The Ministry Of Truth

And so, somehow, incredulously, Martin Jol remains the Tottenham manager.  (Or at least I think he does at the time of writing.)

The Tottenham board have done the right thing – but have done it with such astonishing ill grace that its backtracking is correctly described in today’s newspapers in words such as “farce” and “chaos”.

The man Spurs wanted, Juande Roamos, the current coach of Sevilla, confirms that Spurs last week offered him Martin Jol’s job.  Assuming Ramos is telling the truth, Spurs have illegally approached another club’s coach and constructively dismissed Jol.  Ramos says that he turned down the offer, meaning that Spurs had nowhere else to turn but back to Jol.

According to Gary Jacob in The Times:

Tottenham Hotspur attempted to paper over the cracks of their disintegrating relationship with Martin Jol last night, at the same time agreeing a compensation package worth up to £4 million should they terminate his contract. The revelation suggests that the manager’s position remains virtually untenable after he became embroiled in a battle with Daniel Levy, the chairman, and Damien Comolli, the sporting director.

Statements issued after Jol met the board yesterday hinted that an uneasy truce had been agreed, but the fact that the club’s accountants have approved severance terms for the Dutchman, who has two years left on his contract, will do nothing to dampen speculation regarding his future.

Tottenham are thought to be in talks with several candidates. Mark Hughes, the Blackburn Rovers manager, has emerged as a surprise option after negotiations with Juande Ramos, the highly regarded Seville coach, came to nothing.

So Jol remains a dead man walking, the Spurs board looks at least as incompetent as the Football Association’s Chief Executive and Commercial Director did when they trooped back and forth to Portugal last year in their doomed attempt to land Phil Scolari as England manager, and the stench is turning my stomach.

There is presumably no truth in the rumour that when Spurs take to the Old Trafford pitch next weekend, their team will comprise the Keystone Kops.  But the way things happen at White Hart Lane these days I wouldn’t bet against it.

A friend doubts my sincerity when I say that I’ve had enough of the Beautiful (sic) Game but, as things stand, I have absolutely no interest in it whatsoever.  No matter how nauseous I’ve been made to feel in the past by the ineptitude and corruptness of the game’s administrators, or the antics of greedy, grubby club owners, or prima donna players whingeing about having the hardships of being made to subsist on £50,000 a week, I’ve always felt that I could take a seat at a game or slump on my sofa in front of a televised match and simply immerse myself in those 90 minutes of action.  Right now, I don’t feel that.

Right now, I don’t much care if I never attend or watch another game of football.

Maybe I’ll feel differently in a few days, weeks, months or years.

In the words of Tim Finn, “I can give you the present. I don’t know about the future – that’s all stuff and nonsense.”

Today may represent my last day as a football fan. 

My “fanaticism” has been waning for some time.  Attending football matches has given way to domesticity and a degree of financial prudence in recent years; I cancelled my Sky Sports subscription more than two seasons ago; and I have long since stopped going out of my way to catch Match Of The Day (rammed as it is now with inept presenters, lazy summarisers and risible commentators).

I still subscribe to When Saturday Comes and read it cover to cover but have been struck of late that the only upbeat articles therein focus on football as nostalgia: the magazine’s writers love their days gone by but seem pathalogically to loathe almost everything about the modern day game.  And I know what they mean because I feel much the same way.

Almost every football fan who ever paid attention to the game before 1990 seems to feel the same way.  Those who fell in after Gazza’s Tears don’t seem to understand that what passes now for top-flight football is a confection that bears little resemblance to what is remembered by those of us who stood on terraces and remember games being played on pitches of mud or water rather than grass.  Not everything was better then (the extinction of running sewers on the terraces is to be welcomed), but a vast amount was.

I’ve been a Spurs fan since 14 May 1981, when I was nine years old.  Before that, like virtually every other boy of my age growing up where I did, I supported the all-conquering Liverpool for a couple of seasons.  But I watched the 1981 FA Cup Final replay from my bedroom in the Middle East (where my family was living at the time) listening to the commentary whistle in and out of reception on the BBC World Service.  The game kicked off after 10pm local time on a Thursday night, but I was allowed to watch as Friday wasn’t a schoolday, and I fell in love with the thrilling, attacking football played by Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City and the five goals the teams traded that night.

If City had won, I may well have been condemned to a quarter of a century of the constant misery that grips the City-supporting fans I know: my City-supporting barber when I lived in Manchester seemed perpetually to be on the brink of tears every time he contemplated the club’s fortunes, which was almost his only topic of conversation.  I really wish I was there today to witness his pessimism as Trashcan Sinatra‘s Human Rights Warriors sit atop the Premiership table.

As it was I was drawn to the winners of that game, Spurs, thanks to Ricky Villa’s amazing winning goal.  Since then I’ve followed every twist and turn – two more FA Cups, a UEFA Cup, a League Cup, Hoddle, Ardiles, the amazing 1986-7 season where Clive Allen scored 49 goals and the team very nearly won everything (yet somehow won nothing), Gazza, Lineker, the brink of insolvency in 1991, Klinsmann, the mid-90s flirtation with relegation, the risible succession of underachieving managers (including, sadly, Hoddle and Ardiles) – until the present-day mini-rennaissance under Martin Jol.

But today I truly understand the words one fairly dour Yorkshireman said in the spring of 1984 when he resigned as Tottenham Hotspur manager.  Speaking to the press as he left White Hart Lane for the final time, Keith Burkinshaw said, “There used to be a football club there.”

I didn’t really grasp what he meant at the time.  I was only 12 and didn’t then understand why the concept of a football club as a floated public limited company was so disastrous.  But it meant we’d lost the second most successful manager we’ve ever had – he resigned because his vision of a successful football club did not match the board’s vision of a successful PLC.

Since then, businessmen have ruined the game that captivated me for the first time as I watched the 1979 FA Cup Final in the company of my uncle and grandfather.  Spurs is now controlled by an organisation called the English National Investment Company, which tells you everything you need to know about the way football ownership has been going since long before Roman Abramovich rolled into town.

ENIC’s front man at White Hart Lane is Daniel Levy.  I don’t doubt that Levy loves the club – unlike Abramovich, Glazer et al, Levy had a Spurs season ticket long before ENIC bought its stake in the club.  But, for a fan - a true fan who appreciates the importance of stability, security and the need for a proper pre-season preparation – Levy has an appalling record for appointing and sacking managers.

Within weeks of becoming Chairman in 2001, he sacked George Graham, installing Glenn Hoddle a couple of days before our most important match in years – an FA Cup Semi-Final against Arsenal.

We lost.

Two years later, when he finally realised Hoddle is an appalling manager, Levy sacked him in September 2003, just six games into the season and after Hoddle had spent millions over the summer.  We got a caretaker in for the rest of the season.

We finished 14th.

In the summer of 2004 Levy appointed Jacques Santini as manager.  He lasted just 13 matches, after – you’ve guessed it – spending millions on players.

Since then we have been in the safe, if deeply unspectacular, hands of Martin Jol.  Hamstrung as he was when he was parachuted into the job in November 2004, Spurs ended the season in their customary 9th place.

Thereafter, in his two full seasons in charge, Jol has taken us to consecutive top five finishes – something no Spurs manager has achieved since Burkinshaw in 1982 and 1983.  Last season Spurs also reached at least the quarter-final stages of three cup competitions.

Today, the media unites in reports that Levy is to sack Jol imminently.  If this comes to pass, it will happen after three matches of the season and after a summer in which the manager has spent £40m buying a series of new players.  It will also come after Spurs won their last match 4-0.

Whether or not Jol is the right man for the job in the long-term, his record to date means he certainly deserves more of a crack of the whip than this – the sort of shabby, panic-driven move that smacks for all the world of the same desperation that permeated Leeds United when their failure repeatedly to qualify for the Champions League brought about financial meltdown.

Worst of all, the campaign to undermine the manager and question his ability via the media has clearly been orchestrated from the White Hart Lane boardroom (or “sources close to” it) and Jol’s treatment has been contemptible.  This is not how my club should conduct its affairs.

Levy will bring in yet another manager (caretaker or permanent), again too late to allow him to bring in the players he wants and hampered by the lack of a pre-season in which to familiarise the players with his chosen tactics.  The club will effectively be in a holding pattern until next summer, praying for a cup run to assuage the fans and that the new guy can squeeze out of the existing players the same overachievement Jol has managed.

I am truly unsure, however, I will be there to witness how things unfold.  Like the WSC writers, I’ve moaned about the state of football until I’m bored of my own moaning.  But my support for Tottenham has never wavered like this – I’ve never before felt as disillusioned with Spurs as I am today, having read this morning’s back pages.

I have no desire to associate myself with an organisation run by people whose very conduct suggests they are unfit for purpose.  I have no intention of spending another penny on “supporting” an organisation that chooses publicly to undermine the efforts of the best manager it has had in almost 25 years.

I dare say I’ll watch some big matches on television going forward but the relentless hype and the merciless march of English football’s capitalists might just finally have worn me down to the extent that I now fully expect to become the creature I could not even understand until a couple of years ago – a bloke who genuinely doesn’t follow football.

The heart and soul of the football club with which I fell in love has gone.  And like Keith Burkinshaw before me, I abhor what’s left.