Belated Grievances

Oh I really don’t want to have to write this. It’s late because after getting home from the game, and all of yesterday, I was tired. Tired of watching the same performance for a year. Tired of watching us waste our chances; from our failure to capitalise on our status as Champions League contenders, to missing out on the right players, in the right positions at the right time, to our failure to convert presentable chances in the games.

While Levy was pooling all his effort into getting another brass farthing out of the spammers for the loan of Keane in the January transfer window, Man City got their £27 million business of signing Dzeko done early, and Liverpool were spending £20 million on Luis Suarez. A microcosm of how we do business- exert every bit of effort into recouping an extra tenner on the dregs like Hutton and Bentley, whilst completely blinding ourselves to the bigger picture. This is not how successful businesses are run. Being a master negotiator is one thing; I’m sure he gives the traders down at Romford market a torrid time for the best price on his Persil liquitabs, but is that the yardstick for a great businessman? I’m a million miles from being convinced that the guy is all he’s cracked up to be.

Perhaps he’ll pull a rabbit out of the hat again? Even if it is another talented but not necessarily what we need type (Kaka has been doing the rounds- Jesus ‘aitch), is this the kind of thing a great footballing or financial tactician does? It’s the behaviour of a chancer. A gambler. One of those city traders we love to hate who take a punt. With our money.

The playing staff need to have a long, hard look at themselves as well. Lennon hasn’t performed since before the last World Cup, and is in danger of becoming that fast lad we chuck on in the last 10 to see if we can get at ‘em. Gareth Bale needs to grow a brain and make it snappy. I made excuses for him last year- Always with space to run into, but always ball watching; always blankly gazing back at an exasperated  Modric or BAE, with a look so little-boy-lost, you felt he needed warm milk and a story, and not the demands of Premier League football. He wasn’t fit. Once he’s got the confidence in his limbs, he’ll make those runs. He’s fit enough now and he’s still not doing it, which can only mean a lack of intelligence.

Harry’s team selection was beyond bizarre. Livermore has got a bit more convincing to do, but what was going through his head when he thought Modric and Kranjcar would be better options for protecting the back 4 against the talent that they were going to unleash? A blind leap of faith in a we’ll-score-one-more-than-you, instead of showing sufficient respect to the task in hand and being hopelessly out thought.

As for Modric, Sunday was the final insult. Regardless of whether he asked not to be played or not, after everything he’s said over the summer, he still got the biggest cheer when the names were read out over the tannoy. After being ‘alwight-saaaaahn-gis-an-hour-then-yeah’-ed off, to a few boo’s, but overwhelming cheers, there wasn’t even a small, cursory hand-in-the-air thanks for the people who had paid to see him for the last 3 years, and who he’d insulted so publicly by demanding a move to another club. I didn’t think my opinion of him could sink any lower. If only that was the only unpleasant surprise of the afternoon.

I can’t find the effort to talk at length about City. Their fans singing ‘we are staying up’ and ‘we’re just a s**t Man United’ with a tongue-in-cheek sense of farce in regards to their ‘meteoric rise’ (copyright every hackneyed Man City article) brought the only smile of the afternoon across my glum chops. If Sunday is a barometer of their season, those fans are going to see a lot of exceptionally talented footballers playing with skill, vision and terrifying movement. Good luck to them, hope they can get one over on their own Arsenal.

Sorry if this bursts anyone’s bubble, but having sat through that and taken a bitter reality pill, I’ve got another one coming. Tottenham Hotspur are not going to win the Premier League this year. They won’t even come second.

I’ll let that sink in for a minute.

Yep, you heard me, and on top of that, our chances of being one of the 3 best teams in the country come the middle of May 2012 are pretty remote.

In other breaking news, Queen Victoria’s dead.

We don’t really do perspective and reality round our way, but there it is. What makes us so special that we are immune from the limitations of our station; we all point at Stoke or Bolton finishing in the top 10 and pompously state ‘they’ve done well’, but round our way, we rope in an ageing goalkeeper, and a loan striker not good enough to even make the squad of a team we claim are our rivals, and then act with incredulity that we get turned over by the summers 2 biggest spenders? This game is about glory. It’s also about us getting a f**kin’ grip, and realising that the benchmarks of the past have been moved.

After getting bashed 1-5 at home, there is no mileage in trying to skim over any of this by saying it was a bad day at the office. Serious questions need to be asked by all involved, or we could find ourselves deep in the smelly stuff, quicker than you can say ‘2 points 8 games’. What I will say is that once these last 2 games are put to rest internally; there are 16 teams in the Premier League that we can realistically finish above. This is by no means a guarantee- we need to get the right people in and quickly. If Scott Parker being a Tottenham player means that I’ll never have to see a Modric and Kranjcar central midfield pairing try to stem the flow of attacks from the likes of Toure, Nasri, Silva, Aguero etc, then fine. Whatever your thoughts on the guy, there’s no argument that his leadership and ability to protect our defence would have made a difference.

In the cold light of these 2 results, I can still see us battling it out for fourth place.

A Warning. To: Man City. From: History

Pretty dull stuff last night, but job done and nice to get a look at some of the young prospects. Impressed with Kane’s general awareness, and Carroll’s speed of thought and feet. No criticism for any of the rest, even if they didn’t dazzle, so let’s wait until they give interviews saying they should be starting every week before we get on their backs. To mirror the general mood around the Lane last night, this blogs attention now turns to Sunday and the visit of Manchester City.

Despite our little flurry of transfer activity, including the capture of central midfielder Iago Falque Silva on loan from Juve, and the signing of Adebayor, and EVEN IF we were to get Diarra, we still wouldn’t come close to this lot. You may have heard they’ve got a bit of lolly and aren’t afraid to spend it

Uwe Rosler and Shaun ‘The Goat’ Goater have been replaced with a couple of lads from Argentina, and for Georgi Kinkladze and Nicky Summerbee, read David Silva and Samir Nasri, their slightly upgraded modern day equivalents. For every other area of the pitch, a sea of numbers to shock a shekel splashing soccer sheikh. Except that it doesn’t; it just goes on and on, and you can’t help but wonder how much more of the planets footballing talent might have been hoovered up if they were allowed to name more than 25 men in their squad. But we’re not playing a team of numbers, we’re playing a, albeit expensively assembled, group of 11 footballers who are fallible to the pressures of price tags and expectations. And I think we’ll beat them.

Despite a promising start, and without doubting the quality of the individuals in their squad, I still don’t ‘buy’ Manchester City. They remind me of a horse racing game I used to play on Facebook, where you’d start off with a horse, train it up, enter it in races, get prize money, buy more horses, and, if you were patient enough, eventually have a stable full of thoroughbreds, and all the riches you could virtually wish for. However, with the money came expensive temptations, and for a bit of your prize pot, you could buy steroids to artificially enhance the development of your horse. Being a very ethical game player, I was never tempted by such things, but then one day, having achieved relative game success, I thought I’d give the ‘roids a go to see what happened.

It all started out brilliantly. Les Ferdinand was storming all of the races he was entering, and winning me loads of cyber dosh in the process. I was beginning to question my whole approach to this horse racing business, and wondered why I wasted all that time developing and nurturing all those other nags, when I could have just goosed them all up from the start. What kind of a trainer was I, that I was so rigid in my approach, I’d blinded myself to such a lucrative and success-strewn path? I was the Arsene Wenger of the Facebook horse-racing game world! But then, something terrible happened. ‘Les Ferdinand has suffered ‘Roid Rage’ and had to be destroyed’. Oh dear.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. One minute you’re a thoroughbred champion trotter with all the riches in the world, and the next, you’re doing guest appearances at junior school fetes; turning too off your mash to know where you are. Then, you suddenly you flip out, brain a small child, and you’ve got a tranq pellet in your backside while you foam at the mouth and yearn for the life you once had. I’m not saying this will DEFINITELY happen to Man City, but if this game taught me nothing else, it’s that it probably will.