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Like a Christmas day can of John West tuna chunks for one with an accompanying bottle of champagne and war movie triple-bill chez Richard Keys, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is the gift that keeps on giving. Like Gregory Peck’s crack commando unit attempting to silence the eponymous guns of Navarone, Spurs currently find themselves in an extremely high-stakes race against time only to be repeatedly thwarted at every turn by a mixture of internal sabotage, the at times unbearable burden of leadership and immense dissatisfaction among the rank and file. The mission? To escape an ignominious, financially ruinous slide into the Championship. The plan? A chaotic improvisation that suggests the club hierarchy are just making things up as they go along, one ill-judged managerial appointment at a time.
Having already seen (and paid) off Thomas Frank and Igor Tudor, Tottenham are now looking for their third head coach of a Premier League season that has just seven games remaining. Yet to win a top-flight match this year, they hover just one place and point above a drop zone they could well occupy by the time they travel to play their next match against Sunderland at the Stadium of Light. Should West Ham beat Wolves at home on Friday week, Spurs will be in the relegation zone for the first time this season going into their match on Wearside two days later. Following the shortest Tudor reign in British history unless you count that of the “nine-days queen” Lady Jane Grey, the powers that be at Tottenham simply have to get their next appointment right. With so much at stake, it must be heart-warming for fans to hear their club’s board appear to be acting with all the leadership of somebody who used to be cripplingly indecisive but now isn’t so sure.
