Is the Honey-Mou Period Already Over?

When Daniel Levy first made the controversial and quite frankly, day ruining decision to remove Mauricio Pochettino as manager, through my tear soaked eyes I somehow managed to read a hilarious and breathtakingly accurate analogy of the situation on Twitter. It was basically the real-world equivalent of leaving your devoted and loving Argentinian wife for a dirty but incredibly sexy Portuguese stripper. You knew it was a bad idea and you knew that it would all end in tears…..but my God, it was exciting! And to be fair, it actually was exciting…..for about 5 games or so. We beat West Ham and Bournemouth 3-2 apiece, qualified from our Champions League Group by smashing Olympiakos 4-2 and even put five cracking goals past Burnley at home. But unfortunately, with the obvious benefit of hindsight, it has now become clear that we weren’t witnessing a new, Mourinho-inspired dawn but merely the final death throes of a Pochettino team that we had known and loved for the last four years. It was at this point that we started to slip back into old habits and subsequently struggled to get through even the most routine of fixtures. Just as quickly as it had started, Jose’s honey-Mou period was over and the depressing reality of the task at hand started to set in. With Harry Kane out for the rest of the season, we found ourselves having to sit through 90 minutes of long ball football and slow, pedestrian build up play. Somehow, we had managed to pay £16m a year for the continental equivalent of Big Sam…..and he would have guaranteed Premier League survival for a fraction of the annual wage, I can tell you that much. How delightfully un-Levy like. Maybe we have actually turned a corner and he will finally allow us to start spending that sort of money on things that we actually need….you know, like professional football players or a scouting department that doesn’t consist solely of a work experience kid playing Football Manager in Conference Room C for 12 hours a day on minimum wage. One can dream, I suppose.

The original odd couple: One likes to spend ridiculous amounts of money on professional footballers and the other likes to steal toilet paper from petrol stations, in order to save money.

You know what the sad thing is? I can’t even tell if I am being sarcastic anymore. But obviously, I wouldn’t wish Sam Allardyce on anyone and I am definitely not writing off Jose Mourinho……not yet anyway. Because during the aforementioned honey-Mou period, some of the soundbites coming out of the Mourinho camp were very positive and dare I say it, rather refreshing. Either he had genuinely taken some time to self-reflect and become a better human being or (most probably) he had enlisted the services of a very expensive, big city PR firm during his year long hiatus from the game. He talked about adapting his style of play, being more flexible with his tactics and relying more on the youngsters in our development squad. He assured us that he was now “The Humble One”. In theory, this was music to the ears of Spurs fans, many of whom had grown frustrated with Pochettino’s unwavering loyalty to a number of ageing players who had long since passed their sell-by date or, in Danny Rose’s case, were already preparing for a post-football career in tabloid journalism. And to Mourinho’s credit, he actually lived and breathed those values…..for about 5 games or so. Then of course, he also slipped back into old ways. The football became significantly more rigid and conservative. He swiftly identified his latest French, central midfield scapegoat in Tanguy Ndombele and wasted no time in throwing him under the metaphorical media bus, when he seemingly refused to dye his hair blonde and communicate exclusively through dabbing. He really does have a type, doesn’t he? But, I suppose that as the old saying goes, a Leopard never changes it’s spots……it will always be a petulant little Portuguese narcissist. As you have probably worked out by now, I know very little about Leopards and even less about old sayings.

Come back 2019, all is forgiven.

But as any long suffering Spurs fan will testify, these problems started way before Jose Mourinho joined the club and I am absolutely not suggesting that he is to blame for the situation we currently find ourselves in. In an ideal world, I really just wish that someone had told us, maybe on several different occasions in some sort of public forum, that the club required a painful rebuilding process in order to move forward. I also wish that that person (if they existed, which they don’t) was given adequate backing when they really needed it, rather than being hung out to dry in front of a bloody Amazon Prime film crew! Oh well, no use worrying about what might have been. No one spoke up and we were all very shocked at what transpired. And whilst we are on the rather touchy subject of whether or not it was a good idea for Spurs to air their dirty laundry in public (it wasn’t) for a couple of extra quid – spare a thought for us poor fans. If we carry on the way we are going, when the documentary finally airs, Daniel Levy will essentially be forcing us to sit through what can only be described as a football-themed Snuff movie. At least the blooper reel should have plenty of material, I guess. Still, if we are really lucky and pray extra hard to the footballing Gods, Donald Trump will have fast tracked his plans for World War III and we will all be living through a nuclear winter where my primary concern will be trying to avoid radioactive drop bears in some sort of post-apocalyptic Australian outback setting, rather than caring about how Jan Vertonghen really got that black eye or whether Victor Wanyama was just a figment of my imagination.

I guess this is why we can’t have nice things anymore……

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom and imaginary radioactive mammals. Despite our increasingly frequent levels of ineptitude, there is still hope for our season and somehow, even our top four ambitions. Just like last year, no one seems to want 4th spot and it has rapidly become some sort of Benny Hill-esque race to the bottom. Arsenal, having struggled for most of the season under an incompetent Spaniard with the charisma of a dish mop have responded emphatically by replacing him with…..well, another incompetent Spaniard with the charisma of a dish mop. No one likes change, I suppose. Man Utd, having proclaimed only last year that they were delighted to have Ole Gunnar Solskjaer at the wheel, have seemingly allowed him to fall asleep at said wheel and Chelsea appear to have forgotten that football is all about how many games you can win…..and not how many false claims of racism you can lodge against your neighbours. Insanely, the teams we need to be most worried about are actually Wolves and Sheffield United….which is a rather damning indictment not only on our club but more importantly on Daniel Levy’s negligence in the transfer market over the last couple of years. Even now, with only 6 days left in the January transfer window, I get the feeling that Jose Mourinho is browsing at Harrods whilst our Chairman is squeezing his last minute shopping in at Poundland.

Antonio Rudiger: Doesn’t really understand bed time stories.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try, I keep casting my mind back to one very defining moment last season, that still haunts me to this day. We had already started to slip under Pochettino and I was clearly all down in the dumps, listening to “The Sound of Silence” on repeat and eating my own body weight in Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food. I was messaging my Dad back in the UK and at the time, Manchester Utd were also suffering in the final days of Jose Mourinho’s time at Old Trafford. I will never forget my Dad’s famous last words on the matter, which were: “No matter how bad it gets, just be thankful that we have Poch in charge and not Mourinho. That guy is ruining Man Utd”. At the time, I merely scoffed at the idea of a) Pochettino being fired and b) Mourinho even considering Tottenham as a viable employment option, before grudgingly returning to my bucket full of ice cream and self loathing. I guess that a year can be an eternity in footballing terms. And with that in mind, if I am still writing about Spurs in a year’s time (probably from my nuclear bunker under the stairs), I would love nothing more than for Mourinho to prove me wrong and force me to eat my words. Or in this case, my Dad’s words. Because if that were to happen, then it would mean that he had finally ended our silverware drought and more importantly, given our beleaguered trophy cabinet a whole new perspective on life (it’s currently storing Daniel Levy’s old Pog collection, apparently). So if this proves to be the case and he has turned us into a bunch of “serial winners” much like himself, then please consider everything you have just read as the ravings of a mad man and that when the time comes, I would be more than happy to assume the role of “The Humble One”. But in the meantime, I’m off to buy some more ice cream. COYS.