When thinking of sites most likely to deploy ragebait headline tactics, your thoughts wouldn’t necessarily turn immediately to The Times, but sometimes it really should.
Take, for instance, this one.
‘Thomas Frank should be the most in-demand manager in football’
Now that is a spicy take, and a quick glance at the replies and quotes on Twitter tells you that it’s done precisely the job intended there. There’s no such thing as bad engagement, even if it’s 400 Tottenham fans saying “What the juddering f**k?”
But, of course, the vast majority of those responses will be from people who haven’t read the article itself. Hidden safely behind its paywall, maybe the content itself is less certifiably, batsh*t insane than the headline suggests.
Mediawatch is never afraid of dirty work and we’ve diligently read the whole of Alyson Rudd’s unhinged hagiography of Frank’s disastrous Tottenham reign and are here to tell you this: the headline has, if anything, downplayed the madness.
This is not a headline writer’s stitch-up. Rudd goes for the jugular right from the intro.
The most desirably hireable coach in the world right now? It has to be Thomas Frank.
It has to be, does it? Has to? Not Xabi Alonso. Not Xavi, or Roberto De Zerbi, or Enzo Maresca, or even Zinedine Zidane. Definitely not Ruben Amorim or Ange Postecoglou.
For what it’s worth, Frank just about sneaks into our top 10 of the best available managers. And that’s probably fair, isn’t it?
He’s not going to have jumped to the top of any big club’s wishlist now Spurs have inexplicably sacked a man who won two of his last 17 Premier League games.
Anyway. Back to Rudd.
‘Think back to when he was appointed by Tottenham Hotspur.’
Okay.
‘The only criticism of his move from Brentford was that the Dane had no big-club experience, that life had been sweet and organised and contained in west London and that the media spotlight of being in charge of Spurs would be a shock to his system and one that he might struggle with.’
Not for the first time, Project Fear was proved very correct so we’re not entirely sure what Rudd’s point is here.
‘Well, now he knows all about the things that were alien to him. He understands that fanbases can be entitled and cruel and impatient.’
Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the Spurs fans who are wrong.
We then have a whole section focused on Spurs’ undeniably impressive if utterly incongruous fourth-placed finish in the Champions League league phase.
But when your whole column is built around explaining away all the reasons Spurs have sunk so low in the Premier League, it’s a little bit naughty to avoid all the contributing factors involved in that Champions League position.
In some part because of Spurs’ involvement as a sixth English club, this season’s has been a particularly lopsided Champions League. Half of the top 12 finishers were from the Premier League; all of them handed a double advantage of being among the strongest teams in the competition anyway while also knowing they could not be drawn to play against each other in the league phase.
And Spurs had more luck of the draw than most. They played nobody who finished higher than 11th, and that was PSG who whacked them 5-3. They faced no other side that finished in the top 16, but did meet four of the eventual bottom six – three of them at home.
Frank’s Spurs were much better and much freer in the Champions League than the Premier League for sure, and a journalist interested in anything other than running cover for a manager they simply like quite a lot might be able to do something with the whys and wherefores of that fact. But a very large part of any answer really would be ‘they played quite a lot of the worst teams in competition’.
And there’s a paradox here anyway; if you are giving Frank oodles of credit for impressive Champions League results, then it only makes the abject failure to translate those performances and results to domestic combat less acceptable rather than more understandable.
‘There was the Uefa Super Cup final against the mighty PSG, which Tottenham lost only on penalties and in which Spurs played some entertaining football, but no one mentions that either.’
Why oh why aren’t people taking time out in the middle of a worsening relegation fight to talk about the time Frank’s Spurs played quite well in a glorified friendly six months ago?
‘Unless trying to claim all Frank’s European exploits were somehow accidental.’
Not accidental. But not all that they seem, either.
Now at last we get to the real reason why Rudd thinks Spurs fans unhappy at being in a relegation fight are simply being cruel and entitled.
‘This is not a man who entered the sport for the dosh and as a consequence is the most down-to-earth Premier League manager I have ever interviewed. Once, during Covid, he chatted on Zoom from his home in southwest London with the place in some turmoil because of a modest loft extension.’
It is extraordinary just how often the entire actual reason journalists will defend a failing manager to the death is ‘they were quite polite to me once’.
We now reach the non-sequitur section of a piece that must continue for several hundred more words, none of which can be ‘two wins’ or ’17 games’ or ’16th place’. They can be ’17th place’, though. Funny that.
This might be the most irrelevant argument in favour of an obvious failure that we’ve ever seen.
‘After all, the Dane put a piano in the players’ lounge at Brentford’s training ground because Bryan Mbeumo liked to practice on it. That hardly supports the notion of Frank as a distant and overly demanding figure.’
Spurs fans must be feeling pretty silly about wanting Frank out now.
‘Frank inherited a team that had finished 17th and needed fixing. He therefore worked diligently to that end but the fans were not much interested in hard work that looked like hard work. They wanted magic dust, they wanted Frank to be a saviour while doing all the furious paddling under the water, unseen, while making jokes and neglecting the importance of set pieces.’
Nobody is saying Frank didn’t work hard to fix the team that finished 17th yet also (given we know Rudd likes pointing out things that nobody mentions) 13 points above the relegation zone last season.
But he left them in 16th place, five points above the relegation zone, and sinking fast. Spurs fans didn’t want ‘magic dust’ – they cruelly wanted to not be in a relegation fight.
The entitled so-and-sos also wanted to maybe occasionally get a home win in exchange for Europe’s highest ticket prices. And, impatiently, perhaps just sometimes to watch some football that didn’t make their eyes bleed, or that treated games against Chelsea and Arsenal as lost before they’d begun.
We’re sure Frank also worked very hard at Brentford, but missing from this hard-hitting analysis of why Spurs fans are to blame is the fact that losing him (and 40 goals from last season, and their captain) hasn’t stopped the Bees improving this season post-Frank under a rookie manager.
On which note, we really might only be a year from everyone memory-holing the last eight months sufficiently for some thinkpieces to emerge about how Keith Andrews deserves his chance at a big club.
‘There was a keenness to pigeonhole Frank as a coach who demands physicality and pressing and yet he was famous in his home country for tiki-taka possession. We see the versions we expect to see rather than what is on show. When circumstances allowed, Spurs could be fun to watch, it was just that the circumstances were not favourable all that often.’
Yes, someone is definitely guilty here of seeing ‘the versions we expect to see rather than what is on show”. HINT: It is not those cruel Tottenham fans.
But what of that manager who left Spurs 17th and so in need of fixing (while also qualifying for the Champions League where lovely, piano-installing Frank did so well…)? There’s a little dig at Postecoglou up there, isn’t there? About the jokes and set-pieces.
Here’s what Rudd thought of Ange when it was his turn to discover that Spurs fans are simply cruel and entitled and impatient and just generally beastly.
‘Ange Postecoglou is cult leader who is turning Spurs into a parody account’
Oh.
‘Ange acolytes will say that a run of one win in eight tells you nothing about his limitations and everything about underinvestment by Daniel Levy, the chairman.
‘Every club, however, has a budget whether that be grand or modest, as well as injury issues, and the job of those tasked with hiring the head coach or manager is to find the person who can squeeze the most from the available resources in a manner that does not alienate the supporters.’
Frank acolytes will say that a run of two wins in 17 tells you nothing about his etc. and so forth.
But the point here is clear and fair. Everyone has injury issues, and you can’t afford to alienate the supporters.
Unless, of course, you’re a lovely, kind man with a modest loft extension.
‘Well, now he knows all about the things that were alien to him. He understands that fanbases can be entitled and cruel and impatient. That not all clubs are run as a streamlined and sustainable model like Brentford. That having 11 senior players injured does not give you license to play defensively in the hope of securing a few precious points.’
It was never really about those horrible Spurs fans, was it?
If only Postecoglou had the foresight to once be polite to Rudd during a modest loft extension, he too might be in the conversation for the title of most desirably hireable coach in the world right now.
