In an ideal world you'd be Barcalona. Enriched with a beautiful (the passing not the diving) footballing philosophy from academy to first team. We (over in N17) don't quite have the foundations in place to implement such a template. It's hardly a task you can set into place over night. The right manager (and perhaps dare I say a sporting director?) has to be at the forefront re-structuring from top to bottom the development of youth players and an evident style of play meaning when the club does go out and sign someone, it's not a scatter-gun approach or one tailored specifically for opportunistic signings and wheeler dealer bargains. Only a certain ilk of player would fit in. Everybody involved at the club clearly understanding how the game should be played and the aforementioned youth players, promoted successfully into the first team, completely and unequivocally Tottenham at heart.
In short, it's fantasy football at this moment in time.
For a clubs traditions to be the main driving force behind such an ethos, it will only happen when it's meant to. If we've had anything of an ethos at Spurs, it's always been to attack and play attractive sweeping football. We've gone about doing so in the past by just signing flair players and 'players of the moment', sometimes without any pragmatic approach on how they would all fit together.
Throw enough paint at the canvas and you just might end up with a masterpiece <- it doesn't quite work.
Our academy always appears to produce players of promise, but we're still waiting for something to blossom.
We've got stability, but there's no point in discussing a Tottenham blueprint just yet. What does need to be discussed is the opening of the transfer window and the work that is about to transpire with hopefully players arriving and leaving. For the moment, it's the short term that requires attention in order for there to be more thought provoking frameworks in the long term.
Someone recently mentioned to me that he believed the vast majority of clubs favour a scatter gun approach when looking to sign someone. They fancy one player, they bid, it's rejected, they move on. The ones that single out a target or two and simply work towards them are always more successful. You would be, if you're focused on one person in particular or a specific type of player that only a handful of targets fit into.
You can categorise most forwards (for example) by way of style so you're left with deciding on age, experience and availability/price after working out if you're after a Drogba or a Defoe. You draw up a list with your preferred choices and work through it, unless you sign the one first on the list.
It will always look chaotic from the sidelines. Why? Well mainly because we are impatient, excited and also heavily reliant on whispers and news coverage. You don't really know what is going on until it actually happens (or when Harry turns up in front of a Sky Sports News camera to update us).
In 2006 we did not bolster our squad during the January window. We should have consolidated. We paid the price. These past two windows we apparently endeavoured to sign a forward and failed. I don't quite believe most of the supposed bids for La Liga stars actually happened. Perhaps Forlan and Rossi were subjected to our interest.
What was disconcerting was the manner in which we bid for Charlie Adam during the final hour or so. Opportunistic and desperate...also so illogical, Spock would have died of an aneurysm had he been subjected to the madness.
Just because someone becomes available last minute, doesn't mean we have an obligation to bid, and yet that's how it appears to have played out.
"Adam is available, would you like me to bid?"
"Sure. Got 45 minutes left but if we can order a pizza in that time we can surely sign a player"
"You certain you want him? Where would he play?"
"Let's worry about that after we've paid £10M"
It's pretty clear we need to have decisive plan of action and a list of targets along with a heavily strained fax machine sending out 'come and get'em' pleas for the likes of Bentley and the rest of the fringe players.
We simply can not afford to dither and leave it all until that final week.
I'm not going to apologise for stating the bleeding obvious. It's just that the bleeding obvious has taken a leave of absence recently. So let's hope he doesn't spend the summer by a pool topping up his tan.
'Seasons End' articles:
The Progression of Harry Redknapp's Tottenham
