Nowadays, Spurs managers seem to come and go at the speed of light. Never more quickly and dramatically than recently when Juande Ramos was so abruptly sacked and replaced by Harry Redknapp.
“There used to be a football club here,” was the sentiment ascribed to Keith Burkinshaw, when ejected as Tottenham Hotspur’s manager in 1984. Actually the words were written for him by the journalist, Keith Jones, and since, had served fully six years, he might in retrospect have been grateful rather than bitter.
Nowadays, Spurs managers seem to come and go at the speed of light. Never more quickly and dramatically than recently when Juande Ramos was so abruptly sacked and Harry Redknapp whipped away from Portsmouth (compensation £5 million) to take his place. Happy ever after? Harry promptly sent his previously demoralised troops into battle to record their first League win of the season, 2-0 at home to Bolton Wanderers. Which still, alas, left them embarrassingly at the bottom of the Premiership.
Should Ramos ever have been appointed at all, at the expense of the big Dutchman Martin Jol, now in charge at Hamburg? Certainly it should never have happened as it did, with Tottenham surreptitiously and secretively sending emissaries to Seville, where Ramos was so successfully in charge, to tap him up. Behind the back of Jol.
True, at that point Spurs were going through a poor patch, though nothing to compare with the horrific start they made to the current season. But in the previous two seasons, Jol had taken them to an honourable fifth place in the Premiership. And on the first of these occasions, only sheer bad luck robbed them of fourth position, carrying with it automatic and so precious qualification for the European Champions Cup.
What happened, before their last vital game at West Ham, was that en route, the players ate a meal and were promptly afflicted with a stomach bug. Most of them were in no condition to play but the Premiership somewhat callously turned down their appeal. So they played, they lost and therefore didn’t reach the European Cup.
To give Ramos his due, Spurs did have one major triumph last season when, in the Football League Cup final, they dramatically beat the hot favourites, Chelsea. After which, this season it has been downhill all the way. Oddly enough, with the exception of their London derby against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, where I saw them gain a well-deserved draw. Overall, however, it has been chaos.
Largely blamed and expected to be the major fall guy rather than Ramos was the French director of football, Damien Comolli, excoriated for his supposedly mistaken transfer policy. But how mistaken was it?
In the game against Bolton, which followed just three days after a humiliating 2-0 defeat in the UEFA Cup at Udinese, Harry Redknapp simply shuffled the pack with the players he had got, restoring the highly dissident English international right winger David Bentley — once used by Ramos at right back! — and the Russian international striker Roman Pavlyuchenko to the team and enabling the clever little Croatian playmaker Luka Modric to play farther up front. The result was a team which at last played with confidence and incisiveness. Word was that the writing was on the wall for Ramos when a three-player deputation went to the fiercely criticised club chairman, Daniel Levy, to complain of Ramos’ regime.
There can be no doubt that much of the blame for Tottenham’s troubles lies with Levy, under whose regime and others there have been seven managers in eight years. Strange, really, to think that one of the most unpopular chairmen of Spurs in recent years had been the wealthy businessman, Alan Sugar. Yet Sugar it was who saved the club, when its well meaning but improvident chairman, Irving Scholar, brought it almost to bankruptcy with his misguided commercial deals: and for a time it did look as if he would hand over to the monumental fraudster, Robert Maxwell, destined to drown when he flung himself off a boat.
The fans emphatically took the side of the then manager and ex-player, Terry Venables, when he and Sugar bitterly clashed. But when it came to business, Terry, for all his various talents, not least as a writer, was hopelessly out of his depth. Sugar saw him off and Terry was given, by a condemnatory judge, a seven-year suspension as a company director.
Bill Nicholson, however, lasted no fewer than 16 splendid years — 1958 to 1974 — having been right half in the effervescent “Push and run team” of 1950-51. Under Bill, Spurs became the first English club of the 20th century to win the Cup and League double in 1960-61. But Arthur Rowe, pre-war captain and centre half for Spurs, the manager who introduced the exciting new tactics, was driven into a nervous breakdown by two malevolent directors, Herryet and Hornsby.
Arthur once talked to me of the managership of Peter McWilliam, a star left half with New Castle United and Scotland, longest lived Spurs manager of all. He reigned between 1912 and 1927, then again, between 1938 and 1942. Not often seen, said Rowe, but his advice when given was always useful. Scarcity value, perhaps. Would he have survived Levy?
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