LADS, IT’S FOOTBALL DAILY
Previously described as “schoolyard stuff, mate” by Ange Postecoglou, the first recorded use of the term ‘Spursy’ is unknown but is believed to date back approximately 11 years. The dictionary – well, Urban Dictionary – has plenty of entries describing the soft underbelly and lack of backbone that has been the hallmark of Tottenham teams going back far longer than a decade. Students of its etymology believe it may have its origins in the three-word pre-match “Lads, it’s Tottenham” address to his Manchester United players by Sir Alex Ferguson before a meeting between the two sides at Old Trafford at some point during the 12 years Roy Keane played for the club.
It was the Irishman who first drew public attention to the sneeringly dismissive exhortation in one of his autobiographies, as a nod to his former manager’s “brilliant” appreciation that little more needed to be said for a game against opposition so uniquely famous in English football for their ability to inexplicably capitulate that the adjective used to describe their apparently never-ending cycle of wildly vacillating performances is actually named after them. On and on it goes to this day, with Spurs pulling one of their finest performances of the Premier League era out of the bag against the reigning champions, having previously contrived to lose what pretty much everyone presumed to be a home gimme against Ipswich Town. Buoyed with confidence, they will go into their next top-flight game fully expecting to win at home in a game they will almost certainly lose because “Lads, it’s Tottenham” and that’s what Tottenham do.
In the 15 years that have elapsed since Juande Ramos, the last man to mastermind a trophy win for the club who was unceremoniously bounced out of White Hart Lane, Tottenham have had eight full-time managers, each of whom has tried to insert something resembling a backbone into this ever-evolving but always fragile squad of consistently underachieving show-ponies with questionable big-game temperament. And to a man and in various different ways, each one of Harry Redknapp, André Villas-Boas, Tim Sherwood (was that a dream?), Mauricio Pochettino, José Mourinho, Nuno Espírito Santo, Antonio Conté and Postecoglou have failed. But while Big Ange has bought himself more time to find some way of eliminating the flimsiness for which Tottenham has long been a byword from his squad, results this season already suggest he is unlikely to succeed.
Between them, Ipswich and Crystal Palace have won two games this season, with both those victories coming against a Spurs team that has won nine and lost 10 of their past 20 league games. In three different competitions over the past 30 days, Tottenham have beaten Manchester City twice, come out second best in a five-goal thriller in Turkey and lost against two of the bottom three sides in the Premier League. “When you hear fans and neutrals talk about Tottenham, they often say, ‘Soft, weak … bottle it, Spursy – all that rubbish’, I think the last couple of weeks shows we might be going in a slightly different direction,” mused James Maddison, last September after he and his teammates had achieved a battling win against Sheffield United and not lost a north London derby. All that rubbish? Before Saturday’s home defeat at the hands of Fulham – and this definitely won’t help – the good ship Spursyness appears to be firmly back on course.
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Join John Brewin for live Bigger Cup coverage of Manchester City 5-0 Feyenoord at 8pm GMT, while Niall McVeigh will be on clockwatch duty at the same time with goal updates from the day’s other matches.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Olaf Janssen will be the first coach in professional football to be mic’d up on 8 December. His coaching orders, discussions and talk will be heard with a time delay” – football fans watching Magenta Sport in Germany will have the pleasure of hearing the almost-live effing and jeffing of Viktoria Köln’s perma-tanned manager when they take on VfL Osnabrück in the third division. What’s German for “hit the [eff]ing channel”?
RECOMMENDED LOOKING
Here’s David Squires on … Manchester City getting a visit from Swindon Town’s resident exorcist Ian Holloway.
RECOMMENDED SHOPPING
You can get your very own copies of the latest David Squires cartoons. And Big Website’s football bookshop has the latest release from David himself, along with those from Miguel Delaney, Nick Miller and Jeff Stelling.
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
Hurray! A ‘trailblazer’ scheme. If there’s one thing that a multi-billion-pound industry like the Premier League desperately needs, it’s the ability to get the government-subsidised labour of people who ‘will lose their benefits if they refuse to take up opportunities’. And note, of course, that opportunities means ‘work or training’. Or, as we used to call it in the olden days, ‘general dogsbody, making tea and photocopying’” – Noble Francis.
Manchester City becoming ‘Spursy’ (yesterday’s Football Daily letters)? Please! City invented that concept. Does no one remember ‘typical City’? We have always been able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” – Pat Condreay.
Firstly, kudos to Spurs’ Guglielmo Vicario for keeping a clean sheet against City despite playing an hour on a broken ankle. Now that he’s going to be recuperating from surgery for a wee while, will he be living Vicario-usly through Fraser Forster? Sod it, I’m not even a little bit sorry” – Derek McGee.
When spelling out a phrase, such as ‘fair market value’, followed by its abbreviation in brackets (FMV), it is common practice to then use said abbreviation in any further use if the phrase. In your article on the Premier League v Manchester City (Friday’s Football Daily) you failed to follow this protocol, and spelled out ‘fair market value’ in the subsequent paragraph, thus wasting a number of key strokes. And I’ve wasted something like 465 writing this email” – John Ellen.
Send letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s letter o’ the day winner is … Derek McGee, who lands their very own piece of Football Weekly merch. Terms and conditions for our competitions can be viewed here.
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