy wide players, with 3MP up front and vDV feeding off him. It ain’t as pretty as we might like but it’s effective – which is kind of what is needed when we had 6/7 games left and hadn’t beaten any of the bottom 4!!
Verdict? Harry is in ‘last chance saloon’ – we do look pretty good squad wise but H and Levy need to get their heads together for next season and make some big signings quick – Man C, Chelsea and Liverpool (and I suspect Le Arse) will all be buying / building so if we don’t then another golden dawn will have just drifted away……
I think one thing everyone can agree on is that the club need a damn good plan for how to impress the world and take a big stride forward over the next three months.
Agree as well that we need to include VDV but not rely on him as we did. Wickham (As Devonshire mentions below) is a great prospect but needs another season, preferably in Europe somewhere. I’d hate to put everything on his shoulders as he’s a lad that takes everything very seriously. Drogba-esque is a word that’s been rattling around my head.