Are Spurs Really Going Down? | ENIC's Dereliction Of Duty, The Palace Disaster with Adam Michie (Q&A)

26:29Jack:Yeah. Inherited the greatest English goalscorer. It's incredible. Debatably the greatest English footballer of all time. It's just how many opportunities do you need to be presented with to make a success or something? Like you say, you missed out on Bale and Modric I mean you missed out because you didn't act on them you have Bale and Modric there two of again the greatest players of all time really in any context Luka Modric Real Madrid's most decorated footballer of all time now for my money the best midfielder of the last 20 years like full stop you know we're talking and yeah I know that the Real Madrid Modric isn't quite the top the Modric and everything but still you know he was he was an incredible player for us gareth bale and a litany of players down the years and to just not capitalize in any of that time you know it does muster these uncomfortable feelings and i reject this and i do feel uncomfortable saying this because it's such a terrible thing for the fans to be facing it's so terrible for us to be facing arsenal winning premier league champions league whatever else they're going to win this season the actual season we get relegated like it's that that's that's awful but you can't help but have that intrusive thought that enic the board they deserve this this the writing has been on the wall for them and this investment this property that they've built you know this this addition to their portfolio they've completely mismanaged

28:02Adam Michie:they've tanked it and the daft thing is and i'm sure most fans will agree the one way of improving your stock price in your asset as a football club is by winning games of football you know i'm not a finance expert but if you invest in a football club and they start winning lots of things and they become exposed across the globe as a team that wins lots of things guess what people are going to want to invest in you and your asset is going to improve but they They were just happy that butter zone of finishing fourth because it meant minimum expenditure for maximum outlay. It was a beautiful little area for them.

28:42But what they didn't factor in was how big the TV rights contracts were going to be

28:49Adam Michie:and what that did to clubs that were below us in the pecking order because it supercharged the whole league. And we sat there behaving as though it was 2010. And all these teams just started going past us. and we were trying to be behaving in exactly the same way, not making any changes.

29:05Jack:Conte called it, you know, like Conte, not his Southampton rant, but Dan Kilpatrick recently highlighted this thing where he was basically saying the Premier League has changed. You know, even if you've got a big old established name at the time who were on the brink of relegation, it doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter what your history is. It doesn't matter what you think about these so-called smaller clubs. Everyone is rich. Everyone is competitive. The game has changed.

29:30Adam Michie:Correct. He was spot on. He was absolutely spot on. And to be honest, I think I can remember conversations on Twitter five, ten years ago that were talking very similarly around the same thing. whereby and if we can notice it why people who are paid to strategize paid six figure sums and the rest to strategize and come up with solutions and ideas to improve the value of assets and exposure and all these things if we can see why can't they see it it just felt so obvious if you're pumping a load of money into a an environment that everyone can enrich themselves on and we were the only club who wasn't going it was just literally just tucking it down the sofa for a rainy day or pumping it into some island offshore somewhere instead of investing it back in i mean i know villa have sort of broke the bank in terms of their um their salaries and things like that they're paying but they knew what they had to do you know they they made that plunge they dropped down they experienced that and the next and you know the owners was what was his name Randy Lerner, he was out the door.

30:37Adam Michie:They're getting somebody else. They brought in a very proficient manager. I know that Emery had a bad time with Arsenal, but that was, I think, wrong man at the wrong time. That's all that was. And then look at them. All right, they're having a slight wobble now, but they're going to be fine. They're going to be in the top, probably finishing the top four this year and they'll be in the Champions League next year. And that self-enrichment happens again. It was just so blind that there was no plan and no strategy around how to handle all of these changes. And it genuinely felt like, you know, we're putting in£30 million bids in the£80 million era.

31:14Adam Michie:That's what it felt like.

31:16Jack:Adam, now, I sort of first was introduced to you. You spoke to Flav on The Fighting Cock a while back about a book you'd written called Orientation, which I think would be pretty relevant today. For anybody that isn't aware of orientation and the journey you went on in writing that, could you perhaps give us some sort of insight into that and maybe reflect on how you're feeling right now with everything that's going on?

31:50Adam Michie:Yeah, so back in, when was this? It had been 2010, which just feels like forever ago. ironically it's exactly the same period of time we were talking about a moment ago when Spurs took their eye off the ball but so yeah some friends and I a couple of my best mates are two of them big Arsenal fans one of them wasn't really a fan of anything really he was always a football fan and never had a team we're all sort of living in and around sort of East London area we wanted to go and watch some football so we decided oh let's pick the local club started going to go and watch late in Orient. And then we decided, well, this is quite a lot of fun.

32:26Adam Michie:Why don't we get a season ticket? You know, it cost about 300 quid, about that, something like that, which is incredible if you think about it, for however many games. And so I just thought, oh, I'll start keeping a diary about what's been going on. You know, there was stuff in my personal life that was sort of relatively interesting at the same time. There was the Olympic Stadium stuff that's going on with Orient um there was all sorts um but the fundamentals of it was I'd kind of at the time I'd had a bit of enough of spurs the way that the club was behaving treating us like customer reference numbers and all these kind of things but this is obviously back in the White Hart Lane era um we had just got into the Champions League you know Peter Crouch at Man City and all of that we just got in and so I I binned off my my membership you know swapping the opportunity to go and watch Champions League the thing that we'd been chasing for years swapping that out for going away to you know watching well Brentford as they were or Charlton or whatever and it was just an attempt for me to kind of fall back in love with the game because I've kind of just lost any love for it really it's it was viewing mainly through going to Tottenham here and there but solely it was at that period where basically you had the big four it's all that Sky would ever talk about you got a bit of coverage here and there but it was just constant we had very little chance of maybe winning anything goes to our comment earlier about how little investment it felt like we were getting or moving forward we had a fairly decent team obviously we get into the Champions League and that was great but it felt like the right time to give that a go I was in my sort of late 20s and I'd never really done that before I'd never been a season ticket holder at a club going regularly and boiling it down to quite simply the match and having some pints.

34:16Adam Michie:That's what it was. And yeah, you kind of rode the ups and downs of the club. But you felt like you mattered at that club because they never made a profit. They got maybe 5 ,000 in, 6 ,000 on a good day. It's a very small stadium. If you've never been to Brisbane Road, there's only about 9 ,500 people fit in there. They've got flats on each corner that was sold off over time to create some revenue, I guess, for the owners. but at the expense of the amount of people you can fit there. But it's very tight, very compact, can get very noisy. You are literally a stone's throw from the pitch. Not that I condone throwing stones at football matches.

34:57Adam Michie:And you can smell the grass. You can hear what the players are saying. And you go there for a few pints before, you watch the game, a few pints after, brilliant. Then you're not trawling through controversies and things like this. And this is obviously long before the idea of VAR as well. And so it just became a very pure event. And I'm sure anyone who was going back down to White Hart Lane in the sort of the 80s, 90s, etc. would say, yeah, you would have had that at Tottenham. But, you know, I grew up in Essex. You know, most of my mates were, I had a couple of Spurs mates, but they were season ticket holders.

35:31Adam Michie:I didn't know anybody who really went to Spurs. And that area, it's like West Ham, Tottenham, Arsenal. Then you had Liverpool, Man United. But there was no real connection to any local club. I mean, Billericay Town is my closest club. South End is probably just down the road, you know, so it's even closer now from where I am now. It was just a really nice experience to be able to do that week in, week out and go on away trips and things like that. So I did the whole journal of that, the whole experience, the multiverse season. The irony being, if I'd have done it the season before or the season after, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as interesting.

36:07Adam Michie:But a lot happened to Horian in that single season. and then they obviously went on well a bit of a rollercoaster of their own from sort of that point on I ended up being a season ticket holder there for about five years and in that time they nearly got to the championship and then went out of the football league you know one extreme to the other so that's the tightrope that a club like Orion walk you know it's not something that we at Spurs are used to but here we are and I think there's a lot of parallels certainly the season that they got relegated from League One, there's some parallels, very, very different circumstances, but the parallels were there in terms of what was happening on the pitch and how off-pitch matters were clearly bleeding onto the pitch.

36:54Adam Michie:And you could see the players weren't quite playing for the shirt or for each other anymore. And it's that experience. This is from 2015, I think it is, from memory, when they got relegated, when they had these new owners who were pumping money in and trying to deal with this, that, the other, but they didn't know what they were doing. You know, they completely lost the soul of the club. The heart went out a bit. There was no club people there. They started getting rid of people, you know, and bringing in their own people. It was a group of Italian guys, you know, and they just started bringing in Italians into a small East End club, you know, where the tea lady had probably been there for 30 years.

37:29Adam Michie:The kit man had been there for 20 years. You know, gutting the place, ripping it to shreds. And sure enough, you know, they lose their manager that had been so loyal to them and so good to them. You start losing players here and there, heads go down. You replace them with merceries who are getting paid more money than the rest of the league. And it all just went to shit and off they went and they got relegated. And then they got relegated again and that was it for them. So, yeah, very obviously different universes, I guess, but the parallels were absolutely stark with what's going on now.

37:59Jack:Do you feel like it's giving you an extra thick skin for what's going on right now, mate, as Spurs?

38:06Adam Michie:Possibly. Do you know what? Possibly. Because I think, you know, I know that a lot of people say, oh, you can't support two clubs. It's like, well, I can't. You know, it is possible to do that, you know, if they're in the same league. That doesn't make any sense. But I think it probably has. And most Spurs fans will never have ever been through this unless you're old enough to experience it in the mid to late 70s. You know, and even then, that was a different world, completely different world, you know, to what's going on now. You know, there wasn't so much of the focus, the spotlight on the club that there is now.

38:40You know, we're not the butt end.

38:42Adam Michie:We weren't the butt end of jokes then, I imagine. Maybe people who were around back then correct me. But everywhere you go is people just a pile on on top of them, you know. And this would just put the cherry on the icing for that, you know. It's almost like all coming home to roost at once. so yeah I wouldn't say I'm inured to the idea of being relegated I've seen Orient go through it a couple of times but it's not very nice and you know it's a horrible feeling in fact you know I wasn't there the day they went out of the football league but I can remember following it on the TV and they I think they had a massive pitch invasion I think it was against Culture to United had a massive pitch invasion and basically stopped the game to the extent that they had to clear the pitch.

39:30Adam Michie:They had to pause the game for probably about 25 minutes to clear the pitch. They were told to clear the pitch. It was like, you better get off. We're going to forfeit the match or something like that. They basically, I think that's what they wanted. So they ended up clearing off the pitch and then the ref started the game and then finished the game and that was it, game over, or it got relegated.

39:53Adam Michie:and you know it affected a lot of people there you know it's a community club and it doesn't matter how big Tottenham is it's still a community club we're a community it doesn't matter whether you're a community in physical in a sort of physical location or whether you're a online community or whatever it's going to affect a lot of people it's going to affect a lot of businesses it's going to affect a lot of just people going to work or to school it affects people it's horrible ball um so yeah i wouldn't wish this on anybody really maybe arsenal or chelsea but i wouldn't i certainly wouldn't want to wish this on on anybody i liked do you know what i mean because

40:27Jack:it's nasty it's horrible do you know what one of the worst things is right it's not one of the worst things but it's something that's just kind of like painful and sort of it just shows you how far we've fallen i actually had chelsea and arsenal fans like mates reaching out and being like i actually feel bad for you guys i don't actually really i don't actually really want you to go they're even like reflecting on it like feel they feel sorry for us you know it's not now the reality of this is coming around it's not way i mean i'm sure there's an element of that don't get me wrong but like i'm talking about like old friends and whatever who you know i they can sort of cut the bravado with me a bit they are like i actually feel bad for spurs like you lot are a pretty good fan base you're a big club you're clearly like you've clearly just had the soul sucked out of you by your owners this is like it's actually quite miserable watching this play out for all of you and so it's not it's not just us like feeling this like sense of victimhood or any entitlement or anything like this because this is sort of what i was touching on in my post-match is that we are allowed to be sad about this we don't have to be number one we don't have to be gaslit by anybody by you know who will say well there's there's real things going on in the world so get some perspective again as i say we compartmentalize our lives that we we can apply you know we can apportion sort of our our feeling of sadness or concern in multiple different directions and in multiple different ways right the thing is like football was supposed to be

42:02Adam Michie:the escape right but imagine imagine you know you you have an escape room in your house that's supposed to be your sanctuary and then something bad happens you dash into it and it's full of wasps that's that's what it's like like do you know what I mean so this is supposed to be nice this is supposed to be where I go to feel calm and happy and enjoying myself but no I can't even have that it has to be a wreck like everything else so all the bad stuff going on that I could do nothing about the thing that I like the most in the world apart from my family is football and

42:33Jack:that's a pile of shit as well so brilliant and i think it's just what makes this painful and like i say look being a fan right being a fan of a football club and your greatest rival is arsenal right who whatever we want to say about them are a huge club with tons of resources and a massive history sooner or later they were going to win the league or something significant again and that's just that's the bitter pill you have to swallow you have to sit there and you have to take your medicine and you have to endure them having a laugh about it right i get that side of things i if they were winning if we were finishing sixth this year and they won the league i would be pissed off i'd be annoyed about it and i'd be like that should have been us we could have done that if we'd have had a moan in that way but it wouldn't feel like why is this happening to us you know because you look at them and you think well they've been ambitious they focused on football since forever and that's that's always been their sole driving factor see also liverpool you know like another club who i i think are very similar to arsenal in that their their focus is always on football manchester united are a club who have taken their eye off it and look what's happened to them for the past years i say that they still win a lot all the time you know but they should do with the amount of money they spend and everything i think that the point i'm trying to drive at mate is that this feels painful in that it's not just that spurs are not doing very well it's not just that even that we're on the brink of relegation it's that we have said as fans we've we've seen the signposts we've seen this club trending downwards for over over half a decade now since 2019 i mean we can push it back even further probably since 2018 when the when the cracks started to appear in the pochettino era right we've all been saying something needs to change here or we're gonna you know nosedive back into obscurity again and we've been told every single step along the way by the club by the media by sometimes other fan bases you're wrong you're entitled you've got a great ground you've got x y and z and we're just sat there saying i don't care i just want the football to be good again i want to enjoy watching my football team again i don't want to sit here and be and to endure it i don't want to have to endure this this is like you say this is supposed to be escape this is supposed to be something fun and this has just been turned into a corporate a corporate exercise for enix to make a load of money to to create an events company as as i was saying earlier it's it's astonishing and we're all we're all just sat there with this kind of impotent rage about this as in like what why is this part happening to us why is this happening to why is this entity latched onto our club in particular why have we why have we kind of been the inverse manchester city why have we had the billionaires come on to us and actually not care about the football they've wanted to create an events company as opposed to making us the best football team in the country it's it's It's just exasperating, mate.

45:39Jack:I'm just talking about it now. It's like winding me up further. And it's so emotionally draining.

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47:14Adam Michie:Bear in mind, when Enick bought us, they were kind of the cutting edge of this idea of multi-club ownership. They were one of the first to really do that. And they picked us up for, I mean, what was it in the end? £45 million? Something like that? I can't even remember. Not very much in the grand scheme. It was 26, 25 years ago. And I just feel like any desire or impetus that they had then to grow the club, which they certainly did. I don't think that can be denied. They have grown the club. But it feels like it was built on sand. So they've overinflated us. You know, the big stadium, the state-of-the-art complex of training and all this kind of stuff.

47:58Adam Michie:That all got pumped up to which they almost started sort of believing their own hype. When at the centre of it is this idea that you're supposed to be winning football matches and winning trophies. That's what goes with being the big club. You don't just get Jose Mourinho in and you're automatically overnight a big club or Conte or whoever. And we are a big club, a big successful club. People forget that. But I think when Inic bought us, we were in the doldrums. We were bang average. you know they obviously saw us as an investment as an opportunity to grow their only way was up they obviously looked at the football landscape and saw Tottenham and went well they're just sat there you know they're just bumbling along football's only going to go one way it's going to you know we don't have to do an awful lot you know we'll get some people in we'll get the players boom boom boom and we'll probably make a tidy little sum and then it started maybe ticking along quite nicely for them and they went oh maybe we could go a little bit further you know to however much they wanted to actually put into the club.

48:57Adam Michie:And then they have this idea about the redevelopment, you know, and obviously it's pound signs. You know, this is us now. We are sorted, you know, we're global brand, all of this kind of thing. Riding the back of the wave of the popular nature of Premier League across the world. They just surfed that and just felt that, as I said earlier, it's the bare minimum that was required at that point when you're on that crest. But then you have to keep going. so I don't think that I don't think they've ever had maybe in the early days you know maybe at a stretch they've had a desire to grow as a football team and they had football at the heart of it I don't think they knew what they were doing but I think the intentions were to grow the club as a footballing entity and I no longer feel like that is the case and they still don't know what they're doing so they've just sacked it off and fallen back into the bit that they do know how to do which is commercial enterprises and uh their property portfolios we've got some questions in

49:55Jack:um so well yeah let's ask you this because chasers are sort of similar to the to the question was asked me in the in the pre-match what what stage of uh grief are we out of course well actually we did this at the top didn't we we said we're sort of in between bargaining and bargaining and uh and what was it depression wasn't it i think on the stages of grief stuff yeah i'm i'm back and forth between the two at the moment Steve Alkett says looking forward to this one can you help me with a mental health playbook to navigate the next few months regular walks mate that's for me get out there have a walk try not to think about it I mean that's totally impossible isn't it but you got any you got any go-tos Adam for for you know this sort of situation you've been there

50:40Adam Michie:of Orient after all I know I do love a walk I think that's a great idea if you can get to the seaside there's the thing called there's blue therapy find yourself a river a lake just don't jump in jump into it all right don't i don't recommend that but it's seaside river lake lovely little walk take in the sea air get that blue therapy and i don't know maybe take up tennis

51:00Jack:daddy chimbonda says are winning trophies bad for the club 2008 we win the league cup next season two points make games 2025 we win the Europa 2026 relegation um yeah I mean that's that's a that's an alarming correlation do you think there's actually anything in that at all mate

51:20Adam Michie:other than coincidence I think it goes to what I was saying earlier about the broader hubris of the club that they don't need it almost rubber stamps their strategy we don't need to do much to get us creeping forward and making lots and lots of money let's keep it all ticking over nicely we won a trophy let's just keep doing what we're doing because we can still win trophies look look look we've got the shiny trophy now I just think it's a I think it's just symptomatic of that if anything it just kind of um ratifies their approach to to the to the club that's all that is and the fact I mean all right we I'd love to have won a few more in that time and you know we've come pretty close but I think that's all that is it's just a symptom of a club that was more than happy just sat on its laurels literally sitting on its laurels um josh says and it's

52:09Jack:something we've spoken about so it's more of just a statement but it's you know it's interesting he says uh the people in charge of tottenham um don't understand that winning trophies and being successful is what helps you build a global brand and cultural you know of cultural significance it's not a multi-purpose events arena and linkedin posts yep um stefano juoni says Can you rank the most inexcusable derelictions of duty coming out of Tottenham this season? So he's got number one, didn't panic buy in January. Number two, no two bad performances back to back. And number three, the club's presentation in beyond football at South by Southwest.

52:55Jack:I mean, it's all just sort of abysmal, isn't it? I mean, should we also chuck in the coach that we hired who immediately started slagging the club off? Shall we?

53:08Adam Michie:Let's chuck in keeping Fabio Peretici for no reason, then binning him off, and then giving him a call and saying, who should we bring in instead of Frank?

53:21Jack:Who was that guy you said we should bring in that we didn't listen to about at the time? Oh, him, yeah, go on then.

53:27Adam Michie:Can he give us his number? Not sacking Frank in about November. There's another one. It's just... I can't rank those. They're all awful. They're all just a big pile of shit. That's what that is.

53:41Jack:And I'm not revising history on this because I thought it was a good deal, but also selling Brendan Johnson and not replacing him. Not having a single player in his position that scores goals and could do... You know, just what we're doing.

53:56Adam Michie:I put that down to being damned if you do and damned if you don't, because we had Kudus, right? Kudus was fit when we sold him. Fair, fair. Literally the first game against Sunderland that we played without Brennan Johnson, he got injured within 12 minutes. I was at that game with my son. And he was going, oh, you know, I'm really looking forward to seeing Kudus. I was like, yeah, yeah, 12 minutes, done. We walked off. I was like, oh, brilliant. And then the second that happened, I went to Johnson as well. So, but I think that also comes down to squad planning, doesn't it? It all falls into the same bracket.

54:30Adam Michie:Yes, you could be unlucky, but you make your own luck. Or, in our instance, you make your own bad luck.

54:36Jack:Ryan Jacobson says, has any club in the last decade had two title chases, two League Cup finals, Champions League final, winning the craziest Champions League semi-final en route, rebuilt their stadium, had a goal scorer break records, had two captains winning a World Cup, had six permanent managers, won a Europa League, finished second and 17th, and now probably getting relegated. I mean, the only, when you put it out like that, it is quite wild. I guess you would probably say Leicester City literally won a Premier League and an FA Cup, then got relegated again. So theirs is quite a roller coaster.

55:17Adam Michie:Blackburn happened to them back in the 90s. They got relegated about, what, four years after they won the title? but I think firstly that is a hell of a hell of a question I mean I personally think that that should be sent to every pundit every pundit that has the temerity to come out and criticize Spurs fans because that's what we've been through right that's the roller coaster that that should just be a disclaimer or an indemnity against any criticism of the fans that we that that list there and that doesn't even go into the real depth of it that that is the surface right that's not you scratch beneath that you're going to find all sorts of shit but i think the only one i could think of the only one i could think of and it won't tick them all off it certainly won't tick off all of that litany of of stuff is maybe somebody like dortmund or atletico madrid um like dortmund obviously they were winning titles um but you know they nearly went bankrupt in the mid-noughties, they had to have a bit of a bailout.

56:18Adam Michie:They've had world-class players there that then keep leaving and going to Bayern most of the time. People like Hummels and Lewandowski and that. You know, yes, they've had World Cup winning players there. I mean, they've had, yeah, Champions League finals. They've lost those. Several managers. I mean, I never know who their manager is. I feel like after Klopp, I feel like they've just had about six, seven different ones. So I'd say Dortmund are probably the closest, but nobody we're untouchable we're absolutely untouchable on on that list of things um fred

56:50Jack:at fred thfc98 says genuine question but do the fans need to go down to the training ground like they do in italy and south america and demand change i mean direct action isn't really something that catches on to too much in this country is it like we do we you know we don't we don't really like that sort of thing around here is it it's all a bit keep calm and carry on

57:14Adam Michie:in the uk it is but the thought of like uh just a an army of pissed off fans with pitchforks and burning torches marching across the uh the enfield countryside to batter down the gates at the training ground i mean that appeals to my imagination it does not i certainly wouldn't condone it just i'm just for the lawyers listening i'm not condoning that but it's an interesting in point we don't do that here do we like occasionally people throw some things at the team bus when they turn up or they throw flares or whatever that's about as much as it is but that's usually because they've had a skimfall and then they see the team coach alive right they don't organize themselves to commit like civil disobedience at the expense of a football club you know to sort of start dragging players out of their cars and you know it's like i just can't see it happening we are we're sort of it's all it's all a bit too jolly hockey sticks i think in our country for that um it'd be fun though it'd be fun i uh somebody um

58:15Jack:somebody who wrote in a few weeks ago was saying that he's also sort of follows new orzol boys and they're having a in argentina and they're having a terrible season as well and uh they basically they started chucking their ultras started chucking petrol bombs at the at the players cars so they went to the ground where all these you know players have got their flash cars parked up and the ultras are just petrol bombing their cars and hung up a bullet uh hung up a banner that said win or bullets you know so it's it's it's different it's just different like that's you know it's not happening here is it all i'm not saying it should either i'm just saying

58:58Adam Michie:you know and all i'm saying is i think we need to be kept like you know a bit kinder on the criticism of Romero do you know what I mean that's that's his culture man that's it's his chaos and

59:07Jack:violence do you remember do you remember when we first signed Lamela and the whole of like the the UK punditry was saying oh I wonder how he's gonna cope playing at Stoke and all that type of thing you think mate he he played in the in the Buenos Aires derby when there was like shootings happening

59:22Adam Michie:in the stands and stuff you know it's yeah anyone coming from Argentina can handle themselves yeah

59:28Jack:it's uh yeah it's quite funny that um mike boden says oh this this would be an interesting one people say get harry redknapp in because he cares about the club but does he really he seems more pompy than spurs i mean i i do i sort of i see your point mike and i think harry is just one of those people he's a bit of a shapeshifter isn't he's always been quite a self-serving character and i think he'll sort of tell his attentions where the wind doth blow but how you know these sort of rumors about Tudor maybe going and I think the last one I saw there was some talk that there's going to be a team of Redknapp, Sherwood and Defoe coming in to lead the charge towards the tail end of the season I mean how do you feel about that mate?

1:00:13Adam Michie:We can't do any worse is all I'd say I mean look Redknapp's touching 80 now isn't he? Surely he must be really good and I think the last team he managed were that terrible pub team They won a competition for like, you know, worst team in the country and he come and managed them for a bit. That's the last experience he's had of managing football, right? Do we really need 4-4-2 runabout a bit? I'm not sure that's going to rescue us from the championship. Sherwood, Christ, the stuff he comes out with sometimes is just mind-boggling. I mean yeah he got us to the end of that season the AVB season he didn't do a bad job he was just a I don't know bit of an bit irritating you know look what he did at Villa completely tanked at Villa Defoe I feel like yeah I'd love him as a coach I think he'd do wonders imagine him working with Solanke he'd be brilliant you know I think he's already been at the club hasn't he as a coach at some point certainly sort of

1:01:14Jack:yeah I think early on in his career

1:01:16Adam Michie:I think we sort of nurtured him a bit and so there's positives but i mean blimey i wouldn't want to wouldn't want him to sully his reputation being involved with the current iteration of spurs to be perfectly honest

1:01:27Jack:you know one of the one of the other things i do think one of the other sort of the alluring bits of having harry redknapp back is we instantly have the media on side again instantly especially like the tabloids they'd be bang bang on us and they'd be like yep they'd be like go on harry will save the day good old harry or save tottenham i think the refs would be back on side i think do you know what i mean there's that there's that little bit of me that he'd be box office i think you know

1:01:55Adam Michie:that that first occasion when he's leaving the the training ground and the window comes down it's almost like the you know say the line bark big time yeah he's back he's back yeah so yeah i could there's a lot of joy to be had in that but let's be let's be realistic now is not the time to bring in a late septuagenarian into the club. Love him or loathe him. I think he always had our best sort of... He had the best of intentions for Spurs, but then he left because his head got turned. Like you said, a bit self-serving. He thought the England job was in the bag. It kind of scuppered the end of that season.

1:02:35Adam Michie:But look, hypotheticals. I don't think it's going to happen. I think it would be quite funny if it did. It can't have.

1:02:42Jack:I think the other thing I would say is it's like for a manager that, you know, got, yeah, his head did get tanned and everything. But after sort of what he'd done for the club and everything, it was quite brutal a fashion as it often is with Daniel Levy, the way in which he was let go and everything. He has never really had a bad word to say about Spurs. I think he's always been very decent about us whenever he's asked. And I think he's almost been like, people have almost tried to lure him into taking a bit of a shit on the club. And he's never really turned to that. I think he's always been quite decent about the club.

1:03:23Jack:And funnily enough, he's actually always been very complimentary of Daniel Levy.

1:03:26Adam Michie:He has. And someone like Martin Yole is the same, even though he got cracked on from a great height. He got humiliated. But he's always been very positive about the club. and I think that was probably largely down to the fact that he really sort of connected with the club and the fans, as I think Redknapp did. And then you think the other sort of managers that we've had, AVB, it's always been a little bit cold. It's always been a little bit of a kind of, you know, clinical kind of relationship between them, quite transactional. Whereas, you know, yeah, Joel, ironically, you know, I know it's the ones that actually we have probably had the most fun under.

1:04:05Adam Michie:You know, you think Pochettino, Joel and Redknapp, they're the ones we enjoyed the most. I mean, AVB was a bad first season, but he just left us all a bit kind of cold. But yeah, I think your point around Redknapp never saying a bad word is bang on because we do get dragged through the mud in the media. I mean, needlessly half the time, we're always the butt of the joke. And I'm kind of sick of that. And in a way, it is one thing, if we do get relegated, at least there'll be one big ha-ha and then we'll get forgotten about for a season because we'll just be ploughing away in the championship. No one's going to pair any mind to us so we can just crack on and probably enjoy it to some degree, as horrible as it would be.

1:04:46Adam Michie:At least we'd be out of the spotlight.

1:04:49Jack:Captain Archie Gray leading the charge if we hold on to him. I haven't said enough about it. It's been all doom and gloom. Throughout all of this, that lad has been an example to the more senior members of the club. 19 years old and he doesn't stop you know he gives it his all every single game and he's actually

1:05:07Adam Michie:quality he's actually such a brilliant player you know and i fully agree i fully agree it's what you want you know he seems to care which is the more i can say for half of the rest of them adam any

1:05:20Jack:any words of wisdom any any solace to to leave the listeners with before we say goodbye for today

1:05:29Adam Michie:All I will say is there is still a lot of games to be played and we're going to get some players back. I know that was the Langer line, but we will get players back. You start filling up that bench and the squad, you know, you get Goudou's back maybe after the international break. That gives us a little bit more creativity on the wing as long as we don't start losing players again. but if we can get those players back, I was saying to you before we started recording, Jack, if we could hand-pick a set of fixtures to help get us out of trouble, it's probably the fixtures that we've got. So let's just get behind them as best we can and focus on winning those, get some players back, and you never know.

1:06:09Adam Michie:We're not done. Until it's done, we're not done.

1:06:12Jack:Adam, mate, it's been an absolute pleasure. Where can people follow you if they want to, basically?

1:06:17Adam Michie:If you want to follow me, I'm on Twitter or X or Atflix and Tricks. I don't really do anything else. Not really a Blue Sky or anything like that. So, yeah, you can find me there.

1:06:30Jack:Can people still buy orientation now?

1:06:32Adam Michie:It is out there. So, I mean, you've got two options. One is if you've got an e-reader, you can download e-reader for a couple of quid. So you can get it that way. Or there are copies floating about. like if you can find my boss actually at work um she managed to get hold of a copy you know lord knows where um but yeah they're floating about um but yeah it got published i think it's about 15 years ago but it's all the themes are still there you'll read it and it'll be like oh you're talking about players from 15 years ago but all the themes are still there you know the only thing that's missing is all that sort of crap about things like var and stuff you know it's box fresh

1:07:12Jack:I've read it myself and it's quality so I do recommend anybody listen to this if you've not read Orientation give it a go it's great very it's a relatable human football story and it's completely relevant to what to the situation we find ourselves in now so get on it Adam mate it's been a pleasure thanks very much thanks for having me on Jack come on you Spurs come on you Spurs

1:08:03Jack:We'll see you next time.

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