Competition - Membership To Tottenham Hotspur To Be Won
I did say that the closing date for this competition was the end of 2007 but I’m opening it up until…hang on where are we….til midnight on Friday night, 4th January 2008. If you’ve all ready entered you are at liberty to change your guess, if you haven’t then here are the rules:
Send me an e-mail to thebagel@beefbagel.com with your guess for where Spurs will finish in the Premiership at the end of the 2007/8 season and, as a tie-breaker, tell me how many points we’ll finish on.
The winner will receive free membership to Spurs next season, which gives you priority booking for tickets as well as a nice card and whatever little gift comes with it. If you live abroad, have a season ticket or simply cannot use the membership for whatever reason I’ll give you a prize from the Spurs Store of equal value.
That said, it could be a fairly miserable time of it next season if, yes yet again, we continue to concede from set pieces. Now, I’m not going to bang on about this one because we all know the score here and unfortunately we’re losing it. Andy Gray’s commentary seconds before the winner yesterday was hideously accurate. For those of you who weren’t watching on Sky, he’d spotted the mis-match of O’Hara vs Laursen even before the corner was taken.
The Radio, Gus Poyet, came out and said that enough was enough on his post-match, pre-Ramos fluency interview, putting on face and stern tone that was clearly a message intended straight for the Tottenham players watching MOTD after winding down with a good session on Pro-Evolution, where like us they probably spend hours trying to get Robbo to run the length of the pitch and score. He said:
“The word from today is we have had enough. There are going to be changes for sure. We conceded two goals from set-pieces again.
“It’s not about individuals because it is a different player each time. It has become a team problem.”
And just to drive the point home, just to keep the players focused and on their toes as much as anything else, Ramos has reiterated the point with an added and clear threat. He said:
“We need to find a solution to these defensive problems. If we can’t sort the problems out with the players we already have here, then we will look outside for other players.”
The problem for me is that as Crazy Gus says, it’s a team problem. It hasn’t mattered who the manager is and it hasn’t mattered about the players we’ve brought in, there is a general level of fear, a hoodoo of set-pieces and we need to get a hold of that before we can start to straighten this out.
But, the real issue for me yesterday was not the set pieces. We’ll fix that one, eventually. What bothers me as that we were outplayed. Villa were good; in some areas very good and we couldn’t break them done by playing through them as we feel we can with most teams in the league. They didn’t just wildly close our players down they closed the passes and our whole moves down as well. It was like trying to best a giant sponge. They just absorbed everything we did. Our attackers players were all dealt with save Dimitar the Great, which made it all the more tragic with respect to his current transfer saga and worse still was that they were frightening on the break as well.
There were Villa fans next to me in a pub on Holloway Road - far too deep into scumland - bitching about Stiliyan Petrov who I felt was one of many of the Midlands players doing a fine job. Barry and Reo-Coker had the read the of game like it was yesterday’s newspaper and Apommelhorse was so nearly lethal. He’s like two Little Aaron’s stacked on top of one another. Thank God Luke Moore is such an utter waste of space.
The sad part is that, corners aside, they were the better team and it’s starting to look like there are too many contenders for the role of Champions League Contenders. If we lose Berbatov, we’re going to need to bring in some pretty special players to make up the difference, whether that’s now or in the summer. Fortunately, Ramos looks like the real thing so far and I’ve faith in him to not only ask for good players but to do very well with the ones he has as well. Unfortunately, it’ll feel like taking a few steps back before we start making that ground again.
So yes. As for the big story in the January Window, just what are we going to do with Dimitar Berbatov? There’ve been backwards and forwards quotes over the last few days to mention so it’s usually best to stick to the latest on this matter. The problem is that another one comes out every five minutes, so by the end of this post it’ll be out of date. All the same what we’re getting today is yet more word from the Tottenham camp that despite Berbatov’s agent, Emil Dantchev’s wishes, the Beautiful Bulgarian is going nowhere.
“Obviously Berbatov’s agent is looking to do his business,” said Ramos.
“But we are happy because we have the player on a contract and we plan to keep him.”
We own the striker’s arse until 2010 and, although the board’s resolve is sure to be tested with £30m bids from United and Chelsea, we’re looking good to keep our man so far. There’s something about this whole business that feels horribly like the Michael Carrick saga: a player wanting to go to a bigger club despite being under contract and that relentless desire from Ferguson. In some ways it might be best to sell him now at an inflated January price and trust our team to make it through the season into mid-table obscurity. On a personal level, I just want to keep him for as long as we can because I love watching him play. I’ve never seen anyone play quite the way he does. I’m not saying he’s the best I’ve ever seen but he is unique. There’s no pace about what he does and you can’t quite believe your eyes how he manages it all the same.
According to Robbo, Berba has no need to go anyway to be a winner, with Tottenham in the Carling Cup semis, the UEFA Cup knockout stages and the FA Cup to come but even if we do pick up an of those somehow I can’t see that it’ll be enough. Short of buying Ribery, Ronaldo (both), Kaka and coaxing Zidane out of retirement, we’ll be waving goodbye to our favourite Bulgarian sooner or later with it’s his or his agent’s desire. But for now I’ll just enjoy the words of Gus again who not only reckons it’s a no go this time around but also lets us know that the management feel as we do:
“There is nothing on the table and there is nothing happening. It is not a problem for us. He is here and it is no drama.”
“We want to improve and we want to go to a better level. He has to stay.”
Heeeeeeeeeeeey youuuuuuuuu baaaaaagels!
The Bagel.