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Tottenham Are Big Enough to Sustain the Ambitions of Pochettino and His Players
- Updated: October 10, 2016
Bandwagon manufacturers up and down the land are on call after Tottenham Hotspur’s 2-0 win over Manchester City before the international break.
After Spurs went largely overlooked amid pre-season hype focusing on big-name managerial appointments at City, Chelsea and Manchester United, the Premier League’s second-placed side defeating its first will have had many preparing to change their minds. Continue that form and cap off a strong October with a win over champions Leicester City and perhaps the Foxes will loan them their leftover bandwagons from last season.
Tottenham’s unbeaten run is a good start to a season they hope they will truly prove their credentials in over the coming months. Yet even as people are re-evaluating them, there is a feeling they are being damned with faint praise in some quarters—that in one aspect or another, their good work is regarded as illusory or ephemeral.
Failed Valencia manager and England coach Gary Neville is one such thinly veiled critic.
“The job he has done at two clubs in the Premier League has been wonderful and he deserves, not being disrespectful to Tottenham, the biggest jobs in the world,” Neville said of Spurs boss Mauricio Pochettino, per Sky Sports. “He’s giving the best dress rehearsals you could possibly wish for.”
The suggestion Tottenham will not be enough to placate their manager, and by consequence their players’ ambitions, is understandable to an extent.
Last season’s near-miss in the title-race might have been considered a more gallant one but for the way they collapsed in a vital game against Chelsea and blew a chance at finishing runners-up. Fair or not, it lent itself to the notion Spurs are a club not capable of establishing themselves again among the country’s elite.
Even as they transformed from a firmly mid-table entity to one contending for Champions League places, it was the eventual failures to qualify that were most commonly highlighted.
With several of their best players moving on after such disappointments, the notion of Spurs as a stopgap—or “dress rehearsal,” as Neville put it—was firmly established.
The recent clutch of new contracts being signed by current players (see below) brought to mind similar moves to keep such predecessors around.
#PochettinoPose pic.twitter.com/cnvbHuUBvv
— Bleacher Report UK (@br_uk) September 23, 2016
Each one of the club’s best players at the time, Robbie Keane and Gareth Bale, both signed new contracts in May 2007 and June 2012, respectively. Both left just over a year later, despite their extensions coming with the kind of worded commitments also expressed by the current crop of renewals.
“It is an exciting time to be at the club, and I am looking forward to even better seasons ahead,” Keane said, via BBC Sport.
“The club is progressing and I want to be a part of that, so it was great to get the deal done,” Bale offered five years later.
In the former instance, chairman Daniel Levy remarked upon the strategy Keane’s new deal was part of, one that is being replicated now with Dele Alli, Eric Dier, Kyle Walker and others.
“The key to retaining top players is to agree long-term contracts,” …
