The problem here is not the interim manager, it’s the ad hoc interim ownership and the short-term sense of identity at this ghost town club
T
udor is to do. To do is to dur. Something like that anyway. With the clock reading 45+8 at the end of the first half the air inside the Tottenham Hotspur stadium had already begun to curdle and turn strange.
In the space of 18 minutes, 1-0 to Spurs had become 3-1 to Crystal Palace. The crowd had begun to turn in on itself. Boos were directed at the players. Boos were directed back at the booers. Birds flew backwards through the sky. The clock struck 13. Beer glasses filled from the bottom up. “You killed the club,” man in a quilted coat shouted at the directors’ box, with genuine feeling, as though this was not a figure of speech, the club actually was dead, before stamping off towards the thrillingly alive empanada and artisan pickle outlets of the vibrant new retail concourse.
“I saw something here,” Igor Tudor would announce at the end of this game, sat looking hollow and pale and haunted in the luxuriously upholstered situation room in pit of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. But what exactly? Has there been a stranger, more inexplicable managerial avatar than Tudor in recent times. This was his night-time debut at this ground. In the flesh Tudor is surprisingly lean and gangly, with deep piercing eyes, angular jawline, renaissance-style spiky chin whiskers, car coat and leather leisure-trainers, like a Tuscan Duke on his way to a corporate golf day.
