Gunnerblog

“Relegation looks like a real possibility”: A Spurs fan speaks to Gunnerblog (again)

1 comment February 8th, 2009

The good thing about playing on a Sunday is that the papers have hefty sports supplements to fill, usually with interviews with participants in the day’s games.

The Daily Mail kicked us offer yesterday with a terrific piece on Robin van Persie.  He seems to have really matured somewhat of late, and with negotiations on a new contract underway, he makes several politically savvy remarks:

“I appreciate we have to first catch Villa. But it’s not my ambition to finish ahead of Villa. That’s not how I started the season. For the moment this is not good enough. It’s not our aim to be fifth. But we are working hard to change that.”

A player as talented as Van Persie deserves to be challenging for the top prizes, and if the club want him to stay, they have to show that their ambition matches his – otherwise, one of his many other suitors could tempt him away from a club he undoubtedly has a lot of affection for.

The Times, meanwhile, have spoken to Gael Clichy, who is honest about the mistakes he has made this season, particularly in the game with Spurs at the Emirates:

“I gave them their third goal at a time when we were playing fantastically well. If we’d won 4-2, as we should have done, everybody would have said we were good enough to win the title. Unfortunately, because of my mistake we dropped two points and the next day people started to talk about Arsenal not being strong enough to do it.”

It’s true that had we won that game, things may have turned out a little differently.  As it was, we went straight from that match to defeat to Stoke, and then a little later we tumbled at the hands of Villa and Man City.  We now seem to have stabilised a little, with a nine-game unbeaten run in the league.  Add that to an eighteen league game run without defeat to Spurs, and we ought to be in a psychologically strong position going into this match.

Throughout the week, I thought I’d seen every silly headline about Andrey Arshavin imaginable.  And then the News of the World did this:

There are literally no words.

Just before the 4-4 game, I interviewed a Spurs-supporting chum (if you can imagine such a thing) called Adam, to get a viewpoint from their side of the North London divide.  Since then Tottenham’s season has risen and plummeted like a log flume.  Having spent heavily during the January transfer window, it remains to be seen what the final twist in their Premier League campain will hold.  Never one to fail to enquire about another man’s misery, I caught up with Adam ahead of today’s game to check on morale in the enemy camp.  Enjoy:

—

Adam, we last spoke before the 4-4 game, which seemed to spark a mini-revival from Spurs. How far would you say that game went to turning your season around?

To be honest, I don’t really think it can be seen as the game that turned our season around, if that has even happened yet. Any side that has changed their manager this year has seemingly been handed a ‘free ten point card’ – as soon as a new guy has been brought in to any club, their results in the immediate aftermath have had a bit of a surge. That seemed to happen to us and typically had us fans dreaming of success. In reality however, after a slight improvement at the back end of 2008, the performances in 2009 have been as awful as ever, with the threat of relegation looking like a real possibility at this stage.

Are the problems with the team the same ones that Ramos faced?

Well, the problems are that we are playing poorly, do not look up for the fight whatsoever and look horribly unbalanced. Ramos had these problems and Redknapp is experiencing them too. The frustrating this is that when we win, Redknapp proclaims himself to be a genius. When we lose, the fault lies with the players and the previous regimes. Oh, by the way, you may have heard that we were on 2 points from our first 8 games? Redknapp has pointed out that stat in 90% of his interviews since coming into the club. Unfortunately, if we stay up, it will be made out as a massive success, and Redknapp will of course shower himself in glory. In truth, we were out of the relegation zone in November but have since been sucked back into it. THowever, that isn’t something that a journalist will ever probe Redknapp about as that would ruin the ‘special relationship’ shared by the two parties. If you cut through the bullshit, it’s pretty clear that we are still a club in crisis, and positives like reaching the Carling Cup final are merely pieces of tracing paper covering the Grand Canyon sized cracks running through us.

Nice analogy. Speaking of papering over cracks, we have to discuss the transfer dealings at the club: Defoe, Chimbonda, and now Keane have all come back – do those buys make sense to you? Are you happy to see them return?

This is probably an easier one to talk about as individual cases:

Defoe… well, seemingly like Adebayor does with Arsenal supporters, Defoe really splits the opinions of Spurs fans. Some love him and see him as the answer to all of our problems. Others, like myself, see him as a decent player but are not quite so pleased to see him back. The guy clearly has ability but very rarely does it manifest itself in the big games, or when we play away. Of course, he looks brilliant already with his three goals, however all Spurs fans know that he can score against Portsmouth and Stoke at home – he always has done and he will continue to score against rubbish teams on his own patch. To win the rest of us over he will have to start doing it against the bigger clubs as well as putting more of a shift when we play away. His injury may work in our favour as we will have the chance to make a partnership out of Keane and Pavlyuchenko, quite comfortably our two best strikers in my humble opinion.

As far as Chimbonda goes – is it possible to be happy at signing a reserve left back? He certainly has got ability and will improve the squad, but there is still a bitter taste in the mouth of many Spurs fans after his departure in July and poor conduct in the second half of last season -you may remember him strolling off the pitch at Wembley with us one-nil down against Chelsea, an act for which he was fined two weeks wages. Overall, he is a good player to have in the squad, but I wont be too happy to see him in the starting XI on too many occasions.

Keane – Wow. Who would have imagined him pulling on a Spurs shirt again when he left so acrimoniously back in July. I was particularly vocal is my disgust at his conduct; I didn’t buy the claims that he was a Liverpool fan as a boy as he had previously turned them down at the age of 17 and has been seen and filmed partying with Celtic fans after many a Celtic win in Old Firm games. However, I am a firm believer that he has shown a great deal of guts in swallowing his pride and coming back home. Some will argue that he shouldn’t have been made captain straight away but I see that as a pretty good decision due to King’s well-documented injury problems. At the end of the day, he was a leader when he was last here and there is nothing to suggest that he wont be a leader for us again. Hopefully he can hit the ground running with a goal in the derby on Sunday. Now all we need is to get Berbatov back and we’ll be laughing!

Good luck with that! A lot of money has been spent, with those three players joining Carlo Cudicini and the £14m former Arsenal triallist Wilson Palacios in coming in. You’ve talked about the possibility of relegation, but surely a squad assembled at that degree of expense ought to be able to withstand that threat?

The squad is more than strong enough to compete for a European spot if they try hard enough – setting aside the Big Four, the Premier League is a competition where the grafters do well, and a bit of hard work and guts would do wonders for our league position. If you’d asked me before the re-signing of Keane if we would say up then I would have confidently predicted that we would be playing Championship football next year. However, with the addition of Keane, I am now backing us to stay up – but it could be far too close for comfort…

The fact we’re even talking about it underlines how far Spurs have fallen, and how quickly too. How do you feel when you see a side like Aston Villa (and perhaps Everton too) competing for the top european places, when so recently it was Tottenham in their position?

Its a bit depressing really. A lot of fans still rue the loss of Martin Jol but I think his time had run out-he was a great guy and didn’t deserve to be treated in the way that he was but unfortunately it’s a results business and at Sevilla, Ramos was doing brilliantly whilst we were really struggling. Ever since then, we have been in transition really which has stunted any potential progress quite dramatically. Add to that the Berbatov and Keane sagas and it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that we are struggling. We are arguably a club in shock from three incredibly tumultuous years since lasagne-gate. As I stated earlier, the Premier League is primarily a grafters league and in David Moyes and Martin O’Neill, Everton and Aston Villa have young managers who understand how to succeed in this League outside the top four: pack your team with workers then throw in a bit of creativity and pace. That is a winning combination and is one that we do not have – the creation and pace is there, but as is becoming a recurring theme to these answers, we simply don’t have the graft to succeed at the minute. Maybe Palacios can add something to that but I just want to hear someone mention Spurs in a list of teams that are ‘hard to beat’ – when that happens I’ll know that we are on the right track.

Andrey Arshavin is a player who Spurs chased for much of last summer – while he is unlikely to be involved this weekend, is it disappointing to see him a self-proclaimed “Gooner”?

It is desperately disappointing to see him at any other club than us to be honest. If you think your saga was long-running, you have no idea what the summer was like for us… If we had him in the team then I’d fancy us to be challenging for the top six -  he is that good in my opinion.  I find it difficult to be specifically disappointed that he has signed for you as he is (or at least was) one of my favourite players in world football, so in truth I’m just gutted that he is pulling on any other shirt than ours.  It will be great to have him in England however and, if you can sort out your defence and add a bit of bite in midfield then I’d see you as more likely to win the Champions League next year (provided you get there) than ever before, given the lottery-style, English-based competition that it has become recently. Apart from Barcelona, I don’t see anyone outside England having their name etched on the trophy anytime soon.

Finally Adam, do you have a prediction for this weeknd’s game?

Haha… Well, last time I gave you two predictions, one based on actual logic and the other based on ‘football logic’. On that occasion, football logic prevailed, but in this instance, both real and football logic point to a one-one draw for me, with the inevitable opener from Robbie Keane being cancelled out by a late Adebayor (typical) goal to extend our winless streak in the league over you.

—

Thanks to Adam for that, and hopefully we’ll speak again.  Unless, of course, we lose today, which would make that possibility fairly unlikely.

It’s a massive game – the above demonstrates how big it is for Spurs, but it’s huge for us too.  With Villa nabbing yet another away win yesterday, they’re now eight points clear of us in the table.  Some fans are even suggesting we’re more likely to catch Chelsea, who would be just three points ahead if we could pick up a win today.  I have to say that I feel we shouldn’t look to overtake Villa or Chelsea specifically – we should just worry about winning enough of our own games.  If we do so, then we still have a very good chance of making the top four.  In the Clichy interview he reveals Arsene is still telling the players they can win the title – personally I believe that to be unrealistic, but if saying that motivates the squad to get the results we need to clinch a Champions League spot, then that’s fine by me.

The team almost picks itself, with the only real debate being about who will start at centre-back.  My guess would be Djourou and Gallas with Kolo dropping to the bench, though Arsene can always surprise you – especially with his defensive selections.

In midfield it’ll be Nasri and Eboue wide with Song and Denilson in the middle.  It’s not the strongest-looking midfield, and I think we’ll need a big performance from Denilson today.  In recent months he has shown a steady improvement, and he’ll need to be at his absolute best if we’re to get a result this lunch-time.

Upfront, it’ll be Van Persie and Emmanuel Adebayor, who’ll be looking to continue his stunning strike-rate against Spurs.  Andrey Arshavin might make the bench, but I’d be a little surprised if he took the field at any point.

A win would do wonders for our morale, aswell as our hopes of Champions League qualification.  It’s important to remember how fragile Spurs’s confidence is: if (and it’s a fairly big if with our recent form infront of goal) we could get an early goal or two, they may well fall apart.  Above all, we ought to put right the farce that was the 4-4, and take some points off a side we treated far more charitably earlier in the season.

Christmas has been and gone.  This is no time for giving.

Come on you Gunners.