Want consistency and stability do you?
The only thing AVB was going to stabilise was our position as a mid-table club. You think we're immune from that? Look at Saudi Sportswashing Machine a decade ago, playing attractive, attacking football, beating a Juventus team that contained the likes of Nedved, Davids, Thuram and Del Piero at their peak in the Champions League, regularly finishing in the top 5 and being an outside bet for the title. Then they bizarrely sacked Robson, and through years of mis-management by Souness, Roeder, Allardyce, Kinnear, Keegan and Shearer, they fell to pieces and were relegated. They've done better under Pardew, but they are a mid-table club nonetheless. Villa had a decent team in the late 90s, but were poorly managed for years until Lerner came in and pumped some money into the club and established them as top 6 regulars. When the money dried up and O'Neill's lack of tactical innovatino became apparent, they fell away and are now a mid-table club again. If we had kept AVB we would have ended up this way.
I really don't care if AVB dresses well, comes from an exotic country and uses advanced vocabulary. He was utterly clueless. People criticised Harry's tactical approach for being basic, but basic was a million miles above what AVB served up. Things like "don't play a high line with slow defenders against fast attackers" is something any common mug can tell you, but time after time AVB kept making the same mistakes. I don't care if he came promising to play attacking football, it was excruciating to watch, and no it wasn't because the players weren't clicking with his system, it was because he was leaving Eriksen, Holtby, Sigurdsson, Lamela and Townsend, you know, the guys who can pass the ball, on the bench in in favour of Chadli, Paulinho, Dembele and Sandro.
Rodgers took over Liverpool at the same time AVB took over here. We've finished above Liverpool every year for quite a few years now. They had, for a very long time, been a very boring team to watch. In the same time AVB has had, Rodgers has transformed their style to his attractive, attacking brand and they absolutely dingdonged on us yesterday, the gulf in quality between the two managers was so obvious. No more excuses. Our highest ever points tally last season was impressive if you only looked at the statistics. But if you looked at the performances, there were serious warning signs there. Having arguably the club's best ever player on top form all season helped - if you took out even half of the ridiculous wonder goals he scored last season then we'd have come about 7th. The statistics for a 1-0 win over Sunderland show 3 points. But the reality was we were completely incapable of creating chances against one of the worst teams in the league until 5 minutes from time the best player in the country scores a screamer out of nothing. They say a sign of a great team is one that can win when playing badly, but that's actually the sign of a **** team too. A great team thrashes the opposition when they play well and grinds out a narrow win when they play badly. AVB ground out wins when we played well and got spanked when we played badly. Yes, we're "only" 5 points off 4th. But we were only 5 points off 4th after this many games in 2002, we finished 10th that season.
I said something similar in another thread yesterday, but take Francis' struggles in the transfer market, Gross' media handling skills, Graham's negativity, Hoddle's stubborness, Pleat's tactical cluelessness and Ramos' indecisiveness, merge all the attributes into one dog**** manager and you've got AVB. You can claim all you want that it's not as bad as the days when we had Moussa Saib, Gary Doherty or Jason Dozzell, but in all the time those players played for us, only Francis got beat by 6 goals away from home (once) and only Gross got beat by 5 goals at White Hart Lane (once), and AVB has a far better squad to work with than any of the truly dreadful managers we've appointed in the last 20 years. And for that 6-0 defeat against City, that 5-0 defeat against Liverpool, 3-0 against West Ham, 5-2 against Arsenal etc, how many times have we really turned it on under AVB and ripped somebody to shreds? Francis beat a Man Utd side that won the double that year 4-1, Gross won 6-2 away at Wimbledon in a relegation six pointer, Hoddle beat Chelsea 5-1, Pleat beat Birmingham 4-1 and Wolves 5-2, Ramos beat Arsenal 5-1...I mean even Graham beat Southampton 7-2. With the talents at his disposal, where are AVB's big wins? Villa away was the only one we've had in the league in his entire time here and to put that win into context, they were suffering such a bad form and injury crisis that they'd lost 8-0 to Chelsea a few days earlier...
I grew up watching Tottenham as an awful mid-table side, but at the end of the noughties we finally got our act together and put together a side containing Luka Modric, Gareth Bale, Rafael Van Der Vaart, Niko Kranjcar and Tom Huddlestone that played gorgeous football and delighted both our fans and the neutrals alike. In the year and a half that he's been here, AVB has torn that team to pieces, and if we hadn't acted, would have undone all the good work done over the last decade and taken us back to those dark days. This was Levy's worst appointment at least since Santini, if not the worst of his entire era. I wanted nothing more than for AVB to be successful at Spurs, to rub it in the faces of my Chelsea supporting mates who laughed about their CL win getting Harry sacked...but even as early as pre-season 2012, it felt like the life was being sucked out of Tottenham. Yesterday was so painful to watch, £48 for a ticket, long journey home in the rain, and I work with a load of Liverpool fans...but it was a blessing in disguise as it means that this absolute mug is no longer associated with the club I used to be so proud to support.
