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Steve Hitchen

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HITCHENS IN OR OUT?

  • Total voters
    195
Blanchflower said:
But eventually it doesn't work, the transfer market is imperfect....there's no ponzi scheme beyond the top

You need to keep your best players to get to the top

Leicester's model never breaks into the elite
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Leicester won the league!

Atletico Madrid, sellers of of FOUR 50MM+ players in the past two years are (no jinx) about to win the league.

Liverpool sold their talisman and won the league and Champions League.

Chelsea have improved and are in a CL final having flogged off their best player.

There was a time when the "selling club" thing was real. That's over. Opportunistically selling top talent for silly money is a part of what any smart club is doing now.

What you CANNOT do is sell players and then let your squad capital decline through disinvestment and/or poor recruitment, both of which Spurs (and Woolwich) are up to their eyeballs in.
 
FightingIllini said:
Leicester won the league!

Atletico Madrid, sellers of of FOUR 50MM+ players in the past two years are (no jinx) about to win the league.

Liverpool sold their talisman and won the league and Champions League.

Chelsea have improved and are in a CL final having flogged off their best player.

There was a time when the "selling club" thing was real. That's over. Opportunistically selling top talent for silly money is a part of what any smart club is doing now.

What you CANNOT do is sell players and then let your squad capital decline through disinvestment and/or poor recruitment, both of which Spurs (and Woolwich) are up to their eyeballs in.
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Bang on, never should be an issue selling players if you have smart recruitment and source replacements who are of equal quality or better. We've failed miserably in that respect.
In most other businesses the people responsible would be accountable for that but not here it seems. The guy supposedly in charge of our recruitment gets promoted.
 
TonySoprano said:
Bang on, never should be an issue selling players if you have smart recruitment and source replacements who are of equal quality or better. We've failed miserably in that respect.
In most other businesses the people responsible would be accountable for that but not here it seems. The guy supposedly in charge of our recruitment gets promoted.
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And the cost of letting an asset dwindle to zero the way Eriksen did may be something a Man City can afford, but a normal club cannot.

Selling Kyle Walker at the top of the market is one of the smartest things we did during the Poch era. We should have sold others too. If our recruitment wasn't good enough to keep the quality level up, we were always doomed anyway, if just through aging and contracts running down.
 
Blanchflower said:
A real mix of issues

- Poch being too stubborn over signings
- the club being focused on building the stadium and the cost
- a truly amazing player for a few seasons (Dembele) coming to the end
- Poch having a mini breakdown
- Levy thinking Mourinho still had it
- not generally being city/Chelsea

But I think it potentially turns around very quickly
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I agree with your last sentence and have been trying to get that point over. Having supported the club since 1961 I have seen how things can change so quickly. My best example of this in in October 1980 I was at WHL. We were losing 3-0 to WBA and were crap. Villa was useless and substituted after 60 mins. It was at that stage 3-0 down that for the only time and in an apparent hopeless position that I left the ground in disgust. i missed Spurs pulling us back to 3-2. But the main point is no one would have convinced me that day that the following May, I would be at Wembley watching them win one of the best Cup finals ever. That was done with the same players and Manager.
There is no reason why with a couple of key new players and the right Manager that we cannot get back to where we were just a couple of years ago.
 
Blanchflower said:
Poch wanted Lo Celso over Fernandes
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That's the rub. Who knows at what stage what % of Levy's ear each player has/had/is to have...

Maybe Hitchen was strong on Fernandes, but Poch over-ruled saying he could get a song out of Eriksen, for instance (very plausible).

Poch lacked the streets in recruitment, that much is demonstrated, he could have recruited players of elite potential with low/zero history of metabolic induced injury. He said recently he wants PSG to play like wolves, but if his Spurs history shows anything, it's that they were fed like dogs.
 
Blanchflower said:
But eventually it doesn't work, the transfer market is imperfect....there's no ponzi scheme beyond the top

You need to keep your best players to get to the top

Leicester's model never breaks into the elite
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We sell our best players too, look at Bale right now did we get the best of him?

Kane is a freak one-off, do you think he'd still be here otherwise? Chances are he'll be gone in the summer at 27.
 
TonySoprano said:
Bang on, never should be an issue selling players if you have smart recruitment and source replacements who are of equal quality or better. We've failed miserably in that respect.
In most other businesses the people responsible would be accountable for that but not here it seems. The guy supposedly in charge of our recruitment gets promoted.
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What if he’s trying but when he goes to levy it’s just like banging your head against a brick wall. It seems a lot of people criticise hitchen, while not knowing what he does. We have a chairman who is notorious for being a pain in the arse over transfers. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility it is happening with Hitchin.
 
Blanchflower said:
Bale was nearly a decade ago
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We sell the players we should of kept , fail to sell the players we should have because we overcook it.

Bentley as Rose are the best but far from the only examples.

Genuine question what is your connection to the club or people that own it. I appreciate you are highly unlikely to answer. However if you say none I will find it hard to believe as you defend the indefensible almost constantly
 
Kristeva said:
So what? Do you think if we'd had a player of similar quality in the last 10 years we wouldn't have sold? We're no different to Leicester, we don't have any choice.

I get it, I hate Leicester too, but don't slag them off or the way they do things just because there not your club. It's pathetic and childish.
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We are completely different, players will join Leicester over us as they know they can move on as soon as Utd or City come calling - they know we won't do the same.
 
Ed Vanderlay said:
We sell the players we should of kept , fail to sell the players we should have because we overcook it.

Bentley as Rose are the best but far from the only examples.

Genuine question what is your connection to the club or people that own it. I appreciate you are highly unlikely to answer. However if you say none I will find it hard to believe as you defend the indefensible almost constantly
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Shouldn't the question be why do so many of our fans seemingly hate the club and talk it down at every opportunity
 
Blanchflower said:
Shouldn't the question be why do so many of our fans seemingly hate the club and talk it down at every opportunity
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Lots of people are pretty simple so they take on board all the negativity chucked out by the media and run with it. There’s never something positive about us in the media. I challenge anyone to find the last time something positive was written about us. Even when we beat Man U 6 1 we didn’t get any praise.
 
Brian Fantana said:
Lots of people are pretty simple so they take on board all the negativity chucked out by the media and run with it. There’s never something positive about us in the media. I challenge anyone to find the last time something positive was written about us. Even when we beat Man U 6 1 we didn’t get any praise.
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I think critiquing the club's activity is the opposite of 'simple' and shows more capability of critical thought than blindly following them.

As a spurs fan in London, I'm surrounded by friends who support Woolwich, Chelsea, Man utd, and even Liverpool. They all get rewarded for their devotion with a cup every few years.

Spurs fans devote themselves with hope for years on end as we build, and disappointment is almost guaranteed on a trophy basis. Then we sell our best players and the 'rebuild' starts again for another 5 year cycle of hope and crushing disappointment.
 
Kane you believe it said:
I think critiquing the club's activity is the opposite of 'simple' and shows more capability of critical thought than blindly following them.

As a spurs fan in London, I'm surrounded by friends who support Woolwich, Chelsea, Man utd, and even Liverpool. They all get rewarded for their devotion with a cup every few years.

Spurs fans devote themselves with hope for years on end as we build, and disappointment is almost guaranteed on a trophy basis. Then we sell our best players and the 'rebuild' starts again for another 5 year cycle of hope and crushing disappointment.
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That’s not what I’m saying, quite the opposite. I’m saying some of our fans seem to revel in the negativity. They use any excuse to have a go at the club, team, manager, players. It says more about them than anything else.

Take whoever we appoint as the next manager. He’ll get my backing whoever it is, even if it’s someone I think won’t work. I’ll still support him and hope for these yet they’ll be done who if it isn’t who they want will want him to fail from day one. We saw it with Mourinho and we will see it again.
 
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