Still a Funny Old Game

It' a funny old game, as the late Jimmy Greaves used to observe to Ian StJohn on a weekly basis back in the eighties.  One of the funniest, in a funny peculiar way, aspects of football are those fans who never seem 'happy' unless the club they support is in some kind of crisis.  Every time a bad run of results starts, these guys are in their element.  If the manager is recently appointed, then it serves only to confirm everything they said at the time as to how wrong their appointment was, if newly signed players are underperforming, then its the same formula.  If the manager is long-established, then suddenly these 'fans' start going over their history with the club to show how they were 'always' shit, if the poorly performing players are long established then they are 'past it' or 'they were always shit'.  Conversely, when their team is doing well, these same fans sulkily pick apart every winning performance for how it was achieved by 'fluke' or luck, dwell gloatingly n every defeat and accuse the club of 'selling out' some vaguely described and mainly imaginary 'principles', in exchange for success. Obviously, these type of 'fans' have always existed, but back in the days of  'Saint and Greavsie' they were largely confined to the saloon bars of pubs where,every Saturday post-match, they'd be boring everyone to death with their doom-laden analysis.  Nowadays, thanks to social media, they feel unavoidable.  Right now, the comments section of every Tottenham blog I look at are full of these 'fans' telling all and sundry how our club is 'utter shit and surely heading for oblivion.

As a follower of the Spurs, I find myself in something of a quandary. I agree with the core of these 'fans' criticisms: that the club is currently sliding into a crisis, with a squad of players who clearly have little idea of how to play together in the tactics set up by a new coach who is simply not up to the job.  I agree that the team needed a thorough overhaul and rebuilding, but this needed to have been done three years ago with a better coach.  But I don't want to sound as if I relish the current chaos surrounding the club as these 'fans' do.  True, I've never thought Nuno was right for the job - his whole CV shows a coach wedded to negative, overly defensive tactics, the complete opposite of what we've been used to at Spurs for most of the past couple of decades - but I take no pleasure in the mess he is creating at Tottenham.  I'm not going to be an apologist for him (as many seem to want to be, trying to place the blame for the situation with the players or the chairman - the fact is that it is the manager's job to find a way of motivating players and getting them to play in his system), but equally I refuse to believe that everything about the club is utterly, irretrievably crap.  Their relentless negativity is what sets them apart from the rest of the fanbase - you just know that whatever the club does, no matter how successful it becomes, it will never be good enough for them.

Unlike the doomster fans, I still believe that the season is salvageable, provided that the club acts swiftly and decisively.  A change in management now would be impractical so soon in the season and would do nothing to solve problems with the squad say the doomsters.  But some of us have been around long enough to recall the debacle of Juande Ramos' twelve months in charge - he was ignominiously sacked eight games into a season, having  only accumulated two points.  At the time there were plenty of these 'fans' around saying how the problems went deeper than the manager - unbalanced, weakened, squad, sub-standard, unmotivated players - yet, pretty much as soon as he arrived, Harry Redknapp started to turn things around.  Of course, as far as these 'fans' were concerned, Harry was never good enough for Spurs, mo matter how well the team did under him - he wasn't some overrated continental manager spouting tactical theories and the like but, worst of all, under him the team didn't allow them to indulge in their apocalyptic 'fan' fantasies.  This turnaround wasn't unprecedented - some of us remember Martin Jol replacing Jacques Santini early in the season with positive results or, more recently and on a smaller scale, Ryan Mason improving results and performances after replacing Jose Mourinho at short notice.

Obviously, this begs the question of who the new Harry Redknapp might be - where will we find them?  Jol and Mason were already at the club when their calls came - Mason still is.  Redknapp, of course, was already managing in the Premier League, getting decent results for the perpetually struggling and cash-strapped Portsmouth.  Is there an equivalent currently in the Premiership?  I don't know.  But neither do those 'fans' who revel in misery and disaster.  To get back to the original point of this post, the psychology of these so called 'fans', who seem to dominate social media, (it isn't just a Spurs thing, every club has them), intrigues me - just why do they support a particular team if the only time they get animated about it is when things go wrong?  (Indeed, it isn't just their own teams they seem to hate, but also football in its entirety).  Is it a reflection of their overall personalities - are they the sort that are never seem happy unless miserable?   Are they simply contrarians, able only to define themselves by being in opposition to a perceived norm?  Perhaps they are like those on the left of the Labour Party who seem to hate the party and try to undermine it at every turn? Maybe they are purists who, rather than some pure left wing ideology they feel that Labour should encompass, feel that there is some kind of pure footballing philosophy that their club should embrace - its continual failure to do so the root cause of their malaise?  Whatever the cause, they are quickly becoming very tiresome.