Juande_Ramos
New Member
- Oct 26, 2007
- 181
- 0
I'll have to correct you there.
We certainly didn't have the fifth-best squad in the league in 2005-2006, and unless you happened to have been wearing your super-strength Spurs-tints it wasn't the fifth-best last season either; in fact, it's arguable that the signings we made in the summer of 2006 strengthened us very much at all. We were also hammered by injuries last season, particularly in defence and midfield, yet competed largely successfully over 60 games, and equalled our best-ever final twelve games of a season (achieved in 1951). In 2004-2005, Jol's partial first season, our PPG after he took over was only fractionally inferior to Liverpool's under Benitez; Spurs went from 14th the previous season to 9th, Liverpool from third to fifth. Jol also had a 74% success record in cup games; agreed, we didn't win anything, but in terms of games won that's pretty impressive, and as far as Spurs are concerned, inferior only to Bill Nicholson and Graham (who was a rubbish league manager for us, but whom even I have to admit was pretty good in the cups).
We (or rather some of us) were led to believe that this summer's signings had given us a squad easily able to challenge for fourth place. Patently, they have not, and, having successfully undermined Jol, our board was able to fob off the blame on him. Juande is now finding out the unpleasant truth.
We should not be drawing comparisons between Martin and Juande. What we should be questioning is whether the board is willing to back the judgement of its coach/manager and sporting director. At the moment, it seems to me that Levy and ENIC are far mainly interested in maximising profits and merely paying lip-service to success on the pitch.
You tell me who were.