TOTTENHAM ARE STILL A BIG CLUB!

Taxes?

Ancelotti was getting €12m. I doubt Blanc is on as much though

Writing in his column for The Sun on Sunday, Redknapp comments that the Belgian would be the ideal player to fill a gap at Manchester City.

"The defence is not so solid and the guy who could put that right at a stroke is Jan Vertonghen.

"The way he brings the ball out of defence makes him perfect for City. He would probably cost around £40 million, but an all-Belgian central defensive duo of Vertonghen and Vincent Kompany could prove priceless."

think we now know if tom carroll's been recalled

Surprised he's not sniffing around the Man Utd job yet

you think he wouldnt steady that ship?

So i mean at what stage do we embrace this?

Matt i want u to know that i still love u man but the fp i just gave you was for "nouse" and it needed doin.

Sherwood has enough nouse to hang himself.

Not prepared to make a call until we've played a couple more decent teams. Being Kevin Keegan's Newcastle might be fun but equally if the wheels come off they'll do so spectacularly.

Everyone ships 4+ goals to City these days so I'm not going to hold that against him unless he plays an obviously lightweight midfield. Everton and Newcastle results probably a decent barometer. If we're still in contention after playing Chelsea and Arsenal back-to-back in March then I'll be convinced.

Also worth pointing out he's got us knocked out of two cups at the first time of asking and may indeed get the hattrick in a few weeks.

Job done there imo, as a caretaker manager taking over with only one real goal

Aaron Lennon has 78 caps?!

21 according to this:

http://www.sporting-heroes.net/football/england/aaron-lennon-4557/international-caps_a11799/

James Milner has 44.

worthy of them

Jimll fix iterating

A victim of wikivandalism

Tottenham putting in a p good challenge to LFC in the how to waste £55+m on 2 useless players stakes.

Of course Soldado had more pedigree than Carroll and Lamela will surely be better than Downing. But so far...yikes.

In terms of core ability and technique Soldado and Lamela >>>>>>> Carroll and Downing.

I think Soldado may be a write-off here but we could sell him back to Spain and recoup some of that money. His problem seems to be confidence as much as anything else, every time I see him play he looks like he's having a fucking shit time, but his approach play has been consistently good and he's set up a load of goals for us.

Lamela hasn't really had enough time on the pitch to impress, anyone labeling him a flop or a waste at this stage needs to remember Bale's first couple of seasons. He has the potential to be better than anyone else in our squad, maybe only Eriksen might eclipse him. He needs more time on the pitch next season, definitely, but if we keep Sherwood as manager he'll bottle it in favour of Townsend every time.

Obviously Sherwood's chances of being in the post next September are roughly equivalent to mine.

A hat trick of tap-ins in the league would do Soldado a world of good really.

Soldado's looked okay I've thought, it's more Spurs were so not set up for him. Of course Adebayor returning from Patagonia and immediately being The Man isn't going to help either.

re Downing, it was with resigned amusement that I read this stat analysis on goalscorers and saw that, statistically, the two least effective seasons in Europe in the past half-decade both belong to him.

Yeah I don't actually think Lamela is useless. Similar to LFC in that the torres/bale money received mitigates against the fees subsequently spent on players who performed badly(Carroll/Downing) or haven't performed(Soldado) or haven't even contributed(lamela). But still neither club is rich enough that they can afford to bomb that much money and easily recover. LFC look like they'll be saved by Suarez arriving at the same time and being out of this world. Spurs haven't had that silver lining signing.

They are men. I am a manager – not a babysitter. I’m already planning for next season, a lot of players here are playing for their future and I think they realise that now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS0RxcYEFyo

if spurs lose their next two matches at home (benfica and arsenal), which is quite likely, would sherwood get the sack?

who would replace him? the season would be a write off, they'd just stagger to the end with him surely

yes, all that guff from sherwood applies to himself more than any particular player

Levy would make himself a laughing stock sacking Sherwood before the end of the season, it's probably not going to happen.

We have the players to beat most of the teams below us and none of the clubs above us, so we'll be fine and finish more-or-less where we are now without Sherwood doing anything spectacular, but that's pretty much the end of it. Season is a write-off anyway unless the unthinkable happens and we win the Europa League.

Spalletti would be available immediately.

Man for man we're in about the right positiin but jesus its been a long time since we've anything like clicked

Happy enough for sherwood to threaten all and any player from now til summer, surely they all realise he's the lamest duck since howard

TS:

"I'm the one planning it at the moment and looking at different personnel. The boys here have an opportunity to prove that they want to stay. If not, they'll be moved on and we'll look for replacements. I know the DNA of the guys and I know the ones I can trust and those I can't."

Asked which players were playing for their future, Sherwood added: "All of them. Everyone gets a second chance. They've got an opportunity to respond, they know what's required. It's about rolling your sleeves up in adversity and that's what I'm looking for. The players are men; I'm a manager not a babysitter."

^
He openly states that he cannot trust some of the players.
Is he leaving them to wonder which ones?
Does he know what 'DNA' means?
If he doesn't trust some of the players, why do they get a second chance? They can't be trusted with it.

He's a terrible thing.

My guess is he's talking about Vertonghen, who I think mentally checked out a while ago. Maybe Paulinho or Capoue as well. Startlingly inept man management either way given his obviously draining authority, it's not like he can pull a Mourinho or even a Redknapp here.

Also if he thinks Levy will back him in writing off £100m of by and large good players then he's more foolish than I imagined.

Weird how in all of this it's Adebayor who gets to play teacher's pet.

I mean Capoue had already gone on record as basically saying "in England they don't know shit about foreign players" and I can't really fault him for it given the way he's been treated.

but pf, i really can't see the point in getting exercised about sherwood!

he has never been in the running for the job.

I'm not even sure if he can damage the players given his position.

but i'm not against shouting at vertonghen and the likes.

He's in the job!

Fair

I suspect that several of the new arrivals, especially the ones who are in and out of the team, will be very nervous about their World Cup prospects and may well consider their moves here a disaster in that regard. The Belgians and maybe Paulinho will be alright but one or two of the others must be dropping out of the reckoning.

WC squad hopes a vg point alright.

Naughton will be doin well at this stage id say

pondered before an alternative world in which bale is unhappily at spurs at lamela goes to the 2014 wc after a great season at roma

Benfica are a big club. I wonder how good they'll be against Spurs tonight.

They have been a bit disappointing this season but are still top of the league, iirc. If they turn up, I would be happy with a draw.

Will tune in just for the chance to see Lazar Markovic for the first time. Unless it clashes with the Porto-Napoli.

Benfica looked more like a big club.

Spurs, especially in the second half, had several passages of idk 7-8 passes which went nowhere useful and felt like a kind of simulation of what a confident team and/or Big Club does; at those times their inferiority seemed much more apparent than during moments of individual cretinism

Thats merely the managerial cretinism showing up where the individual cretinism fails

A rare enough fuckin occurrence in itself tbh

I would like to believe that Sherwood is now discredited and this is commonly understood.

But reality does not always work like that. Possibly the club's owners remain as confident about him as he does. I will believe his departure when I see it.

Wouldn't normally C&P from The Fiver but their demolition of Sherwood today was pretty damning. They didn't bother to even try and be funny:

Tim Sherwood, a "source" told the Sun in January, "is not afraid to speak out". Thanks, "source". We hadn't noticed. As the man himself said this week, "I am singing it from the heart, not from the script – I'm not an actor, I work on impulse." On Thursday night he impulsively declared that Benfica's finger-waving manager Jorge Jesus "lacks class", and what's more he thinks it would be a good idea to ignore him completely when Spurs are in Lisbon for their Big Vase round of whatever second leg. "Nah, not for me thank you," he declared. "I have no intention of speaking to him."

Good plan, Tim. If you don't much like someone, it's often best to avoid them completely. And he wouldn't be the first Spurs manager to refuse to talk to a person he considered disrespectful, after all. Glenn Hoddle did it once, when one particularly insolent player criticised him in the press. Midfielder, this player was. Name of Sherwood. "The day after the article came out I tried to have a meeting with Hoddle," he sobbed. "He just said, 'I don't want to talk to you.' And those were the last words he ever said to me … In the end, the situation got so bad I wrote a formal letter of grievance."

OK, but a man's allowed to change his mind, isn't he? And to his great credit, Sherwood seems a principled chap. Take, for example, his criticism of Dimitar Berbatov in 2007, towards the end of the sulky Bulgarian's time at Spurs. "He is a big character in the dressing room and if he starts poisoning the rest of the boys you've had it," Sherwood said. "You need players in this situation, players who are going to fight for you." Like Sherwood himself fought for his managers. Take, say, Mr Roy at Blackeye Rovers, who wistfully recalled: "Tim became very disenchanted with the club. Being such an important character, his discontent was able to spread to a lot of other players. These people didn't have the strength of character or experience to stand up to somebody who was finding fault with most things."

Finding fault with most things, eh? Doesn't sound like Tim. He just sings from the heart. And, besides, he was younger then, and still learning. He's older now. Wiser. "When you get to this late stage of your career," he said a full decade ago, "you do start to think about the possibility of management and what you have learned from your different bosses." So, let's see exactly what he's learned, and how well he learned it:

Thing No1: "George Graham has a simple philosophy: 'If you don't lose goals you don't lose games.' If there's a secret behind his success, I think that's it." Result: Spurs, having kept a clean sheet in 54% of games this season before his appointment, have been running at 29% since.

Thing No2: "I've learned a hell of a lot from Glenn Hoddle – and all of it his how not to do the job. His biggest fault is he has absolutely no man-management skills. The art of successful management involves keeping everyone in the squad happy." The result: Sherwood accuses his players of being "lazy and unprofessional" and "too nice to each other". He shouldn't have to worry about their feelings, he reveals: "They are men. I'm a manager, not a babysitter."

Thing No3: "Kenny Dalglish's great managerial talent was that not only did he know every one of his own players but everybody else's as well. He would study the opposition and tell us what their players were good and bad at. He was a genius, the absolute guv'nor." Result: Luisão left totally unmarked by an ill-prepared Spurs defence at set pieces and scores for Benfica. Twice.

In summary, don't pay any attention to anything the man says. Or does.

This reminds us that Sherwood is not only incompetent, unintelligent and unqualified, but vile.