Guillem Balague: Tottenham Hotspur - my part in their downfall (apparently)

Mauricio Pochettino has seen his side take just two points from 12 ahead of Saturday’s clash with Stoke
Mauricio Pochettino has seen his side take just two points from 12 ahead of Saturday’s clash with Stoke

I’ve had a sudden, sharp intake of clarity; a moment of practically Damascaen proportions.

I had to stop myself from screaming ‘Eureka’ at the top of my voice in this Barcelona terrace that is hosting me right now.

The fact is that for a while now, I have been labouring under the delusion that Tottenham Hotspur’s recent slump in league form was in some way or another football related. Incidentally, by ‘football related’ I mean with things like injuries, form, tiredness, fixture pressure, luck, kismet and the general rub of the green; those sort of things.

Spurs have managed no victories and just two points out of a possible 12 from their last four league games. In less lucid moments it crossed my mind that one of the reasons Spurs’ league season might have hit the buffers was because maybe they were missing the calming influences of someone like Toby Alderweireld at the back (despite the fact he has not been as good in recent times as we had seen him in the past).

Or perhaps their inability to change the play because of the long term injury to Erik Lamela, not to mention the absence of Vincent Wanyama and that consequently this was highlighting a certain lack of strength in depth to the Spurs squad.

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Perhaps an extensive and demanding European schedule had taken more out of the squad that had been expected.

Maybe the lethargic, tired displays when on recent league duty from the same Christian Eriksen that almost single-handedly demolished Ireland as his goals sent Denmark in the upcoming Russia World Cup had something to do with it or even a dip in form from Spurs and England normally talismanic midfielder, Dele Alli.

Tottenham’s Dele Alli is in a rut
Tottenham’s Dele Alli is in a rut

Was Harry Kane fully fit, I asked myself? And was there perhaps a bit too much reliance on these three players that meant when they were not completely on song, then Spurs form suffered as a result.

And then it all became clear.

A book, that’s what it was…is. There’s your problem. More precisely, my book on a season in the world of Mauricio Pochettino and Tottenham Hotspur.

Even by the standard of some Tottenham Hotspur supporters who have ‘previous’ when it comes to ‘straw-clutching’ in an attempt to explain footballing outcomes they have felt they did not deserve, this latest episode after four games – I’ll repeat that, FOUR games – borders on the Kafkaesque. Especially as it does not count the demolishing of Liverpool!

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Way back in 2006 we had ‘Lasagne-gate’. All Spurs had to do was win against a West Ham side with nothing to play for and days away from a cup final appearance, or match Arsenal’s score against Wigan to be assured of a place ahead of their Nemesis in the Champions League the following season.

The incident became etched in Tottenham folklore. To this day fans still claim a dodgy lasagne before the game caused an outbreak of food poisoning among the team that effectively scuppered their ambitions.

Colin Perrins, head of Tower Hamlets Trading Standards and Environmental Health, told the BBC: “None of the results or findings indicated that food poisoning was the cause.”

Harry Kane has not looked fully since since his injury

Spurs lost 2-1, Arsenal came back from 2-1 down to win 4-2 at Wigan and Arsenal leapfrogged over them into the Champions League. Cue chaos.

Another school of thought is that the reality was that Martin Jol’s Tottenham had buckled under Arsenal pressure or for want of a better word, bottled it. And former Spurs player Johnnie Jackson inferred that too much was made of the affair in a 2011 interview with Neil McLeman of the Mirror. “I think it was exaggerated a bit to be honest. The only one who I remember actually played the game who was struggling was Michael Carrick. But they ended up losing it and missing out on fourth place and I think they made more of a deal of it than it actually was.”

Fast forward ten years and we had ‘Wembley-gate’. Once again nothing to do with anything football related, Spurs demise – in Europe this time – was purely and simply because they were playing all their European games at Wembley and the national stadium was ‘jinxed’.

A notion as stark, staring, bonkers as that propagated by ‘respected’ commentators in the past – and I’m not making this up – that players would suffer cramp more readily on the Wembley pitch because of some mysterious property contained in the turf that would sap the strength from the players’ leg muscles.

Ignoring the fact of course that at the time only big matches like cup finals, and vital international games were played at Wembley and consequently players might be slightly more tense, tighter, and it might be that rather than some evil, mystical property that lay embedded in the soil of the country’s national stadium that might be a reason for the onset of cramp.

Not a bit of it; Wembley was ‘jinxed’, end of story. At first it was ‘jinxed’ only for European games because last season Wembley was were all the the club’s European matches were played.

This season apparently, the good news is that ‘Wembley curse’ on European matches has been lifted but the bad news is that it is now ever-present in all home league matches – apart from Liverpool that is.

And now it’s my book apparently.

Now I’ve been accused of a number of things in my footballing life but I can honestly say this is the first time that I find myself in the dock charged with being responsible for the downturn in the league form of a Premier League football club purely because of something I have written.

I feel like the chief archivist of the White Star Line single handedly blamed for the sinking of the Titanic. What total errant nonsense!

Let me try to correct some of the impressions that are out there

If my book was responsible for a downturn in form then it obviously only applied to ‘league’ business and not to the Champions League. Since my book has come out this is a Tottenham side that has finished unbeaten and top of a European group that most pundits thought was a stone cold certainty to earn them, at best, a place in the knock out stages of the Europa League.

I couldn’t see much evidence of a dressing room in chaos when on the 1st of November just days after the publication of my book Spurs destroyed the reigning European champions Real Madrid at a ‘jinxed’ Wembley.

Or when they silenced a packed Bernabeu with a 1-1 draw or a 2-1 victory at Borussia Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park Stadium.

The notion that the dressing room risked being destroyed because of revelations that Pochettino had expressed disapproval of Eric Dier’s warm greeting of Jose Mourinho are fanciful not least because the person that actually told me this was Eric Dier himself.

Maurcio Pochettino has made staggering advances with the English language since he arrived in this country but the notion the he actually ‘wrote’ the book can only ever be a notion harboured by fantasists. It is totally his book, but the very idea that after after a 12 to 14 hour day at the club he would then come home and then spend much of the rest of the day penning his memoirs is plain daft, but not as a daft as those that would have you believe that that is in fact the case.

Closeted

It is not an autobiography. It is a biography in the first person, a window into that closeted world of elite managers and football clubs.

Robert Graves’ book ‘I Claudius’ was published in 1934. It is written in the first person but the fact that it was published 1880 years after the Emperor’s death meant that he was spared questions like “did you write the book” and “why did you write this??”

I am very glad to say that Pochettino is very much alive, although the flip side of this is that, unlike the Emperor Claudius, he now finds himself having to answer the most ludicrous of inquiries.

I wrote the book in the first person for maximum effect; to give it more gravitas. Much of what he says are taken directly from conversations I had with him, some are paraphrased from what he said, but all contain the essence of what he is is thinking.

Some were taken by speaking to his loyal and thoroughly devoted colleagues that work with him and there are also extracts put in his words following interviews and meetings I had with players that he is currently working with and has worked with in the past.

When writing a book one of the hardest things is not the writing, per se, but rather, once it has been released, the building up of the publicity required to keep that book in the public eye to the extent that people want to buy it to find out what the fuss is all about.

Maurcio Pochettino has said from the very beginning that every penny he earns from this book will go to charity. So from him and from me let me take this opportunity of thanking everyone out there for keeping the pot boiling.