Parker

Harry Redknapp is the quintessential English manager. Working class roots, played football since he was a kid, steeped in the game, worked his way up in management from the lower leagues. Close to his players, he preaches the virtues of hard work and character. He has prospered in the modern era but his teams would look familiar to fans from any era of English football – big men at the back, tough tackling midfielders and wingers with another big bloke up front.

He’s often scornful of tactics, preferring or so he claims, to assemble good players and let them express themselves on the pitch. John Giles, a shrewd man not easily fooled, concurs: “You don’t see him complicating it with big tactics or formations.” Yet our success this year has come about precisely because of a different approach to tactics. Like the players, he’s absorbed a few lessons from our European experience. A couple of changes have made all the difference.

Teams play from the back – get it right there and everything flows. That’s true for us, of which more later, but the crucial difference is up front. Redknapp has jettisoned his faith in a centre forward as target man in favour of mobility. Manu Adebayor is not performing to the best of his considerable ability but he doesn’t have to, because he brings out the strengths of those around him. Crouch was a target for Bale and Lennon’s crosses. Manu is that and more. In particular, his runs open up space for others to either move into themselves or to slide in a pass through the channels.

As a result, Van der Vaart has prospered. Harry has him in a free role, working across the pitch and in the gaps between the opponent’s back four and midfield. He can hang back or make a little run himself, feed Adebayor or a runner, all these and more are possible. Bale is encouraged to make diagonal runs into the box. When all three are firing, Lennon is stretching them wide and Modric is hanging around, any defence will struggle. Before we leave Rafa, note how hard he’s working this year. His ‘ground covered’ stats rival anyone on the pitch when he plays well. He’s no longer a luxury.

The other major development is our centre midfield. Whether they are called a half-back, defensive midfielder, midfield destroyer or ‘a Makelele-type’, English teams have revolved around the energetic, tough-tackling midfield player. Times have changed and Redknapp has moved on. Positional play, the ability to pick up the ball and distribute it, to keep possession until team-mates are in the right place and defence can become attack, these qualities are more valuable at the highest level of the game. Spurs fans owe a huge debt of gratitude to Wilson Palacios but he doesn’t possess these abilities and so, like Crouch, has become part of our past. We know Modric can do this. Now we have Parker too. Both can tackle but that’s a bonus.

The modern game is so much about possession and movement off the ball. The great Italian coach and theoretician Arrigo Sacchi talked about formations but in the end the most important quality was the player’s ability to understand where he was in relation to his team-mates and to the ball. It was as if the game is about thousands of these micro calculations, re-calibrating constantly as the game flows. Put it all together and you have a team functioning as a unit, adapting to the ebb and flow of the match, to the conditions, to the opposition’s pressure or the need to score or defend, and above all to whether or not you have the ball.

Scott Parker is good at many things but this is finest quality. He knows where he should be at any given time. In defence he will shield the back four or slip back into a channel, leaving the defence to mark opponents. He’ll pick it up and wait. Not dither or procrastinate, but wait, a touch or two here, shielding the ball as others move around him. Then he’ll release, short or long, short mostly, keep it moving and allow more time to readjust into attack from defence. No space, well, knock it around, get others moving or move it himself. Sometimes he will inject some pace, either with a run upfield, jabbing strides and low centre of gravity, or with a sweetly timed through ball.

At his best, the game moves at his pace, hums to his tune. Add the traditional English virtues of toil, sweat and tackles and you have the perfect midfielder. He’s been outstanding, both in himself and in the way he gets the best from others. His intelligence means he knows what’s best for them, where they might be and how they want the ball, and again Redknapp’s coaching has been instrumental in getting the pieces to function as a whole.

Last season I said similar things about Luka Modric. Put the two of them in the same team and they complement each other perfectly. I would go a step further and include Sandro, a world-class prospect in my view, alongside Parker. They would lie deeper, although as I’ve implied that’s not a rigid demarkation, with Bale, Modric and Van der Vaart ahead. Lennon would miss out.

This isn’t about straight lines, remember. Rather, flexibility, intelligence, mobility and an ability to respond to conditions are key. All these five can run all day. They will have to, to cover, press and chase when we don’t have the ball. If we are short, one of the two DMs can slide across whilst others make a direct run straight back to cover. This allows Walker room to plunder on the right. If he’s forward, another stays back. Doesn’t matter who, they work it out according to where they are and the positions of their team-mates. Each player takes these same decisions, hundreds of times a game.

Tottenham Hotspur desperately need a player like Emmanuel Adebayor. His strength, pace and goalscoring ability on the ground and in the air will if all goes smoothly become the long sought after focal point for our attacking play. No one who was at the Lane to witness his exquisite volley in the 3-1 defeat by our neighbours will need to be convinced – it’s seared in my brain, probably forever, which can’t be said for many of the goals we’ve scored since then.

So the real question is not do we need Emmanuel Adebayor but why does he need us? Specifically, and let’s not beat around the bush here, why does he want to play in front of fans who have given him dogs abuse, more calculated and vile than any I can recall in over 40 years of watching Spurs?

That Song is nasty, brutish and racist. Many say that’s not a legitimate interpretation. I wrote about this last year and nothing I’ve heard before or since has altered my opinion. I am neither a prude nor averse to the abuse that crowds dish out during matches. In fact, there’s a powerful argument to say that abuse is all fans have left in the face of intransigent and distant administrators, a game driven by profit and power and players who value money and celebrity above pride in their performance.

Despite this, there are limits and this song goes too far. In so doing, it shames the tradition of tolerance in the stands at Spurs. We are rightly indignant when subjected to the equally despicable insults relating to the yids tag, especially as no one does anything about it, indeed in some quarters we are blamed for bringing it on ourselves. However, in the dark days of football racism in the seventies and eighties, when WHam and Chelsea fans racially abused their own black players, when bananas were routinely chucked onto the pitch and not as an energy aid, you never, ever saw that at Tottenham. Yet this song is sung out of habit these days, when until recently the player had nothing to do with us, didn’t even play in the same league. I’m not particularly aware of him having a real go at us, although I am happy to be corrected. Not in the way Terry and Lampard, Henry and Pires have gone out of their way to taunt us.

The song is sung just for the delight of it. He first heard when his father had been dead for less than a year. And we are not the only ones. L’arse sung it when he scored against them for City after his infamous length of the field run to their end.

So in the face of this extraordinary abuse, which he heard for himself at the Bernabeu only a few months back, knowing the fans detest him, he signs. If he strung us along until deadline day only to spurn us at the last second, I wouldn’t have blamed him.

The easy answer is ‘money’. No doubt there’s plenty on offer, not just in terms of matching his salary but also a hefty bonus for signing on the dotted line. However, that’s not the sole reason because he could have achieved that aim by staying where he was or by accepting the other offers that were around.

Professional pride is a factor. He wants to play regularly and knows he will be first choice at Spurs. Harry made him welcome and despite any misgivings about his image expressed on this blog and elsewhere, his reputation with most players is justifiably high. Our style suits Manu perfectly, and if it all goes according to plan, he will be a star again.

Yet professional pride can’t be the full answer because there’s plenty of evidence portraying the striker as disruptive and selfish. At our neighbours he became bored and agitated for a move, cited in the process as an unwelcome influence in the dressing room, while at City he had a right sulk on after being left out, including a fight with one of his team-mates. When the mood takes him, he’s not professional in the slightest.

For us mere mortals, it’s nigh on impossible to fully understand the psyche of a professional footballer. They’re like you and me, flesh and blood after all, yet so different at the same time. In your world, whatever your job, if you had been viciously and publicly abused over a sustained period by your main rival company, would you go and work for them for the same money and if you had an alternative job offer? At your sales conventions, in the pub, in your trade press, you were the butt of all the jokes, now you’re on the payroll. I wouldn’t, and I’m the most reasonable man I’ve ever known.

Some players deal with this by being mercenaries, flitting from club to club with little or no loyalty to anything other than themselves and their paycheque, but that doesn’t ring true in this case. There’s something more to Adebayor. Many professionals react to the pressure by retreating into their own world as a form of self-protection. They assiduously guard this sense of self-worth, to the point of absurdity at times where their self-importance becomes arrogance. However, without their self-confidence, they are lost, unable to cut it in the face of the demand to succeed in the public eye, endless analysis of their faults compounded with stark abuse from fans. In Adebayor’s case, this resilience is not just about football, it’s survival.

The messageboards and twitter greeted Adebayor’s signing with a flood of suitably positive new versions of That Song, and very amusing and self-depreciating they were too. In a small way I like to think I set the ball rolling. Granted my effort in that article last year is unlikely to be adopted by the Park Lane – “Your father undertook a series of menial jobs despite the probable stigma and damage to his self-esteem in order to care for his family and give his son the best possible opportunity to further his footballing career.” It doesn’t even scan but has the advantage of historical accuracy.

Manu was born and raised in Lome, a town near Togo’s border with Ghana, where in order to eke out a living for her son and his 5 siblings, his mother sold dried fish. One account states that his family were so poor, they could not afford to pay for medical treatment so he was left in the hospital for a week or so. At 11 he was staying in a football academy close by a border where drug and arms trafficking was rife, moving on to France in 1999. This in an era where England’s internationals complain about the pressure of being in a 5 star training camp for a few weeks.

Despite his wealth, Adebayor hasn’t forgotten his roots. He’s built a house for his mother and family as following his father’s death in 2007 he’s taken responsibility for the household, and he regularly returns to his country to put something back into the society from which he escaped because he could play football.

Perhaps it’s not merely a common language and heritage that cements the friendship between Benny Assou Ekotto and Abebayor. Both have known hardship in their early lives, both present a detached attitude to the game that does not detract from the quality of their performance. They are self-contained, secure and confident in their sense of self. It gets them through.

This inner strength was tested to its limits and beyond when along with his Togo team-mates, Adebayor clung for cover in the twisted wreckage of a bullet-ridden coach as it was attacked before a tournament. His friend, the team’s press officer, died in his arms. He’s lived a life most of us could not imagine and he’s only 27. Perhaps the songs don’t have the same impact.

So there’s plenty to admire in Emmanuel Adebayor but the reasons behind his success mean that we’ll never become that close to him. And what does it say about us, the fans? Most didn’t sing that song, of course, but many have, and anyway he was on the receiving end of more than his fair share of abuse just for wearing the red shirt.

We’ll never take him to heart but I believe he will receive a warm welcome tomorrow and he will earn our respect if he gives of his best, as his former team-mate and fellow subversive Willy Gallas has done. Fans of all clubs are often accused of hypocrisy and there’s truth there. However, our loyalty is like no other in sport, in life perhaps, and that loyalty, blind, crazy, illogical, harmful, unwavering and unstinting, is to the shirt, to the club. Our club. That’s the point from all this.

In my own silly immature way, when Manu first comes over to the centre Shelf tomorrow, I’ll shout his name and applaud. He’ll hear me and I like to think it will mean something but it won’t. And if he scores, and runs over to the fans, and the fans sing his name, if he winks and raises an eyebrow in ironic surprise, I wouldn’t begrudge him his moment. Good luck to you, Manu. You’re one of us now and we’ll look after you.