The Eze Saga

This has been my first summer transfer window using Reddit. And, it will be my last.

I stumbled onto Reddit shortly after Twitter started trying to radicalise me with alpha-chad and violent content. Elon tried in earnest to serve me up dross. Road rage incidents featuring five burly blokes in the Balkans (….maybe) flipping an already-battered Merc and setting it alight. I really wasn’t into it.

But, god, I missed all the Spurs content. Turns out I do, in fact, yearn for Fabrizio’s here we gos, and Ornstein’s bombas. But I wasn’t willing to turn into the snarling, stabby kid from Adolescence to find them. Well, Reddit welcomed me with open arms.

Or so I thought. Joining the r/coys community this summer has been disastrous for my mental state. Like any good mental breakdown, all started well: the news of Eze’s pending arrival was sending me into a giddy frenzy. Every moment, we were edging closer to a deal. The follicly-opposing forces of Levy and Parish ironing out details day by day. But rest assured it was ongoing, and progressing, not long now. We’re allowing Eze to play on Thursday first. That’s a classy touch. Verbal agreement (so it’s done, right?). Cue the bad photoshops (thanks to Football Insider, I will forever know what Eze might have looked like playing in lilywhite).

Then, in a blink of an eye (or an F5) it truly went to shit: the Havertz injury. I knew what was coming. And, you know the rest…. by 10pm, another photoshop, this time in red. LIVID. From my Twitter days, I was confident I knew the optimal way to flip a ‘90s saloon and torch the bastard. All I needed were four Balkan men. Why am I still refreshing the feed? As it transpires, Reddit is a hell hole, too, albeit with mildly better grammar.

So, here we are. Yet another Spurs transfer clusterfuck. A week of anticipation ends with nothing but a now-redundant photoshop. Despite being my umpteenth time on this particular train ride, this one has felt by far the worst. Dybala, Fernandes, and whoever else…. Oh god, just remembered Willian’s medical. Jesus Christ. Naturally, the doubts were always there, but it’s the Here We Go and the BOMBA that keep you going. The best Fabrizio could offer along the way was 85% of one — a Here We G-, if you will. My Arsenal friends are awfully quiet. One said they couldn’t bring themselves to goad me. You know it’s bad when even they’re showing such monastic restraint.

The same couldn’t be said for our own: the day before, I wrote a now-badly-aged comment (yes, on Reddit) calling this a 9.9/10 window by any PL team’s standards once we get Eze done and add Savinho. “By any PL team’s standards” was intended to acknowledge that not all issues can be solved in one window (we are still short at left back, after all). This well-crafted caveat didn’t stop one reply calling me a “fucking moron in bananaland”. Fair enough in hindsight I got it badly wrong. But I stand by it in principle.

Levy’s squeaky trainers

Thomas Frank’s first transfer window as Spurs manager SLAMS SHUT in 10 days, and he already has the glum face like one of those scam victims in the local paper who inexplicably falls for a text that begins “Mum, this is my new number”.

For this, the club has a lot to answer for. MGW was enough embarrassment for one window or maybe 10. So trust Spurs to make it two for two. I don’t think fumbling Eze or even losing him to our dear neighbours is the critical issue (though it doesn’t help). It’s that this window was supposed to be… different.

Three months on from one wonderful night in Bilbao, this was supposed to be the window where Spurs kicked on by showing clear intent, relentlessly pursuing their top targets (Eze felt an opportunistic response to Maddison’s injury more than anything else). We talk a good game, still: speaking to Gary Neville on the Overlap, Levy said that we must be challenging on all fronts. A bullish sentiment I might take seriously were he not shuffling across our flawless concrete concourse in squeaky Sky Sports pundit trainers.

The trouble for Levy is that his pre-season predictions have left him nowhere to hide. You simply cannot fire a stubborn manager for having tunnel vision only to leave his replacement no choice but to reach for the blinkers. That’s a cryptically-phrased way of saying: “to compete in both the league and Europe, we need quality reinforcements”. Instead, we have wasted two weeks on a transfer that — let’s face it, and, knowing what we now know — was never going to materialise. Where we land in two weeks is anyone’s guess. But it certainly won’t end with a squad able to compete on multiple fronts.