Good afternoon.
Even the most ardent ‘I told you so’ merchants are struggling to find fault with a 3-1 win indoors over the great unwashed from the East End. That said I’m slightly surprised that more hasn’t been made out of how miserable West Ham were. Noble, Nolan and Diame had a bit of a go and when t hey eventually did press there was nobody for the second ball from Carroll’s headers.
Spurs were quite cagey in the opening exchanges and it took Defoe’s first goal before we appeared genuinely comfortable on the ball. Long range ‘shots’ and runs that petered out seemed the order of the day.West Ham were pretty awful. As toothless and witless as their support.
Caulker’s assist aside, Hugo had an decent game. He’s a spritely little fella and I feel a lot more comfortable with him in goal than Brad. He’s not better than Brad, they simply offer different things and I prefer what this guy has. He must however get a settled back four in front of him. Where for art thou, Benny?
Defensively he never really came under much fire. Offensively he made one memorable run during which he sneezed and his frontal lobe shot out of his nose and being the size of an ant’s arse it was lost in the grass. He won’t miss it. Then run ended with him also losing possession.
A remarkably measured game. Clearly he was instructed repeatedly not to hoof and it had sunk in. He was clearly brought on to diffusive the threat of Andy Carroll. The truth is he didn’t succeed and from memory Carroll won every ball. Mmmn.
He was having a steady enough game until the howler. One ‘new’ thing that our lads need to grasp is that punting the thing mindlessly is not on. It invariably hands possession to the other lot.
Commanding and thoughtful. Did anyone else spot him pleading for movement when trying to pass and take throw ins? Oh that must have been Tommy then…
Sam old same old. Some breathtaking passing that at once gave our play a lift. To counter this his movement was abysmal. More life in a tramp’s vest, And this shooting thing needs to be knocked on the head now. He hasn’t scored since forever and needs to stop shooting. I want Carroll given a go.
If all our players were as dedicated as he is, we’d win the Champions League. Left the pitch after vomiting. Word is he ate someone that disagreed with him.
Given how bloody awful they were he should have run rings around them, but he didn’t. I seriously get the impression he joins in when he’s in the mood. The assist was good, but that was an example of simply doing the right thing. Looking up and thinking quickly. He needs to employ this tactic every time he gets the ball.
At last. A proper performance. We now know what it was he was doing in training that kept getting him picked. If he can play like this and build from this, we could be on to something. Again, the opposition was pants, but you can’t help but feel slightly cheered by that showing.
Another improved effort but you have to ask why we aren’t getting this every week. We’ve enough on our plate without supposedly ‘world class’ players going missing or joining in when in the mood. He went through West Ham like he went through Norwich. We need to see him at it every week. No excuses. That Maicon business was a long time ago now.
What a goal. When wasn’t scoring he was of course serving up the usual. Selfish and wasteful. That’s what you get.
He looked pensive and rightly so. The fast food, Persian bazaar culture of the Premier League would have had him listed as having 2 games to save his job or some such gibberish had we lost. Hopefully he has faith in Hugo now. The sooner he can field a steady back four the better. Moussa clearly and understandably isn’t quite match fit. So it’s another week of sticking his head round the physio room door asking for updates.
I can’t believe some of the Huddites on here, the bloke is a passenger. He is the weak link in the side, how he gets into our squad is beyond me. A midfielder afraid to tackle, you could not make it up. :shocked2:
Stats for Thudd, game at home vs WHU:
Passes: 57 (Highest in team)
Pass accuracy: 91% (Highest in team)
Long balls: 13 (second highest behind Daws)
Accurate long balls: 12 (highest in team)
Touches: 75 (joint highest in team with Walker)
Tackles: 3 (joint highest in team with Walker)
Hardly a passenger.
Also, Thudd is not fat at all, he is lean, just a mountain of a man.
;-)
I hate stats, but I love these ones
:daumen:
67% of statistics are made up…
50% of me wants to believe that stat
Thats why we got rid of Modric. That boy couldn’t tackle either. :winke:
Makes you wonder how with only 2 mids… Modders and Hudd-we pissed over Chelsea and the Goons over a three day period..tackles!… who needs flippin’ tackles when you can knock the ball 70 yds or play your way through the buggers..!
What a tackler that Hoddle was, and don’t forget Modric, boy could he tackle, Ginola, Waddle, White, Jones, Bale, Gascoigne, Peters, Ardiles, Conn, Villa, Hazard, Galvin and Nayim, all great tacklers……… :whistle:
Don’t forget Lloris, Ronnie will kill you
That is why we never win fuck all, I’m 41 and have seen us lift the odd cup but at least I have seen non tackling midfielders who can ping the odd nice pass :-p
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I won’t be coming out from behind the sofa til ABV% has at least one top 4 finish under his belt, no idea how long that might be but arry reddies reckons that this season, for Spurs, top 4 is nailed on, so I’ve booked a glitzy night out in May.
Still not absolutely sure whether Sandro is an as yet unpolished quality animal, or just an animal, he appears to need a tad more composure and vision once he’s taken the ball from his crumpled opposite. Walker had a good game, I see no need to slag him off, the boy done good. Defoe will never be consistent so we have to make the most of these good days until we acquire the real McCoy. Daws continues to be not quite good enough for what we aspire to be and Dempsey won’t make it, trust me, not even as peripheral squad. I agree with some on here that it would be good to see Carroll get some games under his belt.
Oh and I’ve got a question; who reckons QPR will stay up and who thinks they’ll go down?
Anyone?
Depends how much Harry is given to spend in January. If he’s given less than £25 million, they are going down (I just pulled that figure out of my posterior).
QPR will go down and I predict that when HR is booed by their supporters, HR will say, “Idiots! When I came here they had 4 points from 13 games.
Regarding Dempsey, his signing reminds me so much of the Darren Bent signing. He played a better game yesterday, but like Darren Bent, I ask myself why have we spent so much money on this particular player and what does he add to the team that justifies him wearing the shirt? I do hope he soon proves me wrong.
To be fair to Bent, who I never liked due to his arseanal style name, he did score goals in the proper manner….
in the net by any means possible,even used a beach ball once
Can’t see how they can stay up-as we don’t have three or four ‘good for them-not for us’ players to flog to him this time
Not to sure if anyone else has posted on this but I recently heard a book review on Irish Radio regarding “Snobs Law” http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/0957155905/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt/280-7755357-5716717?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
The basic premise of the book is that the more that racism and sectarianism declines the more laws they pass after the fact. He points out that the “golden age” of racism in football was the 70’s and 80’s, but specific laws to deal with racism at stadia were not introduced for 20 years, by which time, the problem had largely gone away.
Similarly, there was an improvement in the behaviour of Celtic-Rangers game, after which they introduced laws punishing sectarianism.
He argues that many of the laws are being introduced, not because there is a serious problem, but because some people may claim to be offended, and as such, the new legislation can be seen as an attack on free speech.
Are you reading this Mr Herbert?
Seriously though, there is a certain degree of hypocrisy about racism in football. I have yet to hear of an incident where a black player has complained when his own supporters are racially abusing an opponent, but that is because I am sure that most of them have hearing like Arsehole Whingers vision. The day that players criticise their own supporters will see the beginning of the end of Racism in football.
http://www1.skysports.com/football/news/11095/8286578/
:daumen:
It would be much easier for a white player to criticize their own fans for being racist to another team’s player. They would get a lot less stick for it, they would in fact most likely be held up as brave and noble. Whereas a black player is more likely to be accused of playing the ‘race card’, complaining too much and will get lots more abuse in general. imo.
Thanks for that and good for Benayoun. I had written elsewhere earlier in the day, about the irony of supporters with ethnic players in their team, racially abusing their opponents. It goes a long way to proving the suspicion that racists are inherently stupid.
I’ve got to say that everytime I hear someoine tell me that they can’t get a job because of all the immigrants having taken them, I think to myself, “Yeah. What a shame. You would have been so good at cleaning Khazis”.
Regarding whether it would have more effect if the complaining player was white, my thinking is that unless they are just paying lip service, that his colleagues, black and white, would support him.
But you seemed to have stumbled over my real point in any case. The fact that players only seem to complain when they are the victims of abuse, and are impervious to when the opposition is being abused, makes me wonder how much of this is about genuine indignity, and how much of it is “playing the race card”.
“I’ve got to say that everytime I hear someoine tell me that they can’t get a job because of all the immigrants having taken them, I think to myself, “Yeah. What a shame. You would have been so good at cleaning Khazis”
Funny,you thinking others are racist,when your thoughts that immigrants only clean toilets could be racial in itself.Only saying mind
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Define ‘largely gone away’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_association_football
It appears to be alive and kicking.
It was a hell of a lot worse in the 70/80’s when the National Front was actively recruiting at West Ham, Chelsea and Millwall.
In the 60’s it was virtually non-existent when there was only one black footballer that I can remember in the entire league, Albert Johanneson. The worst I can remember in the way of a racist incident was when Mark Lazarus of QPR jumped into the crowd at Fulham because of anti-semitic chants. A point I keep comning back to on this subject is the stupidity of the racists. At the time, George Cohen was playing for Fulham.
As black players started to appear at the beginning of the 70’s, there was quite a degree of abuse, but as they became more prevalent people worked out how stupid they were racially abusing the opponents when they had black players in their own team and this started to eliminate a lot of the racism that existed at that time.
I think in fairness, apart from the NF hotspots, most of the racism was more of the “winding up” rather than the “master race” variety.
I haven’t looked at the Wiji article, but I would qualify my remarks to the effect that I was referring to the British game.
As far as Spurs was concerned, many people think our first black player was Chris Hughton in 1977, but our first black player was in 1910 with Walter Tull. He is actually quite a fascinating character, and was the only black man to become an officer in the British Army.
There is a Wiki page for him, though it fails to mention that his nickname from the Spurs fans at the time was “Darkie”.
Here is an extract
Tull signed for Tottenham Hotspur in 1909, after a close-season tour of Argentina and Uruguay, making him the first black/mixed heritage professional footballer to play in Latin America. Tull made his debut for Tottenham in September 1909 at inside forward against Sunderland, making him the second mixed heritage player to play in the top division after goalkeeper Arthur Wharton of Darlington, but only made 10 first-team appearances, scoring twice, before he was dropped to the reserves. [5] This may have been due to the racial abuse he received from opposing fans, particularly at Bristol City, whose supporters used language “lower than Billingsgate” according to a report at the time in the Football Star newspaper.[6]
Sadly he was killed in 1918 at the age of 29.
billy nicks wife was called darkie as well.
There’s a brilliant BBC film about Tull. It was shown recently and Northampton Town actually named a road Walter Tull Way. THFC released Tull, after a game in Preston where the abuse he’d got made his position at Spurs untenable, so they say. Still I’ve witnessed it first hand with Spurs supporters with Garth Crooks as i posted a month or back.
@Melc-The Old English way of names-was to highlight either a profession, trade or characteristic of the parent-Black meant dark-sallow-White-ashen-pale skinned and so on-although where Green came from I couldn’t tell you?
Splendid post Spurredon. I have been a Spurs fan for 50 years. The last 43 living in Leicester. Although our multicultural city is renowned for it’s racial harmony today we have had quite a torrid time of it in the 70’s and 80’s where the National Front and it’s ugly offspring British Movement were quite prevalent. The NF weren’t Nazi enough for the BM apparently. The player that got the worst abuse was Clyde Best, and I can remember at one night match at Filbert Street a whole section of the crowd making monkey noises. The thing that upset me the most was the complete indifference of the “ordinary” fans, some of whom who would probably not have considered themselves to be racist, but found it to be an amusing diversion during the match. I remember feeling so ashamed of some Leicester fans that I stopped going to matches there. There was some fantastic activity by the ANL to counter NF hot spots and “no-go” areas, especially at Filbert Street, and I will always have a place in my heart for the people who leafleted outside the ground to combat this vile “ideology”, and made the racists themselves the pariahs.
Spot on!!! A true hero and amazing man. Not a bad player either so they say.
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“Largely gone away” is an unhelpfully vague term to use when discussing something like racism, and if said by a historian, a bit silly, that’s all I meant. I agree with much of what you point out and I’ve referenced Tully on this blog myself, one of Spurs’ greats for a number of reasons.
Alf Ramsey also had that nickname when he lived in Dagenham. Apparently his neighbours suspected he was of “Gypsy blood”
@Essex
I missed that Beeb film, and heard that it was good.
Maybe one day it will reappear on BBC4 or similar.
I’m sure there’s a DVD available, brilliant film all the same..made me cry if you really want to know..!
I put the blame of all these recent shananagons at Herberts door…..he’s inciting racial hatred FFS
I found it quite laughable that SSN now say the attack on the Spurs fans was anti-semitic,So do we now assume those fans stabbed Italy in the past decade were attacked by Italian’s against Scousers, Roman’s against Smogmonsters-and the Italy hates Man Utd brigade?-Nice-one Mr Herbet you’re a real asset to your profession…but he’s on the news now so it’s job done I guess.
Yet again I find myself in agreement with you.
I think as far as Sunday’s game goes, Mr Herbert has poured petrol on what was a dying ember.
I think he will soon be the legal professions answer to Mary Whitehouse, seeing problems where there are none. It’s noteworthy that she was often pulled up for complaining about progs that she had never viewed. Does anyone know if Herbert has ever been to a Spurs match (or any other match for that matter)?
Listening to him on SSN earlier I’d put him in the David Lammy class-so, NO, what was it the Romans said about sport?
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Couldn’t find the Grenada tv stuff on youtube about Very Terribles but I did find this which cracked me up:
In 1993, following the bust-up between Scholar’s successor, Alan Sugar, and Terry Venables, which led to Venables’ acrimonious departure from the club, the BBC’s Panorama decided to investigate the feud between the two men. Mark Killick, the producer, says that he originally expected the story would be one of how a nasty, scrub-faced Thatcherite businessman ousted a working-class hero. It’d be the bastards versus the romantics.
But as Sugar told his side of the story about how Venables had run the business side of the club, the optimal anti-millionaire tale evaporated. To be replaced, as research continued, by the weird story of how – led on by an unscrupulous and plausible partner (Ashby) – Venables had broken nearly every rule in the book: first in raising money to buy a stake in Tottenham, and then in his management of the north London side. At one stage, Killick recalls, he sent a researcher down to Cardiff to look for a pub called The Miners, against which Venables had attained part of a million pound loan. When the young woman failed to find the place, he got quite shirty with her. Only after she had wandered round the Welsh capital for three days did he accept the almost unbelievable truth that this pub didn’t exist at all.
It’s from this very decent article if anyone’s interested.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-workingclass-hero-who-we-all-wanted-to-believe-in-1138943.html
slick tel annuver spiv,wonder how they get the players going, probably con then into thinking they are better than they are?
Whether they a decent football manager is the ONLY opinion we need to have on these people. Spivs or notebook hugging accountants…
Who gives a monkey’s arse? I certainly don’t. Sorry chaps.
Not when the club’s future is at stake it isn’t-sorry but you’re wrong!
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh dont say monkeys arse sherbert might be lurking.
Tried to find it as well but no joy I’m afraid-but I’ll hunt it down somehow-am now going to look at yours while I’m in the mood
At the time this happening, I hated Sugar, but as time went on, , I realised that he was not most cuddly person in the world, but he talked a hell of a lot of sense. Unlike his predecessor, Irving Scholar, he ran the club as a business. Scholar left the club in such a mess, that it was nearly taken over by Robert Maxwell.
I wrote to Alan Sugar after TV’s sacking, in the letter I enclosed my cheque, and asked if he was serious about taking Spurs out of the crap (or words to that effect), cash it and send my season ticket by return-but if you’re only in this for the short haul-send it back-I got a brilliant letter back, outlining the position the club were currently in and how he hoped things would change in the near future-remarkably honest, unfortuntaly I’ve since lost/mislaid it, but if I ever find it-I’ll happily post it on here.
:daumen:
just to let you know you can enjoy all of the Venables v Sugar saga including the Panorama programmes on the excellent ohwhenthespurs website
Top Man, thanks