By Sunshine
August 5 2004

Regarding Spurs, and being realistic for a moment, what is it you want? What is it you really, really want? In a survey of Harvard graduates a few years ago, ten years on from graduation, those who had a well defined objective, on average, earned twice as much as those who didn’t Those who had taken the time and made the effort of writing down their objectives were earning on average ten times those who had no objective.

In a sport where physical fitness and ability is of vast importance, it seems a closely guarded secret that these qualities are far from being sufficient. For far too long it appears that the club have failed to pay proper, if any, attention to the psychological aspects. In order to be successful, any club needs to have winners and a fair share of leaders. Staff and players who simply won’t accept second best and who won’t let their colleagues accept it, either. The sort of persons who fight just as hard when 3-nil up against 10 men as when their team is trailing 3-nil with 5 minutes to go. Spurs simply didn’t have enough of these men last season (and for many seasons before that).

Let’s get back to the original question: What is our objective?

We were once the proud owners of the title ‘Cup Kings’. Not only is that no longer the case, we need to understand if, in this day and age, cups really have enough ‘magic’ about them as they did in the old age, when it was just as satisfying to win the F.A. Cup as it was to take the title. My contention is that they don’t. Fourth place in the league is far more valuable than winning the F.A. Cup, simply because in these financially challenged times, it gains the team (and its coffers) access to the honey pot which is Europe’s premier club competition, the Champions League.

No, I’m afraid that unless we’re quite happy to stumble around forever in the shadow of our main London rivals, our objective has to be a top four finish, Champions League football, the Premiership title and, ultimately, the holy grail that is winning the Champions League.

A couple of months after finishing 14th in the Premiership, such talk sounds like lunacy. Well, I’m sure that if most of the people in top jobs now had spoken of their ambitions when they were sixteen, they too would have been laughed at (the difference is that it would have been a hearty, sympathetic laugh, as opposed to the scorn which the media and rival fans would reserve us).

I disagree with aiming high so that even failure would have an air of glory about it, since that introduces an element which would regard failure as acceptable, whilst I don’t think that it should be. You don’t see Real Madrid any less determined to win the Champions League just because they’ve held the trophy aloft a record nine times. By all means let’s remember and praise our great past and our noble traditions, but this must never translate into sitting on our laurels. Success breeds success, whilst the opposite is also true, as we Spurs fans can testify.

So, now that we’ve identified our objectives, what we really want, how do we go about reaching them?

Anyone who thinks that adding two or three quality players to the squad we’ve already got would be sufficient is living in cloud cuckoo land. Even the addition of Shevchenko, Gerrard and Nesta wouldn’t be enough to transform us into title contenders.

Nope, I’m afraid that the road ahead is a lot longer and more frustrating than many might think, even if the ‘Dream Team’ of Arnesen, Santini and Jol don’t put a foot wrong.

The best that we can hope for in the next two or three years is to hover around the top six. We have a decent squad and Arnesen is doing his utmost to address the flaws with good players at bargain prices. Santini’s job is to mould them into a team which is greater than the sum of its parts. In order to have a chance of doing do, we need another four signings (a couple of left-sided midfielders, a commanding centre back to lead the defence and a fourth choice striker) and we need most of the new players already signed and the youngsters coming through to prove up to the task.

That would be step one in the Odyssey.

The next step is all down to Arnesen, his contacts and his network of scouts. Let’s face facts: In order to achieve and sustain the success that we are aiming for, we need world class players. Established world class players aren’t going to sign for a club like Spurs. Sure, you may get the odd one who has had a poor couple of seasons and is willing to try his luck with us in order to resurrect his career, but that is a gamble which I don’t think we should be taking.

Arnesen has to build a youth team of potential world class players, so that sometime in the not too distant future (say three or four years down the line), there will be a nucleus of young stars, committed to Spurs, breaking through into the first team squad, much like what happened at Man Utd when Beckham, Giggs, Scholes, Butt and the Neville brothers came onto the scene: Within a short space of time, Utd found that they had three absolute gems and three other international class players available to the team at almost no cost at all.

Fortunately for Spurs, this phase started almost immediately with the addition of the likes of Ziegler, Defendi and Mills to a group of talented youngsters already at the club (Yeates, Thyer, Kelly, Ricketts, Burch, Ifil, etc). Arnesen looks to have money to invest in this area and whilst I expect some of these to start filtering through this season, I’m looking forward to having a reserve and youth teams at the very top of their leagues.

The brief for Santini now should be to establish the club in the top third of the table, to get us playing slick, effective football and hold our own against the top sides, whilst getting the better of the rest of the division on most occasions. Like the cavalry, a few years down the line, batches of Grade A players should start to bolster the ranks and our chances of reaching our ‘lunatic’ objectives would then be no laughing matter and would, as they do with every other club which has quality, tier 1 players, lie in the lap of the gods.