When the Spurs go Marching In (Soon)

2013-2014 wasn’t a particularly good year for Spurs fans. Three defeats to the classless side of North London along with three incredibly confusing defeats to West Ham and the oaf that is Sam Allardyce, getting beat out by Everton, regressing in finishing position and points total, having a negative goal difference for most of the season, suffering through two antithetical but somehow equally ineffective managers, limp exits from cup competitions—I could go on for a while. I guess it’s not surprising that most of what I’ve been reading has been characteristic doom and gloom from Spurs fans about how we’re doomed to perpetual mediocrity and the Europa League for the rest of our days. However, I’d like to encourage everyone to not strangle themselves with their replica Eric Lamela shirts quite yet, as I’m confident that this year was a bit of the “darkest before the dawn” sort of thing. In fact, 2014-2015 has the potential to be a banner year for Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

Our To-Be-Named Manager

Some may say that lauding our new manager’s potential success before we even know who he is is really counting our chickens before they hatch. Granted, I did have a nightmare two nights ago in which we hired Paulo Di Canio and he and Daniel Levy formed the most fearsome partnership of partially-sane bald people and ran the club into the ground, but I like to think such things are reserved for Cardiff City in the backwardsness that is Wales.

First of all, Louis Van Gaal, “I’ve-won-in-every-league-with-every-team” mastermind is not necessarily off the table. While media reports have suggested that he is United’s man, nothing is official, and his recent quotes do suggest that nothing is finalized. While Manchester may offer more prestige/spending power, the Spurs job would certainly have less pressure and external expectations, and it could very easily be argued that we are less of a work in progress than United is. If Van Gaal does in fact decide to join the good guys, we’ll have one of the continent’s most successful managers—quite a far cry from the one-shot man at Porto or Tactics Tim.

In we don’t manager to secure Louis, we’re in the fortunate position of having fallbacks who are also excellent candidates. Frank de Boer, who would personally be my number one choice, has never not won the league as a manager. Of course, he has only managed the richest club in the Eredivisie, but it’s important to consider that Ajax had not won the title since 2003-2004, so de Boer clearly has brought something to the table that was not there before. He also has impressive experience as a player with some with Ajax and Barcelona, and his teams play attractive attacking football. The other likely candidate is Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine wizard who brought Southampton from relative relegation fodder to a top-half team this season. Pochettino teams also play great football, and he has done fantastically bringing up youth talent at Southampton. All in all, if we were to get any of these three managers who have been strongly linked with us, we’d be in our strongest managerial position in the PL era.

Next: Our Busts are Not Busts