As football supporters we pour all of our hopes and dreams into the team we support. Our own lives could be going to hell in a hand cart, but for those 90 minutes we forget about all that and dream that what we are seeing in front of us is somehow going to make our own lives better, even for a short while. When that doesn't go to plan we then drop to the depths of despair and look for someone to blame. Normally the players or the manager. After all they have let us down haven't they?
Our feelings are linked into the result of a football match. Win the worlds a wonderful place, lose and well you may as well not get up in the morning. Nothing makes this more clearer than a derby game or a game against your closest rivals in the league. Bragging rights and being able to strut around the work place as if you own the place, if only for a short while, make it all worth while.
When you lose, you take it personally, they let you down. They don't know how you feel, they don't get it on their £100,000 a week salary they are so out of reach from you the fan that it makes it even worse. The money you spend on the ticket, the merchandise, the food. To you its a fortune so why don't they care more? Why don't they show it more? They just don't understand how hurt we are, how can they.
Yet perhaps its us to a certain degree, perhaps we are the problem. When your a kid you chose a team and you stick with it through thick and thin. There are your local rivals and, like it or not we as a club are behind Arsenal our rivals. Let me explain, Liverpool are more successful then Everton, Man Utd are more successful than Man City, we are more successful then West Ham, and Chelsea have been more successful than Arsenal recently. What is the one common denominator in all of this? Money. Every club we now class as a rival is backed by very, very rich people who aren't afraid to spend it. We have a very rich owner too but he doesn't splash the money about like a drunk in a strip club. He expects more for his money and rightly so.
If they don't win something at these clubs straight away, the manager gets the sack and the next one gets unlimited money to spend to make sure they win again. Man City continue to do it, Chelsea continue to do it, Man Utd continue to do it and yet we don't. We haven't won anything yet, that's correct, but we finished second last season in the Premier League, are highest ever finish in the modern era. Did we spend a fortune? No we didn't. So how did we do it against all this money? We grew our own talent from within.
Fans are fickle beings, always have been always will be. They play Football Manager and FIFA and then allow themselves to believe that its that easy to win things. We live in a society now where if it doesn't work then throw money at it until it does. Lets not see what the issue is and try and fix it long term, lets throw money at it and fix it now. After all who cares about tomorrow? The future is too far in front for us to see or care about, what matters is that instant gratification that comes from spending more than the other team because that's how you win things isn't it? That's how it works in modern football doesn't it? You write a check for whoever you want and the other teams roll over take the money and sell their best players to you because you are the richest.
This is all that is wrong with modern football in my opinion. I don't want a club that throws money at it, I want to win things of course I do, but not at any cost. Ask the fans of Leeds or Blackburn how they feel after the money that was thrown at their clubs ran out? Would they rather do it our way and have a long term goal of course they would, and so would I!. I don't want to go bust and spend years outside of the Premier League looking back to the good old days that have now become a distant memory.
We nearly went bankrupt in the late 80's we were days away from having no club at all, Ill blog about that another time, but we've been there and done that. I've had the success of the mid 80's to the absolute dross of the late 90's and early 00's. Manager after manager, player after player that weren't good enough to grace our club, yet there I was still behind the team supporting them through the thin, whilst Arsenal won trophy after trophy. It hurt, I'm not going to lie, it hurt really badly. I was jealous of them and their success, why couldn't we be like that? The reason was a succession of bloody awful mangers and mediocre players. No plan for the future, just trying to fix things quickly and failing time after time.
We don't have a history of being a really successful club, I'm not knocking us far from it, I'm just trying to put where we are into perspective. Yes we've had the odd trophy which we've won over a period of a few years but not anything like what you could call a sustained period of success over decades like Liverpool, Arsenal, and Man Utd, or more recently Man City and Chelsea. This is where we have come from to where we are trying to get to. We will have success in the near future, in Daniel Levy we have a Charmian who knows what he wants and how to get it. He is transforming this club from within and we don't see half of what goes on. The new stadium, the sponsorship, the deal with the NFL, this will allow us to be financially independent for decades to come.
This season we are playing 38 away games in the league. No matter how we try and turn Wembley into White Hart Lane it will never be home. Home is being built, a new home, a new start, a new era. You've just got to be patient. Poch is the best thing to happen to this club in decades, I would so as far as to say he could be our greatest ever manager. Yes he has to win things, he knows that, the income from the new stadium will pay for the players that we need to take us to that next level, the wages will increase and fans favourites now will be replaced by new fans favourites as they have been in the past and will continue to be in the future. We will lose players, but not for the reasons we have in the past. They wont be leaving us to win trophies or wages because those things will come. You will always get players who think the grass is greener elsewhere like Kyle Walker and if the media is to be believed Danny Rose as well. They will go and will be forgotten in the annuls of our history.
However what these other clubs don't have is our bright future. Who knows when the Sheiks and Oligarchs get bored of their toys and walk away, what happens to those clubs then? What we are building is sustainable for the future. This isn't a computer game this is real life, with real people, making real mistakes. Its frustrating of course it is, to see us not win every game, but hang in there because the future, I believe, will be far beyond what any of us even hope it to be. I hope Poch is here to see through the job he's started. If he leaves it will be because he has taken us as far as he can and wants a new challenge. There will be no knee jerk reaction from Daniel Levy and the supporters calling for Poch's head need to stop it and look at the mistakes we have made in the past and see we cannot repeat them. We are starting a 100m sprint 30 metres behind the others and catching them!
16 years ago we were happy to get the odd derby win, we dreamt of playing in the Champions League, it was a distant dream far beyond our reach. We weren't even in Europe at all. Then Joe Lewis bought our club and started a revolution by appointing Daniel Levy as Chairman. Its been a slow build to get here, on the brink of a new stadium, a team that perhaps needs one or two world class players to get us right up there, but what would you rather have? The team of yester year with the managers we've had in the past or the team we have now? I have said the same thing through all of that I have written, we have to have patience whilst the manger and the players learn how to get the results we need.
When Ferguson first went to Man Utd they hadn't won the league in years, Liverpool were the dominant team winning everything. Ferguson was quoted as saying when asked what he wanted to achieve at Man Utd, "I want to knock them off their fucking perch" he was laughed at, but a little bit of patience when it would have been easy for them to sack him and he did. Man Utd now hold the record for most league titles. He did it in an era where money didn't dominate the game at the start. It did towards the end of his era there's no denying that, but what he did firstly was to develop youth team players, put time and structure into developing the scouting system in and around Manchester and reaped the rewards. When the money poured into the game, he had already laid the foundations for future success. Times have changed, money is now the dominating factor, clubs go and spend fortunes on players, but I believe in what we are doing at Spurs, we are going to get it wrong at times and lose games we all think we should win. We have to be patient, the Chairman trusts the manager, the players trust the manager and I trust the manager.
At the start of this season I would have taken Top 4 and Champions League football, next year my expectations will rise, because when we do crack it, when do start winning trophies, when we do start challenging every year for the league, when our best players are not being lured away by higher wages, the satisfaction that will befall us will be that much sweeter. We will know we did it the right way, the Tottenham way, we will write our own piece of history, we will write a new blue print of how to win football trophies.
So for now let our rivals gloat, as much as that pains us, let them have their moment in the sun, let us hold our heads up high and believe in better days, because they are coming, no one ever had success without suffering along the way to get there. We will be fine, if and its a big if, we allow our heads to trust our hearts because in Poch we must trust.
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