Reality bites at Spurs

Mick Dennis13 April 2012

As triumphant homecomings go, Tottenham's scrappy victory over the Premiership's poorest team last night in front of the worst White Hart Lane attendance of the season was a decidedly unimpressive welcome for new manager Glenn Hoddle.

Sunday's result against arch-rivals Arsenal was considerably more significant, however, because it showed how far Tottenham are behind the Premiership's top clubs. They are streets behind.

It showed as well that Tottenham's uniquely intolerant supporters are prepared to change the habits of a lifetime and give this manager their unstinted backing.

At Old Trafford on Sunday, Tottenham started with a sweeper and only one out-and-out striker, setting out to stifle Arsenal in midfield and managing a meagre seven shots all game compared to Arsenal's 21. If George Graham had sent out a team to play like that in an FA Cup semi-final, then the fans would have slaughtered him, but because it was the blessed Glenn who put pragmatism ahead of kamikaze attacking, there has not been a word of criticism.

That is because Spurs fans could never accept Gunner Graham but believe devoutly that Hoddle's second coming at White Hart Lane is his and their destiny. He will lead them into the promised land of eternal glory, glory, Tottenham Hotspur.

It is bovine excrement of course. If Hoddle does achieve success at Spurs it won't be because it was preordained. If the way he organised things when he was in charge at Swindon, Chelsea and Southampton are anything to go by, it will be achieved with as much concentration on defence and endeavour as any of Graham's teams. If Hoddle does well, it will be more about kicking than kismet.

But Spurs fans probably won't notice. They'll kid themselves that Hod the god has produced fantasy football. Fantasy and delusions come easily to Tottenham supporters. After all, you need to raid the archives of black and white Path? newsreels to get footage of either of the dimly-remembered times Spurs won the League, yet their fans believe for some reason they have a glorious heritage of fine football.

The magazine When Saturday Comes got it right with this month's front cover. It shows Hoddle saying: "So it's back to the Spurs tradition" and his assistant, John Gorman, thinking: "Spend a fortune ... row with the board ... finish 10th."

It is a good job that Hoddle didn't manage to cajole the team he inherited from Graham into defying form and probability by beating Arsenal. Can you imagine the Hoddle hype we'd have had to endure in the build-up to the Final?

In fact, the abject semi-final defeat will help Hoddle and Tottenham if it persuades the club's supporters to take a realistic look at the situation for once.

If the fans accept that, after a decade of mediocrity, there can be no quick fixes, then it will be no bad thing that, although the year ends in one, Tottenham are going to end it with nought.

Raise a glass to rugby chiefs

Otherwise we would not have heard David McHugh cheering after the England-France match when it was announced that the Twickenham bars were staying open for two hours.

McHugh, from Ireland, took over during the game when South African Tappe Henning pulled his hamstring. Those of us listening in on Ref!Link could hear the mike being taped to his body and hear him going "Ouch!" when the sticking plaster was readjusted.

It was a little more detail than we needed but Ref!Link certainly took us closer to the action.

The signals from the referee's micro-phone are received in a trailer in the car park and then broadcast back to those fans who have paid £5 each for a transistor radio-sized cardboard receiver and earphones.

You can use the receiver again at the next match and the people using them definitely have an advantage over those who don't. They can understand what's going on, for a start, which is not always the case in rugby union.

You get an insight into the gamesmanship which goes on. McHugh spotted that England were trying to make a temporary replacement by pretending that Jason Leonard had a nosebleed.

McHugh said: "There's no blood. If he goes off it's a permanent replacement." Unlike Henning, who barked at the players in a staccato English delivered in a clipped South African accent, McHugh spoke to the English in English and the French in French (fifth-form French, admittedly, but they still appreciated it).

"Monsieur le neuf. Dix! Dix!," he shouted as the scrum-half refused to retreat 10 yards from a line-out.

On the two occasions when the referee needed to consult the video-ref before (correctly) disallowing French tries, those of us with Ref!Link heard the discourse as the rest of the crowd waited.

"I want you to look at the position of the trailing leg. It was in touch? You are sure? OK, I'll give a line-out."

Brilliant stuff. It wouldn't work in football because you'd here the numero neuf telling him to ref off. So, not for the first time, you were reminded that rugby union is ahead of football in lots of ways.

The grandees of the Rugby Football Union are stuck forever with the memorable epithet given them by Will Carling but they do not deserve all of the ridicule that is heaped upon them.

They certainly deserve some of it. It is difficult to imagine any organisation making a worse bodge of introducing professionalism to the club game.

But, as well as Ref!Link, there are many good ideas at Twickenham.

The fact that those bars were open for two hours after the game represented a victory for a sensibly argued Twickenham campaign.

The local council had been misled by the police into believing that closing the bars as soon as the final whistle went would help ease congestion in the area by encouraging people to go straight home.

What actually happened was that the congestion was made insufferably worse as pavements and roads were filled by one mass exodus instead of the more gradual, if more unsteady, exit made by a crowd who can stop behind for a pint or several.

Some of the locals are still not happy and were out taking snaps of badly parked coaches and sundry other irritations on Saturday.

The RFU really were doing their best to minimise the jams, however. They provided a fleet of free, double-decker buses to take punters away from the ground and into Twickenham and Richmond town centres (where they were greedily and gleefully welcomed by waiting pubs and restaurants).

You couldn't help thinking that sometimes the old farts of the RFU provide a breath of fresh air.

If proof were needed that football can be a capricious beast, it came when, about 28 hours after Martin O'Neill began celebrating Celtic's championship victory, his predecessor as manager, John Barnes, was one of six has-been and never-were panelists on Blankety Blank.

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