In these days of super-rich foreign investors and more non-natives than home-grown faces in the Barclays English Premier League, you have to admire what Tottenham are trying to do.The London club have been one of the few in the EPL to actively pursue players from within the UK’s national borders over the past few years, rather than scouring the transfer market for cheap cut-price alternatives from far-flung corners of the globe.
The likes of current first team Chris Gunter, Gareth Bale, Tom Huddlestone, Jermaine Jenas, Aaron Lennon, Darren Bent, David Bentley, Michael Dawson, Jamie O’Hara and Alan Hutton have all benefited from that policy, which was a cornerstone of the Martin Jol era but has shown little sign of abating under current boss Juande Ramos.
Indeed, Ramos has picked up where his predecessor left off and rather than flooding his side with Spanish imports from his homeland – as a certain Rafael Benitez did when he picked up the reins at Liverpool four years ago – the former Sevilla boss has supplemented a small crop of big name foreign heavyweights with young, hungry Englishmen such as Crystal Palace’s 16-year-old sensation John Bostock and Fraizer Campbel, on loan from Manchester United.
It’s a transfer plan that has won Spurs many admirers, but unfortunately, few points.
The White Hart Lane faithful are nursing their wounded pride after the club’s worst start to a league campaign for 34 years.
Just two points from their opening six games have left Spurs propping up the EPL table – hardly an acceptable return for a club who had ambitions of breaking into the UEFA Champions League places before the campaign began.
But interestingly enough, the man in the firing line after such a wretched start is not Ramos, nor his players. It is not even chairman Daniel Levy.
Instead, rumours abound that transfer guru Damien Comolli is set to pay the price of that failure with his job.
“Just what has the club’s sporting director Damien Comolli been doing all summer?” mused one newspaper columnist in Britain recently. “Spurs spent more than £65million and they have a worse team than the one they had at the end of last season.”
For his part, Comolli and the board have been tellingly silent on the whole matter. There have been no strong defences, no votes of confidence and no impassioned pleas for the fans to remain on side.
Perhaps that is because they have simply realised the truth : that Tottenham are nowhere near strong enough to compete with the big guns when the playing field can be changed overnight by a £32.5million Brazilian and an Arab Sheikh with a fistful of dollars.
Perhaps unusually for football fans, the focus of ire on Comolli’s position is in this case wholly justified. The Frenchman pulls strings along the continental model when it comes to buying and selling at White Hart Lane, and the fruits of his labour have failed to pay off.
His ‘Best of British’ policy was commendable, and it will no doubt have gone down a storm in the corridors of power at FA headquarters where the debate over the future of the England national team continues to gather pace.
Sadly though, it was always destined to fail.
<