Gambling Man

I find myself writing in to The Fighting Cock for the third time about our manager. For the folks who are still behind Postecoglou, I am afraid I am a bit of a harbinger. Every time I have written in, hours before being published, the manager gets sacked. It makes the whole endeavour amusing, if fruitless. Maybe the cycle will break this time. Nevertheless, onward.

Ange Postecoglou is a nice gentlemen who, unlike other managers, respects the club and desperately wants to be here. He is affable and charming, which makes writing something like this all the more difficult. He is another who is very much in over his head, and the goodwill Postecoglou has earned over the past eighteen months has evaporated. He has run the team into the ground, and can offer no solutions whatsoever to the current crisis. It is Plan A or Plan A But Better, after all.

It makes for grisly watching and horrible results. Wins for winless Palace and Ipswich. Goals for goalless Everton. A victory for Leicester who hadn’t won in seven. Racked up derby losses. The press is disjointed with an exhausted squad, compounded by injury. None of these star players look like they’ve ever been coached. Ange’s Tottenham career seems to be hanging on a one-nil lead going to Anfield in the league cup semis – a single strand of thread against maybe one of the best teams in Europe. Wouldn’t be the first time in recent history Liverpool delivers the final blow to a Spurs manager in a cup competition.

It’s all kind of grim, and the ire of the situation is being focused less on Postecoglou (guilty as he is) than on the chairman. Rightfully so. As of this writing, the calls for fresh blood over the January window have resulted in a keeper but no outfield players. The result of which is the manager with one plan continues to wring the squad dry. We saw all of this play out last year as well around the exact same time-frame. There is the popular refrain that it is hard to do business in January. Yet the negligence over the squad building over the summer had led us to the current situation the team is in. Daniel should know it will be harder to do business in the Championship.

Hyperbole? Maybe. After all, no one is too big to go down.

None of this seems to phase the chairman, however, who simply can’t help himself but continue to gamble. All of the signs are there. Buying youth potential for eventual selling is one aspect of Levy’s gambling. Holding out in towards the end of a transfer window for maybe a discount is yet another. Nothing quite says gambling like the short-term, win-now managers who in fact did not win now. It is remarkable that a football club runs this way, but the payouts have been some incredible talent passing through, title challenges, a first ever Champions League final, and arguably the most beloved manager since Bill Nic (who then proceeded to throw away all the love and affection chasing a Chelsea bag).

Now we have a truly abysmal manager that’s threatening the club with relegation. Yet Levy refuses to cut his losses in the bleak hope that maybe this one will finally pay out with a trophy. A curious metric, since the previous manager who got us to a league cup final was sacked before he could manage it.

It is particularly amusing to me that the English media is now focusing entirely on the chairman and his gambling habits. This is after writing about how Pochettino is too good for Spurs and should join another club (he did, eventually). Even more ink was spilled about how our home grown talisman must leave Spurs to win things (he left, eventually). Now the media wonders what happened to Spurs and the squad-building negligence therein? Not looking for help thanks, we’ll handle it ourselves.

Regardless, the chairman continues to gamble. The problem now is that his gambling has gotten so out of control that it has put all of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club at risk. The fans, paying the highest priced tickets in Europe, have gotten sick of the gambling. Now the massive stadium Levymandias built with his winnings, boos and jeers him and shouts for him to go. Look upon my works indeed.

Yet the chairman will not go anywhere. He is part owner and will not fire himself. Instead he will perhaps fire the manager again, and opt to play manager three-card monte again. It seems to be one of his favorites. Supporters looking to damn Levy while ignoring circumstance point to Nuno being third with Forest, Mourinho being second with Fenerbache, or perhaps the most damning Conte being first with Napoli. A good omen, perhaps, for Postecoglou wherever he ends up next and dealing with a club that rejects the idea that you need to gamble to be successful.

That is where we are. Twenty plus years of ownership by ENIC has really blossomed Tottenham Hotspur Football & Athletic Company Limited into quite the business, generating incredible amounts of value for its owners and shareholders. But as Burkinshaw’s misappropriated quote goes, “there used to be a football club over there.” The football continues to be run as if though it were still having to gamble on some lucky outcomes just to compete with the big boys.

At the end of the day, the house always wins and debts are called in. When Levy will cash out is anybody’s guess.