Chadli: Bitter-sweet for some

News about Nacer Chadli's transfer to Spurs coated my timeline today like a delicious chocolate fountain, and boy did we need it. With the addition of the Belgian winger and the continued strengthening of our squad, we can begin to boast the best midfield in the country. And yet, a taste of bitterness, just a hint, lingers on the tongues of some Spurs fans.

Chadli versus the old defence. 

A bit about the player. Chadli was primarily a winger for Dutch club FC Twente. Quick and skillful, the Belgian can play either side of the field, but mostly on the left. For his national team, Chadli has gained 14 caps alongside a very star-studded team, and has played a lot of time in the centre of the midfield for them. He has become Twente's most important player, however, he had his sights set elsewhere, running down his contract in search for a transfer this summer.

One of the things that Spurs were lacking last year was options on the wing past the diminutive Aaron Lennon. Without him, Spurs always look weaker, out of sorts, like a portrait leaning slightly on on
e side. We tried to sort out this wonky portrait with various midfielders, unfamiliar with the position, but the structure was never the same without our No.7. I hope, with Chadli and Townsend in the ranks, that this long term problem will cease to exist.

So what was the reactions of the Spurs fans? Delight at signing a very exciting, young, skillful midfielder who comes right under the Spurs ethos? Satisfaction at the strengthening of our squad? At the very least, delight to see money being spent earlier this summer? Mostly this, but like I said, with a hint of bitterness - bitterness at the fact Spurs have yet to sign a striker.

This one's for the ladies.

I understand the concern. After all, the lack of a typical No.9 cost us many times last season when we needed a goal. Chances and crosses were frequent, the corner count ridiculously high, but with no one to finish it off. The meal was prepared, cooked, plated up, but there was nobody to deliver it. What a waste of good food.

However, to call this signing unnecessary, or a distraction, or wasteful when we should be pursuing a striker, is ridiculous. This was a key issue that had to be addressed, and for £6-7million, the issue may have been solved without putting a dent in our budget. Some people though... If we didn't sign anyone other than a striker for £25million, they would be happy. If we signed Iniesta, Schweinsteiger and Robben, but not a striker, they'd start burning pictures of AVB. Punters eh? As much a part of football as the game itself.

The Belgian Brigade that has swiftly invaded the Premier League has a new recruit. As for Tottenham, I must say that the added ingredient of Belgian chocolate has really made our team much more tasty. Leave out the bitterness guys, I prefer milk chocolate to dark.

Can Roberto Martinez elevate Everton into the Top 4?

After being appointed Everton manager yesterday, Roberto Martinez promised the chairman Bill Kenwright 'I'll get you in the Champions League', an ambitious target from a young and intelligent manager. Is it possible, though, for the Toffees to break the Top 4? Is it possible for the Merseyside club not only to compete with Liverpool, Tottenham and Arsenal but to better them throughout the whole season?

Great manager, great appointment.

Roberto Martinez is a young manager, one of the new generation of coaches who favours the modern game, known by its proper title, the beautiful game. He teaches a passing game with slow build-up and complex formations. Martinez truly made Wigan Athletic his own his own, using what little funds he had to make a s
tylish side that went on to win the FA Cup. During his tenure at Swansea, he was the first to introduce the beautiful game there, laying the foundations for Brendan Rodgers to build and make the Swans into a successful Premier League team. So at Everton, should he bring in the right players, he can transform their traditional style of football into something attributing to the beautiful game.

However, style of play does not always guarantee success. Every method has flaws. Wigan fielded a weak defence, week-in, week-out, leading to them getting hammered against many teams every season. Defensive problems plagued the Latics for years, and with all his intelligence, Martinez never found the right solution to these problems. Wigan are not a team capable of gathering a squad of players that are fit for purpose. Everton, though, are half-way there.

This season, Everton have competed for the Top 4. They caused problems for all of the top teams, beating United, City and Spurs, siting at 5th and 6th place for most of the season. For the first time, they not only finished the season well, they also started the season well, only losing twice in their first 19 games. They also finished above their Merseyside rivals Liverpool for the second consecutive season for the first time since 1937. There is no doubt that Roberto Martinez is inheriting the healthiest Everton side in years.

Moyes and Martinez, passing on the baton.

When thinking of the best players at Everton, Leighton Baines, Marouane Fellaini, Steven Pienaar, Kevin Mirallas and Sylvain Distin come to mind. I rate them alongside some of the best in the league. However, the rest of their squad are not on that level. Like Wigan, Everton are not blessed with a talented squad, something a Top 4 team demands. Martinez must build a squad, not just a team, that can compete throughout a whole season. With 4th place Arsenal finishing on 73 points, it has never taken so much consistency and so many wins to get into the Champions League.

The one thing above all that I believe is needed to make the Champions League is investment, and a small mixture of good management, style and talent can come with that one factor. It is well publicised that Everton are not a wealthy club, and David Moyes' success there was somewhat of a miracle considering that. With Financial Fair Play being introduced next season and the further inflation of our league, poor Everton will find it near impossible to compete with the six other teams for the Top 4.

I don't doubt for one second that Everton will be a strong team next season. Given time, Martinez's style of football will make them feared alongside some of the very best in England. Despite that, it will require some more magic to come out of the hat of Roberto Martinez and Everton F.C to make that coveted Top 4.

Mourinho: Never go back

Jose Mourinho is the most successful manager in Chelsea's history, winning multiple trophies including two league titles. He is one of the most revered managers in current times. He is two time Champions League winner. He is an undeniable character. And yet, I do not believe Jose's second tenure at Chelsea will last long.

He is, most certainly, The Special One.

In the last 10 years, Chelsea has transformed from a top table London club into a European heavyweight, a superpower in the modern game. 10 years ago, the club was bought by Russian oil baron billionaire Roman Abramovich. As we have seen in this century, injecting money into a club is a surefire way to success. Chelsea Football Club will always be the perfect example of this. Their fans have their oil baron owner to thank for that.

But they do not worship the billionaire, oh no. They wouldn't dare, nor would any reasonable fan. They worship the little Portuguese man self-proclaimed as 'The Special One'. In their eyes, he is the man that created the team that brought to that superpower status. He represents success, silverware, pure and utter glory, and arguably genius.

For a legendary figure the Chelsea fans have described him as, he was sacked by the football club in 2007 after only three years in charge. The itchy trigger finger of Roman Abramovich fired the first bullet on The Special One, one bullet of a fully-loaded magazine. Since his sacking, Abramovich has shot down many managers, all hoping to build at Chelsea but only given time for a quick fix: Avram Grant, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Guus Hiddink, Carlo Ancelotti, Andre Villas-Boas, Roberto Di Matteo and, most recently, Rafa Benitez. 7 managers in 6 years...

Stalin, the Chelsea fan

Roman Abramovich is an impossible man to please, a tyrant to say the least. He demands success from the word 'go'. Like Joseph Stalin of Soviet Russia, Abramovich operates by the basis that no man is immune to being removed, and the best way to fix a problem is to remove the man. No man, no problem. Jose Mourinho is a manager that will demand large control of his club. At Real Madrid, he demanded control of his transfers, but as we have seen with the Gareth Bale situation, the man in control of the transfers is the President Florentino Perez. This element combined with the Russian owner does not bode well for Mourinho's second tenure at Chelsea.

To me, this appointment is one not just to bring success, but to appease some of the discontented Blues fans. Aren't they all ecstatic about their God coming back? And it may turn out fine. Abramovich will provide huge amounts of money to make a title-winning squad. If Jose buys well, his first few seasons may be successful. But football is ever changing, and success, at any level, is never permanent. This is something the Vozhd will never understand, and as long as he controls Chelsea FC, no manager, not even The Special One, is safe.

They say you should never come back to your old club. But to me, that's more of a teaching of sustaining legacy and reputation. Whilst Mourinho's reputation will never be tarnished, the least can be said for his tenure. As much as I love the character of The Special One, I fear his second tenure at Chelsea will be much more short-lived than his first.

The Great Chelsea Purge, and it's not over yet.

Reviewing our season: The Manager

Andre Villas-Boas came to Tottenham Hotspur as a disgraced manager, his reputation damaged by his 8-month tenure at Chelsea. When he was sacked after Chelsea's 1-0 loss to West Brom in March, I laughed at the club and the chairman for living up to their monstrous reputation and, I won't lie, I laughed at Villas-Boas as well. Too bold I thought. Too idealistic, could never be respected by English football.

AVB on his first day as our manager. 

So my reaction when he came to Tottenham? Confusion. Distress. I questioned why Levy removed the first manager
to put us into the Top 4 and replaced him with what I thought was a joke of a manager. I thought to myself right there 'we're losing key players, we don't have the funds, other teams will capitalize: sixth at best'.

11 months later, I feel ashamed of myself for what I thought in July.

We did not start well (but when do we ever?). Three last minute collapses against teams we would usually pick up points against. Analysis showed slow play, long balls, poor final balls. Compare this to last year's football and the future looked bleak for Spurs. I was swiftly proven wrong.  Four weeks later, we beat Manchester United at Old Trafford for the first time in 23 years. From then on, I believed in AVB.

What a day. 

Throughout the course of the year, we have seen AVB utilize the players at his disposal and turn them into a solid team, a team with a backbone. He made Mousa Dembele, an attacking midfielder, into a defensive midfielder who could abuse the opposing midfield. Wilshere, I believe, is still firmly lodged in his back pocket. Partnered up with Sandro, the beast, labelled by AVB as 'the best interceptor of the ball in th
e Premier League', you had a feared midfield pairing.

He chopped and changed the centre backs: Gallas-Kaboul; Gallas-Vertonghen; Vertonghen-Caulker; Caulker-Gallas. It turned out that Vertonghen-Dawson was the right partnership. Maybe it took him three-quarters of a season to work that out, but it was no easy feat, considering last years pair of King-Kaboul was no longer an option. Vertonghen was the best centre of the season and the skipper is on the verge of being England's centre back.

Bale started on the left, with the option of switching to the right if things looked stagnant. But throughout the season, AVB has gave him more of a role in the team. At the start of the year, he was not the player we boast as 'world class'. AVB understands Bale, his strengths, his limitations, his ambitions, his limitations. He could not be just chucked in the middle and told to have some fun, take some shots, or else last year he would've scored just as much. Under AVB, he is a goal-scoring machine, the best player in the league. He will do even more next season.

When it came to strikers, it looked like Defoe upfront could do the job. With 14 goals in the first half of the season I think, he looked liked the striker we had always wanted. He has scored just one goal in all of 2013. Inconsistency is Defoe's limitation. Adebayor has scored 8 goals all season, despite starting many of our games. He and Scott Parker are two players who have not benefitted from AVB. Yet in the final stretch of the season, we have seen the excellent player Adebayor can be. The funds were never there to go out and buy the striker AVB wanted. It was either buy a Louis Saha for half a season or wait till the summer. He made the right choice, although if it were me, I would have been tempted to resign Gregor Raziak.

Everything about this moment was glorious. No league
 position can take that from us.

Some of AVB's team selections this year have been brilliant, pure and utter class management. Bringing on Holtby, Huddlestone and Defoe against Manchester City changed the match on its head. It broke apart the best defense in the league. Sigurdsson's selections in the second half of the season won us vital points, especially against Arsenal, where he looked for large parts the most comfortable player on the pitch. He understands every player in the squad, their strengths, their limitations. Let's just say some have more than others...

In other seasons, 72 points would've been more than enough to get Top 4 and we'd be labeling AVB's first season as the best of the lot. We have lost only 3 games in 2013, 2 in the league. Compare that with last year's collapse, and we know just how solid we have been this season. However, AVB could do nothing to prevent our opponents' form. Arsenal didn't lose a single game since losing to us on March 2nd and picked up 39 points out of a possible 48 since January 23rd. Chelsea's overload of games never led to the collapse we predicted many times. I guess £90million buys you that at the very least.

You have some football fans out there that have said us losing a 7 point gap over Arsenal in the last 10 games warrants AVB's first season being labeled a failure. Believe me when I say it does not. He has exceeded what has been expected of him from after his appointment. Some pundits predicted us to finish below Newcastle and QPR this year! AVB took a broken squad, struck with long term injuries, retirements and big-money departures, and turned it into one of the most feared in the league. We competed for the Top 4 from the first day to the final day. 72 points is the most we have accumulated in the Premier League. And yet somehow, we expect more. It can get better.

Andre Villas-Boas did not want to come to Spurs to restore his reputation. It's just a happy coincidence then that it has turned out that way. I believe he can take us further as a club than we have ever gone before. I believe in AVB.

AVB's Blue and White Army

Jonny Walczak's guide to Dubliners

The Sisters - Has pretty much nothing to do with sisters. Little kid gets molested by a priest. Priest dies, but the kid still can't get over being molested by a dirty old bugger.

An Encounter - Two kids play hooky and come across another dirty old bloke (literally?) on the street. He rambles about a load of shit. Has a wank in a field. The kids have the intelligence to dash off. 

Araby - Teenage boy has a boner over Mangan's Sister, but has no idea why. He goes to the market to find her. She's not there. 

Eveline - Eveline meets this really stand-up bloke called Frank, really top bloke, promises her a life away from shitty Dublin in the nice and sunny Buenos Aires. What a guy, right? Nope, Eveline would rather stay and take care of her family for the rest of her fucking life. Dumb bitch.

After the Race - Rich bloke hangs around rich blokes, races around in some really nice cars. Has great education. Plays poker. What an easy and happy life? Nope, he's unhappy too. Ungrateful little shit.

Two Gallants - Two guys called Corley and Lenehan goes out and shags a bunch of women, steals money from them and resigns them to a life of poverty and prostitution. Should be called the Two GalLADs. (Shit joke).

The Boarding House - Mrs Mooney is a bitch. Polly is a bitch. Mr Doran gets fucked over (literally, again). 

A Little Cloud - Little Chandler is a bitch. That's right, a bitch. He bitches about Gallaher, even though he's done well for himself. He bitches about his wife, even though he lets her abuse him every night (not literally). And he makes no attempt to change his life for the better. Reads poetry.

Counterparts - Gotta feel for Farrington. I mean, he beats his kid for cooking him dinner, but he really has a shit life. Full marks if you mention 'cycle of abuse' in your essay.

Clay - Don't get me started on this bitch. Buys cake. Loses it. Crys about it. Expects death. What a pointless existence. 

A Painful Case - Poor woman has a shit marriage and flings herself in front of a train. Morale of the story? Joyce hates marriage.

Ivy Day at the Comittee Room - If this comes up in the exam, you're gonna fail. Shittest story in the whole fucking book. 

A Mother - Really caring and considerate Mum dominates her husband but tries to dominate some musicians and fails. Why? She's a woman.

Grace - Drinking's bad, m'kay. 

The Dead - Gabriel, a socially-awkward rich guy, can't take banter and rambles on about shit even though nobody listens to him, but really wants give his wife a good seeing too at the end, only to get completely rejected. 

Michael Furey dies because he had a boner over Gabriel's wife, Gretta. 

Freddy Malins is funny as fuck but he's completely out of it. 

Thank God Joyce never made the sequel, Dubliners 2: Dubliners-ier. 

Here's a fun lot. 

StubHub: Empowering the rich, extorting the common man

News about the arrival of a company called StubHub at Tottenham Hotspur Football Club would normally have gone straight under the radar, considering nobody had heard of them or would care that we had become associated with yet another company. Far f
rom it, the news of StubHub's arrival at the Lane has been heard across many of the regular match-goers. The reaction has not been positive.

I have been fully informed about what exactly StubHub does, its purposes and its consequences. StubHub are an eBay-esk ticket market, where season ticket holders can put up their tickets on open bid or on a set price and sell it to anyone (Spurs fans, neutrals, away fans etc). Selling your ticket requires no contact with the new recipient, apart from the exchange of money.

So what can we interpret from this?

Many people use eBay as a legitimate way of selling goods for profit. My mate used to do it and he earned a veritable mint out of the auction and buy-it-now system. I even considered doing it myself, but really didn't have the cash to get it up and running. StubHub, therefore, could be used in a similar sense to make money out of fellow fans. Say I had a season ticket, what does it cost, £1000? I could sell each of my £50 worth tickets for £60 or £70, maybe £100 for derbies, and across a season I could make a substantial profit. And it could all be done legitimately and according to the rules. I could leech off my fellow Spurs fans and not a single consideration would be given by StubHub. How does that make you feel?

What else?

So, say I put a £50 ticket on open auction. The ticket, like I said, would go to the highest bidder, the person with the most money to spend. If people weren't already being priced out of matches due to the extortion of current ticket prices, StubHub would enable more people to feel redundant and left to watch the match on a stream at home, alone. As a result, the Lane would be filled with more of a higher class of person, a person with a comfortable wealth.

Football is the common man's game, well, at least it is still that in our minds. We all as kids kicked around a deflated white ball in the playground, thinking we could all be the next Ronaldo (fat Ronaldo, always fat Ronaldo). We grow up, rid our selves of those dreams, and instead, put our faith that the pros playing the game could satisfy our childhood dreams in a way we could never do ourselves.

The wealthy man, the privileged man, has had his dreams met and is comfortable. Football fans should not be privileged like that. We are the discontented masses, perhaps unhappy by the cards we have dealt, but happy to spend all our emotions in a football ground and on the shirt we love. StubHub would empower the privileged, not the common man.

StubHub should not be allowed at football. Ticket touting is condemned by us football fans and should not be tolerated in any form. This is simply legitimized ticket touting. The owners have allowed StubHub to enter the club because they have been financially rewarded by them, only that.

Daniel Levy said on the final day of the 2012/13 season in an open letter to the fans that 'you [the supporters] are what this club is all about'. Bound by these words, he must listen to our protests, against this money-making company, existing only to empower the wealthy and extort the common man, and he must meet our demands.

Let us all remember, football without fans is nothing.

Duel of the fates

I don't believe in fate. I've said so before on this blog. So the deadlock between Spurs and Arsenal right now at the end of the league is just a stressful coincidence, however entertaining it may be for the neutral. Somebody who would believe in fate would argue it was always meant to be like this: North London rivals deadlocked till the final match, for their seasons' ultimate goal.

Oh the temptations of the Champions League! How much we would all curse and shed tears and sweat for the prospect of hearing that music (Adebayor's favourite music, I hear).

When we were on the peak of our form, it looked like we could 4th, 3rd, even 2nd. It wasn't foolish not to factor in the (many would argue inevitable) drop in form. Our rivals were always gonna step up their game at the back end of the season. Chelsea, benefited with a large, talented squad, could not only cope with the extra games but also managed to go on a impeccable run of form. Arsenal have also gone on a run of form after being knocked out from all competitions, the quality of one of the league's most experienced managers proving vital now. Can't hear the #WengerOut's anymore?

I'm talking like it's the end of the season. It's not. Not yet. But if you're pondering the big question 'How have we come to relying on Wigan and Norwich to beat Arsenal?' well I'm only trying to offer some clarity. And the pressure of the last few months is a factor we have yet to conquer at Spurs. If we had a few injured players at our disposal, things would be different, but then again, the possibilities are endless if we discuss the conditions.

Let me be brief. Come Sunday, I will smile at what we've accomplished this season. If this is a sign of things to come, I will be eager to go through all this shit again next season. May rupture a few blood vessels though.

TOTTENHAM TILL I DIE.