As one wit put it this morning, when Thomas Frank said it would be a transitional season for Spurs, he didn’t mean transitioning from the Premier League to the Championship.
Had Manchester United not scored a last-minute goal last night to draw with West Ham, Tottenham would be just three points above the bottom three, and on current form heading for the drop.
So it’s entirely right that Frank has been sacked. He is plainly a decent man but is merely the latest example of a manager who has done an excellent job with a small team – no insult to the brilliantly run Brentford, but that’s what they are – who proves not remotely good enough to manage a team whose fans rightly expect to be competing for Europe.
Frank has looked clueless and bereft of ideas as we slide down the table and last night’s display against Newcastle was the last straw. I had to miss it – and it says it all that I was actually relieved not to have to go. That’s no way to be made to think about your team, let alone when you pay £1800 a year to see them play.
To be fair to Frank, he has faced an injury roll call that makes last season’s travails seem a distant ideal. At the moment we are missing Udogie, Richarlison, Maddison, Bergvall, Bentancur, Davies, Kulusevski, Danso, Kudus, Porro and the idiotic Romero for four games following his second red card, with a further two game ban to follow when he gets two more yellow cards. That injured team alone would make a good fist of competing for Europe.
The fact we have sometimes been reduced to fielding the only eleven first team players still standing isn’t Frank’s fault. And it’s not his fault he isn’t good enough. Which brings us to the real villains of this piece – the board.
It is astonishing that the Spurs board kept Frank in place for so long when any sentient observer could see that the team was crashing towards relegation. But it’s par for the course with a board that seems to be clueless about football – and executives who repeatedly let the club down. With an injury crisis getting worse by the week, we bought Conor Gallagher – a good buy – and an untried Brazilian teen, and no one else. As if there was not a single other footballer in the world they could identify who could help the team over the rest of the season.
This crisis for Spurs is on the board. We need a clear out of the executives as well as the board; we need new owners who understand the modern game. Under Daniel Levy we were financially solvent, and we have a wonderful stadium. But under his stewardship we bought a series of players who were simply not good enough, not least because we refused to break a wage straitjacket that would allow us to compete for the best. Levy lucked into appointing Mauricio Pochettino, not his first choice, who took us to places we had dreamt about. But he wasn’t backed, the team declined, and the rot set in. The steady improvement that began under Martin Jol, developed under Harry Redknapp and accelerated under Pochettino has now crashed back to square one, and we are a club going nowhere. That is on the board.
It's right that Frank has gone, but I dread that the fools running Spurs will rush into the next appointment. Worse, I cannot see how anything or anyone will work while we still have the same CEO, sporting director and the rest of the crew who have proved so useless. Spurs need serious change – and the manager is only one part of that.
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