I'm largely a fan of the work that Levy and co have done behind the scenes at Spurs. I love the new stadium, the training ground, the involvement with the community is excellent around the club, and overall we're never going to be a club that ends up with point deductions for breaching FFP or such.
All of that is offset by the oddest of periods we are now in.
Mourinho must have cost £15m to sack. Poch was also around that kind of money, and Nuno must have got a serious wedge also. When you consider agent fees as well, plus what the managers were paid while achieving no forward progress, its got to be around £100m - the only value for money in that being the Poch era with 2nd place finish and Champions League final. Jose was a cultural misfit at the club, who they then replaced with a less experienced version of the same thing, and now we have another manager whose approach strays from the core of players the club has.
Hindsight is wonderful, but truly the best option would have been to either stick with Poch or find someone who was going to continue in that vein, and would get the performances from the likes of Dele and Lo Celso. Ndombele I think was possibly an overall mistake given his attitude and approach, but to appoint managers who want battling physical specimens not skilled craftsmen was just weird.
Next Paratici arrived and the hope was that we would get continuity. The problem is that so far Don Fabio has signed players in the "Levy" mould - ie prospects - Sarr, Gil, for example may come good, but the jury is out. He's not signed players destined to be successful in a Conte team, which was his end goal - he wanted Antonio to be at the helm - if that was the case then why the hell did he sign players, and another manager in the interim, that didn't have the same philosophy.
There's only a few clubs that can transition between managerial philosophies - Chelski being one of them, and they do this by throwing literally tens of millions in cash at the team. Even with cash in abundance sometimes it doesn't work - Man Utd can't do it - look how they have stumbled in recent years moving from coach to coach and style to style. The upshot is that we need continuity as we don't spend the cash Chelski do. In other words if the Conte situation doesn't work out, we need to hire someone who matches his approach, exactly or closely.
Conte can succeed at Spurs, and he can do it adopting the Spurs philosophy in terms of recruitment - but to do this he needs time, and while he's using that time, we may be really quite crap on the pitch. Remember that under Poch in his first season, the squad had a lot of dead wood he didn't get on with and we were 10th in November of that season. Reason why? Sherwood and AVB didn't have the same philosophy as Poch. So there was a transition. Which is where we are now.
I'd ignore the press angles on Conte, he took a job, he's won trophies everywhere he's gone and he won't want to let that slip. If he believes he needs time, and if the club will give him that, he's going to get a team singing from his hymn sheet. In the meantime, until that happens, we will see the likes of Sanchez make errors, hard workers like Davies get the nod over the likes of Rodon, and so on.
