Alex Ferguson and his Manchester United have a long dark history of playing mind games with anyone they see as a threat - and make no mistake, it works. With the bigger clubs the comments are designed to provoke indiscipline in a forthcoming fixture, but with the non-Champions League outfits it's a case of keeping the peasants in their place. Nothing says "We're a big club and you are not" more than the ability - real or perceived - to cherry pick everybody else's best players.
Fergie's favourite is to run a long and sustained media campaign in which he, his press lackeys or his players drop hints that they will be signing a key player from one of their rivals. A look at most of United's recent big name signings - Carrick, Hargreaves, Tevez even as far back as Rooney and beyond shows us a pattern that can only be described as legal tapping up.
In the last couple of years Tottenham have been subjected to more of this than most. Clearly it is not in the interest of the incomprehensible Scot to have the Big Four turn into the Big Five and the stats suggest that we were/are on the brink. Months of speculation preceded the departure of Carrick, a move that cynics might argue was designed to rip the heart out of a team that Jol had built around the talented Geordie and was only a dodgy Lasagna away from breaking the Champions League monopoly.
Every time Defoe scores a few goals we are led to believe that he will be packing his bags for Manchester during the next window and of course, for the last 6 months every news feed in the land has been convinced that our back-in-favour Bulgarian, Mr. Berbatov, is breaking his neck to become a Red Devil.
Historically Tottenham have refused to comment and, possibly due to an incompetent PR department, have come out of these tussles looking like the small club who can't keep hold of their players. But wait - could it be that with the new regime has come a refusal to simply lay back and think of England?
There's not a hell of a lot of club news floating around at the moment, so it would seem as though the press have decided to make a big deal out of Michael Carrick's public admiration of Berbatov. This "story" has been running for days, despite the player himself publicly stating he's going nowhere. Relentlessly the headlines continue, but then, like a bolt from the blue, what do I see?
The Mail, the Telegraph and various dodgy websites all suggest that... "Spurs to bid £18m for Carrick" - WHAT???
Any right minded individual must surely see what utter nonsense this is, but if we ignore for a moment the possibility of this containing even a shred of truth and refuse to treat it as a factual report, then there can only be one other explanation: Someone at Tottenham Hotspur FC has finally woken up and decided to come out swinging. It's pure genius - our ex-player comes out and starts the Berba to Man U fire again and wallop - we say fuck you, we're going to buy you back!
"They put one of ours in the hospital, we put two of theirs in the morgue" as Sean Connery famously said in one of his classics.
Whilst there is no way that we will ever see Carrick in lily white again, whoever it is at White Hart Lane that is playing the media this time needs a god damned pat on the back. With an attitude like this perhaps Fergie will pick on someone else and our players will themselves become... Untouchables.
