Darren Bent - Your Club Needs YOU!

With the news that Russian hotshot Roman Pavlyuchenko is out for 3 weeks with an ankle injury, Tottenham find themselves in a bit of a pickle. The transfer policy of the last 12 months has now seen us go from an embarrassment of riches in the forward line to a loanee with virtually no Premiership experience... and Darren Bent.

We at Spurs Club are absolutely convinced that Benty is a good player (well, at least two of us are). Back in 2005 Charlton had just gone down and the one player on their books of any note was England International Darren Bent. The player himself reportedly turned down several other offers in favour of his dream move to the Super Spurs.

Benty had a very good pedigree when he arrived at Tottenham, we paid £16m when £16m was a lot of money, but let's not forget at the time he was hot property and was coming off the back of not one but 2 exceptional seasons in the Premiership. However, Martin Jol preferred Keane and Defoe, and then the virtually unchangeable partnership of Keane and he-who-must-not-be-named, and so Bent had to bide his time and wait for his chance.

To his credit he has done this without complaint and now, his chance is here. After an incredible preseason many of us Benty fans were crowing "I told you so" to anyone who would listen, but that optimism has obviously dried up quicker than the proverbial nun's chuff. Bent has suffered along with the rest of the team. He has missed a few chances but has also shown in glimpses that he could be worth 20 goals again as long as we don't give up on hm.

However, if there's ever a player that you feel needs to play week in, week out it's Darren Bent, and I'm not sure he's going to get that at Tottenham. With Pav being injured he'll start against Stoke and Bolton, and assuming the three week estimate is accurate and he makes a good stab of the other games he'll probably get an opportunity to lead the line against Arsenal - three games that could end the daily misery we all experience at the moment and potentially establish Bent as flavour of the month.

Many fans would love to see him sold, but that in my opinion is bonkers. He's still only 23, British, has plenty of Premiership experience and obviously there's a talented player in there somewhere. I guarantee that if sold he will be another of our ex-players that goes on to score with irritating regularity for whoever we sell to.

And if we sold him we'd have to go out and buy not one, not two but 3 quality strikers. I don't know about you but the way we are going at the moment I struggle to see how we are going to get one. Talk of Huntelaar, Villa and Arshavin is pie in the sky while we are languishing in the bottom quarter. In fact even if we climb to mid table by January, Arshavin is the only sensible name of the three, and he's hardly busting his balls to move to North London - at least not to the white side anyway. No, as it stands the only aisles we can shop in are those labelled "out of contract" or "10 mil and under" - unless Comolli has something up his sleeve, and who'd risk a tenner on that one? (Please don't even talk to me about tranny loving, injury prone fat boy Ronaldo coming on some nonsensical pay-as-you-play arrangement - it's simply not going to happen.)

So for now Mr. Bent is the big cheese, and it might not be going too far to suggest that the next 270 minutes of his footballing career could be the most important of his life. Spurs ARE moving in the right direction. We had 27 attempts on goal against Hull, with 16 being on target. Stoke are there for the taking, as are Bolton at home, if Bent can put in the kind of performance some of us think he is capable of then wins from those 2 games and ANY kind of result against Arsenal will turn our season around.

So step up Darren Ashley Bent, your club needs you.

Spurs MUST Issue Statement Over Hughes Joke

I damn near choked on my cornflakes this morning when I read that Spurs have allegedly "sounded out" Mark Hughes regarding becoming their manager before the end of the international break next week. They're not even beating around the bush with this one - "Spurs officials contacted Sparky’s advisors yesterday to offer him the job hours before Manchester City’s UEFA Cup tie with Omonia Nicosia. " - are they frigging serious?

I am just astounded that a national newspaper can get away with printing something like this. They are in affect directly accusing Tottenham Hotspur FC of tapping up another Premiership manager. What with tapping up being quite a hot issue recently, and the potential punishment for being caught red handed I will find it incredible if the club intends to just let this one go.

As if the notion that Mark Hughes would leave the richest club in the world for bottom of the table crisis club Tottenham wasn't laughable enough the article goes on to claim that Levy "almost offered him the job" last year. How exactly do you "almost" offer someone a job? Are we to believe that the relentless pursuit of Ramos over the course of 3 months eventually resulted in Hughes "almost" being offered the job?

But really this is no laughing matter because if, as I HAVE to believe, this is utter bollocks, then a certain amount of damage has already been done. The press as a whole will now move away from discussing the form of the team and start touting other candidates for the job, quoting bookmakers prices etc etc as they love to do, and that is a slippery slope that intensifies the pressure on the current incumbent and usually leads to only one outcome.

And make no mistake, sacking Ramos after the chaotic goings on of the summer when we are still in all cup competitions and only 2 points worse off than we were this time last season, and the season before, would make us a laughing stock and may well be the final straw for me. Has sacking the manager been a successful policy for Tottenham over the last 10 years? Of course not so how is sacking another one - a man who was widely regarded as one of the best in Europe a year ago - going to help now?

The problem is that some quaters have already joined the newly formed Ramos Out Brigade, and whilst not as popular as the Jol Out Brigade in it's heyday, members are being actively recruited.

But who is seriously going to replace him? Hughes? Moyes? Klinsmann? I don't see how any of those are better than Ramos, what have they done apart from guide their clubs to mid-table? Would there be another overhaul of the playing staff come January? And what if they lose half a dozen games on the trot, or we end up out of the cups and 15th in the league by March, what then - another sacking and on to the next one?

What a bloody joke!

If Ramos gets sacked in the next fortnight it will prove only one thing - that our beloved club is being run by the biggest bunch of clowns seen in North London since Billy Smart's packed up and moved on.

Why Spurs are Feeder Club

I realise that the title is provocative and for that I apologise, however, you only have to watch Match of the Day to be amazed at how many ex-Spurs are plying their trade at other Premiership clubs. I think that we must have set some form of a record this year with virtually half the league having ex-Spurs at their disposal and Sunderland, Fulham and Portsmouth being able to field the best part of half a teams-worth! Based on our current, albeit temporary league position I guess you could say that makes us a feeder club!!!

In the past many of us have seen this as "clearing the deadwood", but whether you think that coaching these ex-players was the football equivalent of polishing turds or not, this policy has stripped us of the kind of continuity that every good team cultivates by having a group of players stick together for a substantial amount of time. Players, even mediocre players, play better as a team over time and although the Tottenham carousel has ensured Spurs are on a sound financial footing, the flip side is we have not really had an opportunity to see our players develop as a unit over 4, 3 or even 2 years (although I suppose we'd actually need to keep the same manager for that period for it to work, and there's not much chance of that in Spursland).

The latest nail in this coffin are the whispers that the Arshavin deal fell through because of Levy's concerns regarding the player's sell on value. When did Man U, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea or any other club with genuine ambition ever worry about a player's sell on value? They don't, and that is because when they buy players they buy them to play, and more often than not they expect them to play for at least the length of the contract they sign.

They do not regard them as an investment opportunity to be bought and sold as if playing some sort of bizarre stocks and shares game: Make a few mill here, lose a few mill there but as long as we are operating a profit then who gives a shit?

The pattern seems to be:

1. Buy a bunch of young, promising players, foreign unknowns, British boys on the brink of international recognition etc etc
2. Play them for a year
3. Sell those that attract critical acclaim for a vast profit
4. Clear the deadwood at a small loss
5. Keep the rest for another year
6. Repeat
   

Am I saying they do it deliberately? Well yes, as a matter of fact I bloody well am! You may say that Man United engineered the sales of Carrick and Berbatov, and that the players wanted to leave and so on. But the reason they got away with it is because Man U and the rest KNOW that every player at Spurs has a price because every player at Spurs DOES have a price. Of course to save face the club is going to blame everybody but themselves, tell you that the player got tapped up, tell you that his head was turned, tell you that they didn't want to sell - but sell they do and that my friends is why every one of us should be worried by the Gareth Bale talk.

Of course, they won't sell for £10m mind you. No, that is not enough profit for a young international like him. But if Liverpool get serious and the talk escalates to £18m, £20m or more then he'll be out the door before the champagne corks have even hit the wall.

The phrase "financially stable" is probably more palatable to the average Spurs fan than "feeder club" and we should probably thank Mr Levy for the former. However, if Tottenham are to achieve success in terms that are not measured by how far into the black the balance sheet is every year then we need to stop selling our best players - more than that, we need to consider not selling our average players!

Unfortunately the evidence suggests that the ENIC business model has zero contingency for this and for that reason I say...

...bring on the billionaires!!!