Spurs seeking a manager, is it? Trying to avoid relegation, are they?
It’s a fascinating and grim situation Spurs have fashioned for themselves here, because this is not your usual late-season managerial appointment; it’s rare for teams to find themselves in Spurs’ current nexus where short-term realities collide so violently with long-term ambitions.
Spurs have neither the luxury to just write the season off under a throwaway caretaker; they’ve waded too far into the sh*t under Thomas Frank to go that route. But nor can they make a permanent appointment with only the next few nail-biting months in their thoughts or they’re just going to end up straight back in another mess.
They’ve already blown the chance to get a new manager when they could get him some new players, so whoever comes in needs to work with what he’s got and that does in the very short term mainly mean just making everyone feel a bit less sh*t about themselves and trying to produce some football that is a) effective and b) doesn’t make everyone involved decide they prefer rugby or, heaven help us all, g*lf.
So who should it be? We’ve eliminated options that are too far-fetched because they simply won’t come to Spurs or are too unavailable, with the exception of one who would definitely come to Spurs but is too unavailable. But that’s just because he’s still third favourite to actually get the job despite it appearing to be impossible and is also the clear frequently vocalised choice of match-going fans, as well as being just the obvious appointment if it was possible to make, which it isn’t.
We’re sure you’ve guessed who that is. But apart from him, all of these options feel like they could be readily achievable if mainly being deeply flawed. And yes, these things are very much linked.
Now listen, we’re not saying this is what Spurs should do okay? They definitely shouldn’t do actually specifically this actual thing. It would be a mental thing to do. His last proper management gig was with Birmingham, which ended with them second bottom of the Championship after five straight defeats and Redknapp announcing his retirement.
Sure, he rowed back on that to sniff around the Leeds job after Jesse Marsch was deemed just too American for anyone to take seriously, but nothing came of that either. His last Premier League experience was yo-yoing QPR out of and back into the Barclays in 2013 and 2014 before walking away in 2015.
So no, Spurs should not actually entrust their Premier League and financial security to a man who turns 79 last month and who has been retired for eight years.
But – and with all due understanding of the fact that anything before the but can and will be ignored – there is a case for a Redknapp type to come in for the last 12 games of the season and do, well, pretty much what he did when he turned up and turned around the infamous two points from eight games season largely by telling a group of players who no longer believed after months spent with a mood-hoover for a coach that they were all in fact triffic top, top footballers.
I mean, it’s the same isn’t it? He would come in and tell them they’re brilliant. He would tell everyone else that he is brilliant.
What nudges Sherwood above dear old ‘Arry is most obviously that he is significantly younger, but also that there is a win-win element to this: he would either keep Spurs up, which is good news for Spurs, or in relegating them destroy that second-to-none win percentage of which he is so enormously proud.
But we remain here very obviously in the realm of the terrible idea that obviously shouldn’t happen and more importantly definitely won’t. We don’t think.
Spurs are many things as a football club, but subtle is rarely one of them. One of the many ways they sought to support and help their man Thomas Frank while not giving him any more actual footballers was to appoint Heitinga as his assistant.
It’s a wonderfully Spursy move, because it was either entirely guileless and obvious succession planning, which is bad, or they genuinely are now a sufficiently clown-car operation that they really were just trying to help and didn’t realise how it would obviously look if they appointed an assistant who had only recently left title-winning Liverpool because he didn’t want to be an assistant any more, trying his luck with disastrous consequences as head coach of Ajax.
In spectacularly Spursy fashion they’ve ended up positioning an obvious interim who was both obviously overqualified for the assistant role yet alarmingly underqualified for even a temporary head coach gig.
Heitinga brings a tiny bit of lots of beneficial qualities, but surely not quite enough of any of them given the gravity of the situation.
He Knows The Club a little bit. He has been head coach of a bampot big club a little bit. If Spurs were in a ‘season’s a write-off, let’s bin the manager and muddle through to summer as best we can’ scenario, Heitinga would be fine.
But the relegation threat is too immediate, too real and too unthinkable a prospect. There is no really good option for Spurs here, but promoting anyone connected – however tenuously – to the despised Frank regime won’t have the galvanising effect an outside appointment could and there just isn’t enough convincingly plausible upside to an unknown quantity like Heitinga to make this worthwhile.
Gets points for being funny. And would be even funnier after he popped along for a nice chat with Gary Neville and the lads to sh*t all over Spurs in full Conte style. But, we suspect, probably does make this even more of a non-starter than it already was.
Available. Would keep them up. Would wind them up. Would definitely not be seen wandering around holding a tiny little coffee cup with the Arsenal badge on it.
Here we arrive at a vaguely plausible version of the Redknapp-Sherwood-type short-term vibes appointment. One that feels a bit more Michael Carrick than those, in that no, Keane doesn’t have a CV that screams suitability for this job but nor is it entirely empty with all massive recent employment gaps.
He has trod an interesting path through the early days of his coaching career, winning league titles in both Israel and Hungary as well as working in India and England and with the Ireland national team.
Keane famously has many boyhood clubs, but it is Spurs with whom he is most indelibly linked after playing over 300 games for the club across two spells,
There would not quite be the uniting energy that we suspect only really Poch can bring, with the doubts about Keane’s untested credentials at this level entirely valid, but there would be a groundswell of support. Spurs fans would at the very least all want one of their favourite sons to succeed, and there would definitely be a significant lift in the mood.
Into the realm of feasible permanent appointments, with one Italian source putting the former Chelsea boss in ‘pole position’ while claiming this to be a ‘surprise’ which does rather suggest they are not particularly au fait with Tottenham’s managerial history over the last 15 years or so.
Even with the last couple of appointments having a shocking lack of Chelsea in their history, it is still more common to have it be there than not.
Maresca is available, which does immediately elevate him to the realms of the possible. But is he any good? We’re not actually sure he’s any good. It’s just very hard to tell with anyone at Chelsea. Or Spurs, for that matter.
Very possible he is quite good, though. And definitely better than some of the other names a desperate football club will be desperately scrambling around after.
But it does feel like, whether permanent or interim, this appointment needs vibes and a unifying feel-good energy that we don’t think Maresca quite delivers.
More to the point, the Man City job might be his in a few months and it would seem extremely foolish on his part to jump at the Spurs ‘opportunity’ and scupper that one. And we’re sure Spurs don’t want that on their conscience either.
Now there’s the former Chelsea manager you want to bring in. If he wasn’t in charge of Trump FC for the upcoming Trump World Cup it would probably have already happened. The Spurs fans have been singing his name for months, and there has always been a sense of unfinished business here for both club and manager.
We’re not sure either can really move on until they’ve scratched that itch.
The positives are obvious. Instantly has the fans onside, bringing everyone together and instantly lifting the poisonous fog that hovers over the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on every matchday. Proven record of working with young talent and improving it out of sight. Knows the club to an almost pathological degree.
Problem is, the timing doesn’t work at all. Waiting until summer under an interim now represents a staggering gamble with Tottenham’s whole future while the threat of relegation is so real.
Unless Pochettino is going to tell Trump to shove his peace prize up his arse, this just doesn’t seem like a goer. And yes, that would be magnificent and ideal in just so, so many ways. But it’s also not going to happen.
Spurs (or the fans at least) want Poch, and Poch wants Spurs. But Spurs need him now and they can’t have him now. Poch wants it in the summer, and that’s too late.
It’s just too big a gamble.
It’s not ideal, but what working through this list should have told you by now, if events of the last eight months hadn’t already done so, is that Spurs are not operating in the realm of the ideal. They are so very far beyond the search for ideal solutions.
What Spurs can’t do is allow perfect to be the enemy of the good. And De Zerbi is, for many reasons, a good solution. Probably the best one that exists among halfway realistic options.
Once you establish that going to any kind of rookie or callow interim option is too risky at this point, you’re left with a permanent appointment. And that permanent appointment needs to offer two things. First, the prospect of pretty quickly improving the current sh*tshow and not getting actually relegated. Second, the further prospect of having a realistic chance of being not sh*t next season as well.
We’d argue that in De Zerbi you get that. He knows the league. He will at least attempt to play something approaching watchable and effective association football. He’s not perhaps the vibesy arm-round-the-shoulder sort, but he’s not Thomas Frank either. Not yet at least.
He is available, realistic, achievable, and can if he’s up for it be in position quickly. He is also the one name among the currently realistic and available candidates you can imagine making his way to a shortlist in the summer.
If he’s in position quickly, and accept as we must that the game against Arsenal in 10 days’ time is largely a write-off anyway, then he could have two clear weeks working with the small handful of players available to him before the real business of Operation Avoid Disaster begins in earnest at Fulham on the first day of next month.
He might not be the best candidate in several categories, but across all of Spurs’ requirements and needs in the short and medium-term he may be the optimal one.
There’s also a good chance that, whatever happens, he flounces off in some huff or other at the end of next season, freeing Spurs up to then appoint whoever they want anyway.