Former Arsenal striker doesn’t believe in backing up his opinions
John Hartson started writing a weekly column for thelondonpaper this year and has gradually built a reputation for spewing random nonsense that could see him offered a job on Match of the Day in the future. His article yesterday helped him climb even further up the Crap Pundit League although he still has some work to do before breaking the Big Four (Alan Shearer, Ian Wright, Mark Bright and Mark Lawrenson). Here are some of the highlights, accompanied by The Spoiler’s own punditry on the punditry:
“Harry Redknapp says he needs four players to turn Spurs into a top outfit and it reminds us of what a shambolic job former boss Juande Ramos did.”
If it was really Ramos and not Damien Comolli who decided that Spurs didn’t need any left wingers this summer and could afford to sell their two best strikers, why was the Frenchman also sacked and why have the club ditched the director of football system?
“I think he does need to spend an awful lot of money.
This morning, Gus Poyet has admitted that Tottenham were right to sack him and Juande Ramos, going as far as to give “full credit to Harry”. Former director of football Damien Comolli, however, does not hold the same opinion of Tottenham’s start to 2008/09:
“My time at Tottenham went exceptionally well.
“I took a lot of pleasure in what I achieved.
“I think Tottenham was rated as the 11th biggest club in the world — it was extraordinary.
“I had a lot of success. I did a lot of good for the team and left a club in great shape.
“The current results are showing what I did for Tottenham. The team is great and young.”
Granted, Comolli helped the club win silverware and achieved a top five finish in 2006/07, but can the man who forced Martin Jol out of the door really make these claims? Did he really do a lot of good for the team? We’re not convinced.
Former West Ham chairman Eggert Magnusson on November 21, 2006:
“I will also be continuing talks with Alan Pardew on how he sees the future on the playing side. This is very much his domain and he has my full confidence and support.”
December 11, 2006: Pardew is sacked
Wigan chairman Dave Whelan on May 14, 2007:
“I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome [Chris Hutchings] as manager and give him my assurance that he will have my full and total backing as we seek to stay in the Premiership for a fourth season and keep establishing this club in the best league in the world.”
November 5, 2007: Hutchings is sacked
Newcastle chairman Chris Mort on November 26, 2007:
“Sam [Allardyce] is a very experienced manager, and I am sure he will work hard with his coaching team to turn the team around. He is working hard to get his best team, and how they can work together in the best way.”
Chairman pays homage to Ashley with 2,441-word statement
Daniel Levy has written a lengthy open letter on the club’s website in an attempt to explain to fans the thought process behind his recent decision-making.
Unlike Mike Ashley’s similar statement to Newcastle fans two months ago, Levy stops short of blaming himself for the problems and instead appears to list a number of reasons why everyone else has screwed up.
He explains that he sold Dimitar Berbatov on deadline day because under FIFA regulations they would have lost him for a pittance next summer, although he laughably adds that “he had not been a positive influence on the pitch or in the dressing room”, apparently deciding that his 46 goals and 22 assists had nothing to do with their fifth-placed finish in 2006-07 or their Carling Cup success.
Levy also adds that the “ultimate failure” was that “quite simply, we failed because we were not as decisive or as successful in identifying or replacing the two strikers as early as we should have been,” which appears to have been blamed on Damien Comolli. The letter also vowed that the club are not solely run to make a profit and revealed that new manager Harry Redknapp will have absolute control over transfers and that the sporting director role vacated by Comolli will not be filled.
Read the statement in all its glory after the jump:
Levy somehow manages to make things worse for Spurs…again!
Exactly a year to the day after Martin Jol was sacked as Tottenham manager, the club have announced the departures of manager Juande Ramos, assistant Gus Poyet, sporting director Damien Comolli and coach Marcos Alvarez.
The Jol sacking was abysmally timed, with almost everyone who attended the UEFA Cup home game against Getafe besides the Dutchman knowing that he had been axed, but the decision to dismiss the three most important members of the matchday staff just over fifteen hours before a hugely important home game against Bolton, who could climb nine point above Spurs with victory, may have trumped even that.
Poyet was expected by many fans to succeed Ramos but he has gone too, leaving development squad coach Clive Allen and youth team boss Alex Inglethorpe to take temporary charge. With the timing of the announcement it may prove the case that the players won’t even hear the news until the morning and if they are awake to hear the news now, it’s hard to imagine how they’ll manage to sleep on it.
An early favourite to take over as manager is former West Ham boss Alan Curbishley. It has been rumoured that he turned down the QPR job earlier today and the departure of Comolli means that he would not have to deal with a transfer supremo operating over his head, something that compromised his position at Upton Park.
The official Tottenham statement can be read after the jump:
As Tottenham finished another performance where absolutely everything went wrong yesterday, chairman Daniel Levy was caught by the cameras chatting into his mobile. It’s possible that he was ordering a Dominos so it would be delivered when he got home, but that’s an incredibly risky strategy. What if there is traffic? The driver would take it back to the restaurant and then bring it back again cold - an undesirable situation for everyone involved. Perhaps it is more likely that Levy was ordering a managerial execution, much like he did at this time last year.
So, will Levy, Comolli and co hold their nerve and stick with the luckless Spaniard (seen above conducting an orchestra), or will they send out a P45 before we celebrate the birth of Father Christmas? Votes and comments below, please.
Spanish coach doing his absolute best to ensure Spurs win the Championship next season
The Spoiler has come into information that suggests Spurs fans are badly in denial when it comes to correctly apportioning responsibility for their unhappy start to the season. (The Spoiler has also been accused on more than one occasion of being anti-Tottenhamist, an accusation that has no basis in truth.) Various phone-ins and message boards have Spurs fans laying the blame squarely at the feet of Damien Comolli, who has indeed failed to dazzle in the transfer market, and Daniel Levy, for his “Take care of the pennies, and the players will take care of themselves” economic philosophy. Coach Juande Ramos has been given a pass for quietly getting on with a difficult job.
However, the news from the Spurs training ground indicates a very different situation, and that instead of trying to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, Ramos is one step away from having the players bump into each to the accompaniment of comedy music.
According to our mole: “Juande came back from his (summer) holidays unhappy in London, and now seems hell-bent on doing all he can to induce his own sacking and pay-off.”
Rival fans may have laughed at the fact that Tottenham finished eleventh last season after talking up their top-four credentials but one area where you couldn’t fault them was their knack of scoring goals. Their 66-goal haul was the fifth best in the league last season and even better than Chelsea’s. But Juande Ramos and Gus Poyet clearly weren’t happy with this free-scoring nature and set about enforcing a five-point plan to change things:
1. Get rid of Jermain Defoe Juande logic: He might have scored 64 goals for the club from starting 110 games, but who needs Jermain Defoe when you’ve got Robbie Keane and Dimitar Berbatov? By selling him to another club with European aspirations, Portsmouth, there’s no way it’ll come back and bite us. If anything, he’ll help drag them down to our level. The reality: Defoe has scored thirteen goals in eighteen league starts for his new club and scored against Tottenham this weekend.
2. You don’t win anything with left-wingers Juande logic: We may already have Jamie O’Hara, Didier Zokora, Tom Huddlestone, Jermaine Jenas and Aaron Lennon here already but what we really need is more midfielders who prefer playing in the centre or on the right. Bring in Luka Modric, David Bentley and Giovani dos Santos, it’ll be fun trying to figure out where to play them all. Who cares if Bentley got into the England squad for his performances on the right, let’s sling him on the left or behind the strikers. Luka Modric is known as the exciting, attacking impetus of the Croatia team but there’s no harm playing him as a holding player. Maybe I could throw him on the left too! The reality: Spurs ended up starting Gilberto, who hasn’t looked too convincing in his preferred position of left-back, as an attacking left-winger against Portsmouth.
3. Sell one of the best strike forces in the Premier League Juande logic: Robbie and Dimitar scored 46 goals between them last season for our bottom-half side, and the fans voted Robbie as player of the season but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be able to cope without them. They both say they want
