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Ignorance isn’t bliss

3 min read
by Conner Green
In an era of two-minute-highlight-videos and instant success bought about by Sheikh billionaires, pragmatism and giving managers time seems to be a commodity of the past. Immediate success is expected even by fan-bases who haven’t experienced success in a long-time.

The odds have been slashed, the form is poor, the mood is dour and Twitter is in meltdown. Pochettino has to be on his way out, surely? Well, not quite. Not yet. None of us really know what’s going on and for a change, ignorance is in fact, not bliss.

The Tottenham fan-base is split; not fifty-fifty but between a large group of disappointed but pragmatic fans and a vocal minority who spend their days clogging up Twitter feeds with baseless anti-Pochettino spam. “He hasn’t won anything” as though a five year period of no trophies is something new for a club that has won three trophies since 1984. The Poch In and the Poch Out, the loyal and the un-loyal. On the matter of Pochettino we all have so little in common except the fact that we don’t really know anything about what’s happening at the club. Other than the output on the field.

It’s clear that results haven’t been great, they haven’t even been okay. They’ve been poor but what we cannot be sure of is the conversations Pochettino is having with Levy. What signings will come in January or what’s going to happen next summer.

Sky Bet slashed the odds on Pochettino leaving which led to a flurry of Tweets and click-bait articles claiming to show that Poch was on his way out, when more than likely it’s a way of drumming up some extra views for Sky during what is a quiet period for club-football-clicks.

What is Levy thinking? We don’t really know. Is he courting Mourinho? Taking him to a Nando’s in Dubai offering him his choice of any side he wants hoping to entice him to join Spurs? It’s unlikely (as if Levy wouldn’t suggest going dutch with the bill), but once again, none of us actually know.

Not in recent times has there been such a discombobulated period at Spurs; we made a Champions League final, yet we haven’t won away domestically since January. The squad needs heavy investment. We broke our transfer record twice in one window. We’ve moved into a brand new shiny stadium. We joke about going back to Wembley to regain some form. It’s a tough, tough time for Tottenham.

Pochettino was once the man who could do no wrong, the man who was putting Spurs on the map. For some Spurs fans he was the life of the party but now he wants to crash on your sofa, snooze in front of the telly with the grand-kids causing havoc, running around, undisciplined and not that bothered with the mess they make.

In an era of two-minute-highlight-videos and instant success bought about by Sheikh billionaires, pragmatism and giving managers time seems to be a commodity of the past. Immediate success is expected even by fan-bases who haven’t experienced success in a long-time.

Spurs fans have prided ourselves on the fact we aren’t like those South-London-Vloggers; we have perspective, we’re sensible and we don’t turn on our own kind. Yet this season has seen the team booed, fans dismissing others as “not wanting what’s best for the club” and buying into the ‘Pochettino-cult’. We’re turning on each other when we should be pulling together.

A united fan-base can do more to help this team than one that spends it time quarrelling amongst itself and constantly pontificating on what could and may be happening at the upper-echelons of the Tottenham boardroom.

We don’t know what’s happening with Pochettino, it’s sad to see the club in its current state. The new stadium hasn’t brought around the change in form we thought it would but that cannot be placed solely on Pochettino. Booing the team, shouting down other fans as happy-clappers and claiming to have inside knowledge ultimately achieves nothing.

We’re all customers buying a product that we’re not one-hundred-percent sure what it will look like come the end of its seasonal cycle of relevance – but one thing we can be sure of is that we are Tottenham and we will live to fight another day. Because that’s football. Acceptance of the highs and the lows.

All views and opinions expressed in this article are the views and opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of The Fighting Cock. We offer a platform for fans to commit their views to text and voice their thoughts. Football is a passionate game and as long as the views stay within the parameters of what is acceptable, we encourage people to write, get involved and share their thoughts on the mighty Tottenham Hotspur.