On Monday, Spurs published their latest financial results. Revenue was down, and the word of the week was ‘sustainable’, as in Daniel Levy’s insistence that the club’s investment in transfers and salaries had to remain within sustainable limits dictated by income. Time flies – it’s Friday and it’s all about Ange’s ear. The team took the chairman at face value – losing at Stamford Bridge is eminently sustainable.

Over the years, I’ve said how this fixture should not be used as the benchmark to judge the team. I wish it were otherwise, that we could rise to the challenge and out-perform our bitter rivals, but for the moment at least, it’s beyond us and we move on. However, last night’s weak, insipid excuse for a performance sadly was indeed typical of how Spurs have been playing lately. Players drifted around the pitch without making any significant impact on proceedings, going through the motions of worn-out tactics that long since ceased to work on motivated opponents ready and prepared to exploit our predictable routines. There was simply nothing there. Nobody achieved anything. Nobody tried to change anything. Maddison was good for five minutes or so near the end. That’s all I’ve got.

I’d describe this as shocking, except I wasn’t shocked. First five minutes, they have a quick striker, long ball down the middle and we’re nowhere. Comedy moments as the ball bounces around and clatters against the post. I shrugged rather than shouted. Such calamity has become the norm.

And so supporters enter that state of purgatory all too familiar to Spurs fans, where we all know the manager will go but we continue to suffer until we can move on. The myths of religion suggest this is to a higher plane, except for Spurs fans it is more likely to be another state of suffering, but I shall cling on to the fragile hope of salvation.

I can’t envisage any scenario where Ange holds his job into next season. ‘When not if’ seems inescapably to be the only question. I take no pleasure in saying this. I wanted this proud, motivated man to succeed. He was right for my club, so I hoped. I applauded his brave, attacking football and his value-base of teamwork and support for his players, plus his passion for the game, a beacon of authenticity in an increasingly dreary, cynical football world driven by greed.

Except it hasn’t worked. Granted, we will never truly know what he could have achieved if not blighted by injuries. However, the benchmark for any manager, at any level, is whether they can create a team where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and in this respect Ange has failed. Indeed, we often play as a group of individuals with little connection or cohesion, and certainly the players’ confidence and ebullience of the early months has become a distant memory.

He’s done nothing to deal with our problems in defence, with too much space in front of the back four and our penalty box defending is shoddy, as was shown last night with their goal, where a midfield player can lurk unnoticed near our 6 yard box. Udogie should have come across but no midfielder tracked that movement. We constantly, predictably give the ball away. Players are easily isolated on the ball and concede possession. This has been going on for a season and a half.

Some of the players are not up to playing to the level he expects, especially in that central midfield area, and we’ll never know why the club did not act to plug those gaps with a different type of player, one who could also release some of the pressure on talent like Bentacur and Sarr, and enable them to flourish. Our attack, once fast and threatening, is now leaden and predictable.

Ange is rattled. He knows that it’s not working and has to face the bitter reality that he has failed. He cuts an isolated figure on the touchline and, as I understand it, within the club itself. The cupping his hand to the ear gesture will only serve to alienate supporters, bearing in mind that broadly within the ground he’s not been subject to significant negativity. Away matches may be different. I hear from good people who go away that at times the atmosphere has been hostile, which includes abuse directed towards the manager and players, some of it racist.

It is hard and I don’t condone personal abuse in any form, but he like any other manager has to understand that it’s not about his personal vindication, it’s about the team, about fans and team together. He’s created them and us, and it’s not on.

Managers come and go, the hierarchy that runs the club, dictates policy and shapes the ethos where at one of the wealthiest clubs in the world, winning something is a secondary, minor consideration, remains the same. Tottenham are a club devoid of ambition and self-belief, and this comes from the top. For the board, failure is indeed sustainable.

Two home games to come including a European quarter final yet optimism is at rock bottom. The mood among supporters is desultory and doom-laden as we watch yet another iteration of our team decompose then disintegrate before our eyes. It’s horrible, it’s a mess, it’s Tottenham.

Business is bad for the jerk chicken bar-b-ques in the Park Lane. It’s raining, and the crowds surprisingly sparse even though kick-off is only half an hour away. The aroma of succulent curried goat is tempting, the warmth and dry of the ground more so and fans scurry past. The speakers blast out Bob Marley, singing songs of freedom, but there’s no redemption to be found for Spurs fans in the shelter of the stadium.  

I concluded last week’s piece with the ominous comment that there may be trouble ahead. I take no pleasure in saying my prediction for Sunday’s game was on the money. Vardy scores on a breakaway, Spurs are disjointed and directionless and the atmosphere is more toxic than a nuclear waste dump. More telling perhaps even than the chants directed at the chairman was the lack of enthusiasm in the stands, the absence of any concentrated vocal support for the team a grudging acceptance of the inevitability of this outcome. People have had enough.

Protected by the thickest skin in English football, impervious to criticism, even our chairman must be feeling the heat through his cloak of invulnerability. Yet in response, the club have thrown out a couple of titbits that won’t sate our appetite of some robust, overdue and utterly necessary urgent action. Ange is safe, for now, and we hope to sign at least one player before the window closes, something Ange referenced in a press conference. These reports go on to say that we’re not after a midfielder.

I’m struggling to work out the strangest aspect of this. Is it ‘one player’ when the squad is on its knees? Strong competition from, ‘before the end of the window’, when they’ve had 28 days to respond to an urgent need. Both trumped for me though by ‘not a midfielder’. I realise we need reinforcements up front and at the back, but our defensive midfield is a tumbleweed void, a canyon of nothingness. There’s more material in the vast and endless vacuum of space. We’ve recruited some talented young players, no question, but this is at the expense of, rather than alongside, a search for experience, resilience and leadership, qualities essential for success.

For Leicester’s second, the bloke was out for a Sunday stroll, ambling across vacant grass, a touch here, another one to get it right, hold up a finger to gauge the windspeed and direction, pull up his socks and clean the mud from his toecaps before slotting into the corner of the net. He put more effort into his endless celebration than he had to do to score.

Spurs now have a managerial infrastructure to run the club. Yet their current strategy in the face of crisis is to let Ange carry the can as the only public face of Tottenham Hotspur. Daniel Levy – nothing. Donna Cullen – silence. Scott Munn – schtum. Johann Lange – shh! The whole operation geared, at enormous expense, to not carrying the can.

Ange to his eternal credit is prepared to front up, and all he gets for his troubles is, this week, media snark for being occasionally snippy with them. As if no other manager ever has taken umbrage with the media. One paper suggests that one reason they aren’t sacking Ange is that although that will be embarrassing for the board, appointing Mason as caretaker for the third time looks even worse. This is the stage we’ve reached. This is how one of the richest clubs in European football is being run, judging degrees of embarrassment.

The idea that Ange doesn’t have a plan B has been thoroughly debunked, although many pundits still trot it out because cliches and second-hand opinions are good earners. What he doesn’t have is a plan to tighten up when we’re under pressure from player exhaustion and a make do and mend team. For me, the big worry is that we don’t have the players with the skill-set to offer this option.

On Sunday, Bentancur had a poor game but he was essentially left to police the back four on his own, as well as build attacks when we get possession. Sarr was awful but we hear subsequently that he wasn’t fit. I admire the fact that he wanted to play, it shows the commitment the players have retained, but Ange should have been stronger and left him out if fitness was the issue. Then again, this reveals the real problem, there’s nobody else to play there. And so we’re back to the fundamental problem of a manager having to work with a squad not fit for purpose.

My dire warnings of the consequences of the board’s baffling negligence stretch back on this blog for at least a decade. The media have finally caught up. It is a football club and football clubs should be geared to performance. The board have their heads in the sand, refusing to fully invest in the team at a time of crisis and denying any responsibility for this, a crisis that was waiting to happen. 24 years of making the same mistakes, of a wilful inability to understand how to create a successful team, of denial that it requires substantial, sustained and strategic investment in top class footballers.

Or indeed investment in their support and supporters. They have created a vast gulf between themselves and the fans. Get behind the team. The Spurs family. The game is about glory. No wonder there is so much anger around. And it impacts adversely on the team, another deleterious consequence of the board’s attitude. They simply do not get us at all. As one banner said on Sunday: ‘Our game is about glory. Your game is about greed.’

This week, inconveniently for the board, figures around the wages/income ratio for the Premier League have been published. It’s a table that Spurs top. The opposition fans I know read this blog can insert their own joke about our trophy cabinet at this point. The only thing I want to add now is my continued bewilderment that in his own terms, Daniel Levy and the board have been hugely successful. Wages to income the lowest in the Premier League. The ground brings in an estimated £5m per game and the club is in an excellent financial state. This includes our position on PSR. Good. Well done, genuinely. This is the springboard to success as promised when plans for a new stadium were discussed nearly twenty years ago, yet we’re fast sinking to the bottom of the pool.

Spurs are not so much sleepwalking towards a relegation battle as zombie marching resolutely towards it, eyes wide open as if on some speed-fuelled bender. I’m old enough to remember the relegation season, and subsequent years that we spent near the bottom of the table. There’s something here about drift, about how a team with decent players but not strong enough as a whole internalise a defeatist mentality and can’t find a way to win, teams that wanted to play open football the Spurs way and got punished for it. This team isn’t ready for a relegation fight.

The idea that everything will be ok once the injured players come back is a fantasy. Before they return, best estimates still mean several weeks of playing two games a week. The glory glory nights of European football at the Lane now reduced to wanting a win on Thursday to avoid further fixtures. It takes time to get up to match fitness, more time still to reach the athletic intensity our tactics require, a period when players are vulnerable to further injury due to over-exertion. We’ve lost to Leicester and Everton, with Wolves, Ipswich and Southampton still to play, plus all of the teams at the top apart from AFC.

In response, on January 28^th, no new outfield players. The world famous Hotspur, rotten to the core.

In solidarity with my beleaguered football team, today’s piece is rambling, incoherent and smacks of desperation.

Sunday’s performance against Everton was a new low but then again, that statement applies to every match we play these days. How low can you go? Spurs’ response to the mess we’re in is to become more disjointed, not less. Players lose connection with each other. Mistakes proliferate. There’s no steadying hand, few moments of peace as we can’t keep the ball or stay tight at the back to absorb pressure. It’s constant, respite coming only when the opposition choose to take a breather. We’re in heaps of trouble and nobody knows what to do.

That’s the team. Re-read the last paragraph, and think how it applies to the board’s stewardship of the club. Fits like a glove. I didn’t intend to write it so. If only I had been so clever, but I’m bothered and bewildered too, trying to write above the inner voices that are bellowing, ‘not again, how could it come to this?’.

But there it is. I mean, I know the answer. This is the outcome of two decades of misguided leadership from the board. A lack of direction and consistency, where as I’ve repeatedly written before, it is beyond the chairman’s ability and understanding to align the three forces that fuse to create a successful football club – the manager/coach, recruitment and finance. Still, we’ll always have the Spurs dog of the day. Something we can all get behind.

Not going to go over that in detail again. Suffice to say that we have a chairman who wants a seat at the top table but is at pains not to upset his hosts by unseemly behaviour, such as winning trophies. He instructs his managers to aim for the top four without providing the resources to take that additional step towards a title challenge, or for that matter squad depth to take a proper tilt at winning a cup too. He rewards his players with a watch, provided by a sponsor naturally, for reaching a final, not winning it. He wants to take part in a European super league, just to be there. For the money.

Anyway. Look elsewhere for coherent thoughts about what to do now. My head is as jumbled and confused as Dragusin on Sunday. So here are some things. You will have others.

I would not dismiss Ange at this point. The prospect of another caretaker has no appeal. I can’t see how a coach appointed in the short-term could change significantly with this squad and this injury list. I don’t see what else he can do with the back four, and if that sounds hopeless, then that reflects how I feel. There are longer term issues about training, and let’s be honest, fans have absolutely no idea whether training has had an adverse impact on the players’ health. We can see, however, that the lack of squad depth shows we were inadequately prepared for this busy season.

One thing we can dismiss is the narrative pundits, the real ‘football men’, have constructed around Spurs. We’re not the only side to play a high line by any means. Ange does have a plan B, and a C, D and E. He’s adjusted tactics, notably the positioning of the full-backs, a better pressing game and we’re willing to go long these days too. What we still can’t do is adequately tie up the midfield for any extended periods. Players we rely on in that area like Sarr, Biss and Bentacur, cannot keep the ball for long enough, which is a major plank in our defensive construction. Players are prone to errors when the pressure is on and lose the ball at crucial moments. Plus they are knackered. We can demand more effort but there’s a physical limit that many have reached. The press has worked well, again it’s key to our defensive shape this season, but they run out of steam.

What we don’t have is a plan F, where everybody’s back, low block, backs to the wall lads eh! That’s the classic response when teams come under pressure as we are. We simply don’t do that well, for long enough. Coaching? We don’t have the players for it, not with that mindset.

Plus of course Ange came up with a plan G on Sunday, three at the back. This worries me, not just because it was a disaster but because it shows he’s rattled. We could not have possibly trained with that formation for any length of time. Gray is excellent but still only young. Frankly it smacked of desperation. And if that message gets through to the players, we’re sunk. Remember these players didn’t sign up for a battle at the bottom of the table. That’s not what they’re here for.

Levy has to take decisive action in this window, not mess around negotiating some cunning loan with an option to buy to protect the club and save a future fee. Rumours suggest we are looking at defenders and forwards. Nothing yet. Any chance of a defensive-minded midfielder who can pass the ball a bit? There’s no time to waste.

And by action, I mean buy players. The action he usually takes in situations like these is to sack the manager. Will he or won’t he? His previous form suggests he will, regardless of whether or not he has a replacement lined up. I wonder, though, if this time circumstances may be different. Certainly the word from “well-placed” journalists is that he has no immediate plans to do so, and I’m assuming this comes from something deliberately fed to them by the club, because that’s how these things work.

So has anything changed? After those decades of failure I mentioned, to be fair we do have a plan and Ange is integral to that. Attacking football and player investment, especially in younger players but not exclusively, supported by a developed and much-needed club infrastructure in recruitment and a head of operations to run the club day to day. And what are these people saying to the board? Levy tends not to respond to outside interference, but he may be listening to these people he has employed to advise him. We don’t know, but at the very least this is a different element to the process.  

There’s also another, new element to the Spurs story, a prevailing view that the structural, long-term problems evident at Spurs are down to him. Many supporters, including me, have long held this view, but there have been several big pieces in the papers that have been extremely critical of the board’s performance. Levy says he takes no notice of criticism, and if that takes the form of personal abuse, I don’t blame him at all, but this is different, a far greater focus on him, and it must have an effect.  

Finally, Ange remains fairly popular amongst the fanbase, albeit it may represent clinging on to forlorn hope rather than wholehearted support. Dangerous to generalise, but certainly his name is sung at games, although I gather things got nasty post-match at the away end on Sunday when he and the players came over. No songs towards the end for his three predecessors, though.

Sunday will be the test. Home game, we have 75% possession when Vardy slots his second, three down after also conceding from a set-piece. It could turn ugly.

So I predict we’ll mess around at the bottom of the table for a while, with some respite when our players return but not much. I’ve written about the short-term, but this could have a serious harmful impact on our medium and longer term plans, just when we have something in place, which is much more worrying.

Here’s a perfectly plausible scenario. We finish mid-table and don’t win a cup. We look to build in the summer, after all team building takes several windows and we have some cracking young players, but without European football we’re less attractive to classy, quality players in a competitive market. Plus the board will be even more reluctant to pay high wages because income will fall, so recruitment is tough.

Then, it could be hard to keep our best players. Romero and Kulusevski certainly will be in demand, VdV maybe. Also, this season has exposed the deficiencies of some players we do have. Recruitment at this point in the cycle should be about upgrading, whereas we need to replace some relatively recent signings who were supposed to be part of that development.  Dragusin and Werner aren’t up to it, and we’ll have to wait to see how close players out on loan, notably Donley, Vuscovic, Devine, Dorrington and Phillips, can get to the first team.

Plausible therefore that all the progress we’ve made goes out the window and we’re team building again for the 23^rd successive transitional season. There may be trouble ahead.

A good friend dropped me a line the other day, out of the blue. He’d not seen me, I’d not been around much online. He said something like, watching Spurs is depressing right now and so many of the people he has spoken to over many years are struggling at the moment. He wondered how I was.

Over the years, I have learned through bitter experience to temper my expectations, but still, once the last shred of hope disappears, it’s time to give up and I’m not ready for that. That’s the essence of being a fan, regardless of which club you support. Fans will tolerate almost anything if they have something to believe in. I’m a fan. I watch the game, support the team, love the shirt, regardless. But faith has been elusive lately. Reach out to replenish fast-diminishing reserves, only to find it’s slipped through your fingers.

Peaks and troughs of emotion are familiar to every football fan, comforting even, although most are loathe to admit it, because it’s fundamental to being a supporter. Explaining this to the uninitiated provokes two reactions in my experience, first, blank uncomprehending, then a silent search for other character deficiencies. But we believers know, without pain there is no true joy. Or so we kid ourselves.

At Spurs though, this season is wringing out a whole variety of emotions, match by match, frequently minute by minute. Never in my memory have we been through so much, so often, so quickly and, I’m sad to say, so repetitively. Dazzling attacking football followed by crass defending. The ability to slice through any defence, the inability to accurately pass the ball 10 yards. The foundations of team building destroyed by a quake of injuries. Manchester United and Fraser Forster.

We gasp at the attacking brilliance and the potential it holds for a bright future. We despair at how easily Spurs can throw it all away in a microsecond. It makes us angry, so many take it out on individual players, the manager comes in for heavy criticism, as does the board. We take it out on each other, whinging on social media or knocking bits out of other fans. Yesterday, stewards piled in at the end of the game to separate battling Spurs fans in the South Stand. Other fans pontificating that if we’re not Levy Out, we’re part of the problem. I’ve been going for 55 years, really, I’m not.

Yesterday was my first game back at the Lane since Qarabag, my longest single absence since 1969. I missed games when the kids were young but never over such a long period. My new knee is fine. Turns out it sets off the stadium security sensors, so getting in was fun.

Being there is my way of relating to Spurs. There are many other ways equally as meaningful. In fact, as I’ve said before, there’s more considered analysis from people who see the game on TV. But this is my way, and it’s important to me as an individual. It’s about who I am.

There was a stark and sobering difference in mood between the two games. Qarabag was upbeat and optimistic. We won easily, plus the lower prices and greater availability of tickets meant there were many Spurs fans, including family groups, who are not regulars, for whom the game was a real occasion.  Yesterday, although the atmosphere wasn’t dire, disappointment and apathy were never far away. When Wolves equalised, there was little anger, just a collective shrug in the South Stand. Nobody joined the chant from the Levy Outers at the back. A forlorn lone black balloon drifted in the wind, as aimless as our defending.

It’s difficult to see the way forward through the fog of disappointment and the footballing contradictions that cloud our perceptions, so we watch the game and we’re not sure exactly what we’re seeing, let alone make sense of it. By this point, a season and a half of Ange, I thought we would be further on than we are and it’s hard to shake that feeling, even though some of the reasons are beyond his control.

Another confounding factor is my exposure to more punditry than I usually consume because I’ve watched the games on television. Despite my determined efforts to avoid it (rule one: on no account listen on any pre- and post-match chat on TNT, rule two: ignore Jamie Redknapp), the Spurs Narrative is impossible to ignore. Spurs high-line, Ange never changes tactics, Ange is an idiot because he does not always conform to the expectations and prejudices of proper Football Men.

The players are knackered and so are we. I can’t pretend the mists have cleared completely, but I’ve not posted for a while so let’s catch up. Some issues are structural, and therefore embedded, others are situational with a (hopefully) short-term impact and (hopefully) practical solutions.

Spurs are victims of many years of mismanagement from a board unable and at times apparently unwilling, to define and implement a coherent, long-term footballing strategy leading to success on the pitch. More than mere changes of manager, the churn of playing styles and tactics and the associated transfer policies created long-term instability. Success or failure at any football club revolves around the relationship between three elements: the coach/manager, recruitment and finance. Since 2000, these have seldom aligned effectively. It’s the job of the chairman to make this happen, and he has failed. He speaks with pride about taking no notice of criticism, thus denying that some of this is constructive and that constructive criticism is the foundation of positive change. He speaks glibly of being the club custodian and of the club DNA, without either grasping what this means or understanding how to create, let alone implement, a strategy worthy of these laudable ambitions, indeed worthy of the club’s rich heritage.

Ange has inherited this burden. It’s not his fault but he can’t escape it. One League Cup in two decades. A misshapen squad, the legacy of JM and Conte, the quicksand in danger of sucking him down, as it has done for several of his predecessors.

Also, the disconnect between club and supporters has widened, again through the board’s neglect. If you build it, we will come, but it’s sodding expensive. Fans try to resolve the equation. High prices, no success. The stadium makes us rich and self-sufficient, no success. It makes the chairman rich, but there are no new senior concessions because to grant them would potentially undermine the club’s ability to challenge the best. Recently, some informal fan groups have stated how hard it is to work with the club and will not do so in the future because straightforward requests designed to improve the atmosphere have been stifled. These things may sound intangible but they build up, lowering the threshold of tolerance and in the end, it’s support for the team that the board’s actions impinge upon.   

Then there’s structure and Ange. Mythbusting – go. Spurs are infuriating but not inconsistent. Basically, we play well and score goals if teams let us play. Very different teams and styles, but in this sense, City and Saints, the same. If sides press high and cut down our time and space, at the moment we’re not good enough to find a way out every time.

Also, underlying inconsistency is a lack of experience, confidence and nouse to find a way forward. Sometimes we overcome problems like this, often we can’t. We don’t have that steel, that resilience. That’s actually normal for a developing team, which is what we are. It’s not hindsight in my case to say our transfer policy should have added some experienced players in key central positions, someone with mental strength who has been there and done that, who can show our young talent the way. Players with the leadership qualities we sorely lack.

Ange doesn’t change tactics – not so. Although he plays up to this image, yesterday’s game showed how he adapts. Our first half press was decent, although how the players summoned up the energy for it I don’t know. Biss and Bentancur kept the central midfield under control. Second half, we tired and dropped into a lower block. He brought on subs early to sustain energy levels as best we can, given the current workload. It meant for boring football but it was a pragmatic response to the state of the game, and hardly flat out attacking.

What I’ve grandly called a situational factor is the injury crisis. Ange’s fault through overwork? Hamstring injuries plague the PL, while Brentford have ten players injured but the media do not appear to be blaming Frank. However, hindsight here, but the decision to risk VDV and Romero for the CFC game appears to be a big mistake with lasting consequences.

I don’t know what else we can do at the moment. You can sense the desperation as I type, can’t you. Our squad is not ready to be effective across four competitions. We’ve not got to know Odobert yet but his injury plus Werner’s unreliability undermines one improvement planned for this season, the addition of players who can beat a man and therefore expose packed defences. Another stifled change is our pressing game, effective earlier this season but again undermined by tired legs. Our defence can be wide open but pressing is all about defending, and that option is not often available now.

So Ange turned to the low/mid block yesterday, but we’re not good at that. This is in part about coaching, in part because we don’t really have midfield players keen and able to prioritise defending. At the risk of sounding reactionary, I have asked in the past for at least one defensively minded midfielder to fill the gap that often appears in front of our vulnerable back four and to work that double pivot that strengthens the team. We’re not ready to match Ange’s ambitions without them.

So to draw breath. Having decried the board’s ability to plan for success, the past year has seen us create that strategy, with Lange in charge of football matters and recruitment. Going for younger players has exposed the faults in the squad but augers well for the future. Painful rebuilds really hurt.

I see no point in changing manager now. We don’t know how good he can be if he has half his squad injured. We have been too open in the past but he has responded, I don’t see what significant improvements he can make at the moment, although that may change in a couple of weeks as the transfer window unfolds.

As ever, though, Levy has the final word. Will he stay resolute if we lose to Liverpool and Arsenal? History suggests he’ll fold. We have a plan at long last. Let’s see if the board are wedded to it.