When Jol was sacked, something in me died, and my relationship with the club and with football was never the same.
I feel worse today - immeasurably f.ucking so. And nothing about this club will feel quite the same to me again.
A dream died today, and a good man was pushed onto his sword because of people above him deciding he wasn't worth the effort. After five long years where he believed we *were* worth the effort, when the biggest clubs in the world meant nothing to him because he had given us his word.
In the end, we pushed him out, after five years where he stayed despite everyone in football clinging at him, trying to pull him away from us.
So, as with that haunting evening in 2007 when we let another good man go... au revoir to our manager and our leader. The man who deserved better.
Au revoir, Mauricio Pochettino.
Tottenham loves you more than you will ever f.ucking know.
perfectly articulated.
for all the nonsense of ‘he said he was going to leave’ the fact is, he didn’t. Not when the biggest club in the world came calling. Not when the United job was open and everyone was talking him into it.
the only thing a club like ours, in that moment in time, had to trade on is loyalty. The idea that you are building something special. Something that can’t be replicated, something that’s never been done before. That’s the thing we played on to keep him with us when it would have thrown us deeply in the bricker. And Poch went for it.
levy has done what he feels is best for the club, of course. And maybe now the feeling is, with the new stadium, we can always climb our way back. We don’t need loyalty any more. Whichever manager it is doesn’t matter as long as the infrastructure is right and Levy keeps making the right decisions.
but that’s a really risky line to take. United have all the revenue they need, and it hasn’t done them any good. Liverpool have been the one of the biggest names in football and had numerous reboots, but they spent years out of the limelight. Arsenal have had a modern stadium for years and we overtook them.
Levy has always been able to trade off on the fact that over the mid to long term, each decision has yielded progress. Progress for us now is to firmly establish ourselves on City and Liverpool’s current level. If we don’t, and we slide back into merely being a top 6 club, or worse (given the upstarts like Leicester and Everton who can make plays), then we’ve let a good man go for nothing.
I’ve always trusted Levy to do the right thing in the name of the club’s long term progression. I think he’s always been smarter than the people employed - better in his field than they are in theirs. But with this one, I think Poch is equally as good if not better a Manager than he is a Chairman. It’s why we over achieved so consistently. I’m not sure this is such a guarantee of upward progress as the board may think it is.