So What Now? A Look At Tottenham's Current Situation
Article by Mike Davis
I have mixed feelings about this decision and sincerely hope it doesn’t come back to haunt us. Sure we weren't playing that well, the football we were playing was pretty grim to watch and we never appeared to have a plan B when things were going wrong but, we had more points than this stage last season and overall AVB’s record was the best of any previous Spurs manager since the inception of the Premier League.
I don’t propose to spend any time mulling over the pros and cons of his leaving, it’s done now and we have to start looking forward. So what now? Inevitably the media is rife with rumours as to our next manager. The same three candidates seem to be coming up again and again, namely Capello, Hiddink and Hoddle. In the case of Capello he was actually at WHL yesterday apparently working as a TV pundit. I personally would not be particularly happy with him because I feel he is too negative, he is not in my opinion likely to get the team playing the type of football we all love to see at the Lane. Hiddink has a very good track record and did well in his short spell at Chelsea, he is however 67 years of age and I suspect he would only be seen as an interim appointment. Hoddle would definitely shake things up, he would almost certainly give the flair players more of an opportunity to shine, in particular Eriksen and perhaps Lamela. I also think he would play two up front. What needs to be borne in mind of course with Hoddle is that he has already done the job at Spurs and didn’t exactly cover himself in glory. As with Hiddink, I think Levy would see Hoddle as a potential interim boss.
Other names I have seen mentioned in the past few hours are Tim Sherwood, Frank De Boer and Michael Laudrup. I think Sherwood would be an even bigger gamble than AVB given his complete lack of any managerial experience. I don’t know enough about De Boer to feel that I can express an opinion whilst Laudrup would be an interesting choice. He has clearly done well on very limited funds at Swansea and he has certainly got them playing some nice football. He is probably an outsider at this stage but frankly nothing surprises me with the soap opera that is Tottenham Hotspur FC.
Ultimately whoever takes over they need to address a few issues fairly quickly. The priorities in my opinion being:
- Sort out the left back position, even if in the short term it means bringing BAE back from his loan spell at QPR.
- Once they are all fit, play Chiriches and Vertonghen as our CB partnership. Dawson is just too slow and not good enough.
- Play wingers as wingers, ie take your man on down the flank and get some crosses over, stop all this cutting back inside nonsense, it is getting us nowhere and teams have sussed it out.
- Get some more creativity into the midfield, play Eriksen and persevere with him. We don’t need to pack the midfield with huge ball winning players at the expense of flair.
- Play 2 strikers up top!
- Have some tactical options up his sleeve for when Plan A is not working.
One thing you can always guarantee as a Spurs supporter is that nothing will be straightforward. We await the next episode of this long running saga!
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