Thereâs always an excuse with a diddly club like spurs.
Is that not âŹEuro?
Conte nominated for premier league manager of the month.
1 Like
Justifiable recognition for the work heâs done there. Youâd want to be some mug not to recognise it.
A born winner.
Is Conte the first ever Manager of the Month nominee with a 100% losing record for the month he was nominated? Knowing our luck, heâll probably end up winning it.
God forbid spurs would win anything.
A fucking warrior. Sadly fighting the wrong fight.
Weâre in European Cup action against AC Milan tonight. Coach Conte has finally returned from Italy as well. All the chat over the last few days would point towards him not being around next season. Whether he lasts much longer than tonight is the real question of interest. We should have enough to overcome a 1-0 deficit to AC Milan, youâd be thinking. Results have been so inconsistent and form generally so poor though, canât take anything for granted any more.
1 Like
Match delayed by 10 minutes but Iâm not in attendance.
Whatâs going on?
A fucking illiterate trying to be smart with his âQueenâs/Kingâsâ English and making a bollix of it.
Sometime, somewhere the difference between âbeenâ and âbeingâ shall be explained.
1 Like
Spurs booed off at half time. Terrible so far.
Not looking good here.
Maybe Milan might give Misery Guts Conte a lift back to Italy for good.
@ChairmanDan 01/03/23 - âOur name is on the European Cup this seasonâ
@ChairmanDan 08/03/23 - âThat was an utterly dismal performance and weâre out of the European Cupâ
3 Likes
Oooooft.
Thatâs a wonderful little habit he has of kicking poor aul Dan up the hole whenever he likes.
1 Like
And never a glove laid on him
No news of a sacking yet. Hopefully it will be done before the day is out.
There was an Italian manager celebrating on the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium turf but it wasnât Antonio Conte. Stefano Pioli was bouncing up in uncoordinated abandon. His compatriot wasnât; not after the lamest and tamest of Champions League exits. Conte can seem the Tottenham manager who doesnât want to manage Tottenham. They were largely unwatchable as what should have been a glamour game, against the seven-time European champions AC Milan, became a grind. But then increasingly a glamour appointment, in the serial Serie A winner, has brought a plodding joylessness to this part of north London.
There were reminders of what the night should have been. Steve Perryman was on the pitch at half-time. Tottenhamâs record appearance-maker was an irregular scorer but, half a century ago, he scored a brace against AC Milan in a European semi-final. A decade before that, as the stadium announcer Pete Abbott highlighted, Spurs became the first English club to lift a European trophy. Their history is built on such feats, their identity too. There was a glory to it, a style, a romance. Not now.
In the days when they still won silverware, they were the definitive cup team. Inconsistent but exciting, they could rouse themselves for big occasions. Conteâs Spurs may have dozed off as they slumbered through a stalemate. For the Italian, miscast as a Spurs manager, misunderstanding the fanbase, missing the imperative to entertain that has been integral to Tottenham over the years, an evening was a microcosm of where his reign has gone wrong. A season has unravelled amid sterility and timidity. A team who too rarely display the ambition to win games showed a self-defeating dullness. Not for the first time, Conteâs pragmatism looked unpragmatic. Tottenham had two attempts on target in a game they had to win.
So it is AC Milan who will line up in the Champions League quarter-finals. For Tottenham, a missed opportunity invites questions of when they will next get such a chance. Or, indeed, who will be at the helm then. Conte and Tottenham is the loveless marriage that is heading for divorce; it is only a matter of who petitions for it and when. The trial separation may have come courtesy of his gall bladder surgery, but absence scarcely made the heart grow fonder. The chances are that neither will want to commit any longer. Conte, the ultimate short-termist, only signed up for 18 months to begin with. His heart never seemed in Tottenham, long before his gall bladder wasnât.
âThe club knows very well which is my vision,â Conte said. As his visions tend to include spending vast amounts of money, it is probably an area where they are not in harmony. âAt the end of the season we will meet and then make a decision. I have a contract that is running down and weâll see how the season ends.â He may have been joking when he added, in his native Italian. âYou never know, the club might want to get rid of me earlier.â Even as Spurs still have a top-four finish to play for, it is a plausible scenario: if Conte feels too toxic, if his negativity is deemed too draining, if Tottenham prefer to finish off the campaign with Ryan Mason in caretaker charge.
At his best, Conte brings a winning mentality, at his worst a culture of excuses. He aired his two current favourites in two different languages, that Spurs were in the Conference League last season and that Milan are the reigning Italian champions. Each is true, but an attempt to portray Spurs as the underdogs ignored the financial realities. One of these clubs spent ÂŁ170m last summer, though it scarcely showed from Tottenhamâs performance. They celebrated qualifying for the Champions League but mounted a limp attempt to stay in it.
âIn this moment we donât have a solid foundation to be competitive to fight and win, in my opinion,â complained Conte, with the usual inference it is not his fault. âIn terms of history, these two clubs are on totally different levels. Milan won the Serie A title last season, whereas we scraped through by a miracle going from ninth place to fourth. So this is certainly a step forward.â
Yet while 2023 has delivered wins over Manchester City, West Ham and Chelsea, it has also brought regression, not progression: few of the fans who booed at the final whistle seemed to deem a third consecutive game without a goal a step forward. âI am sorry for the fans but we cannot invent the win,â Conte added.
For him, it was stagnation. A manager who likes to style himself a winner has too little success in Europe. He has gone out in the group stages of the Champions League with Juventus and Inter, the last 16 with Chelsea and Tottenham. There was an unsurprising element to it and, amid the attempts to escape the blame, there was a sense of acceptance. A parting of the ways appears inevitable. It is hard to frame it all as Daniel Levy and Tottenhamâs fault.
In his native tongue, Conte seemed to arrow in on a truth when he said: âPerhaps they had higher expectations and can be disappointed.â They were right to harbour higher expectations, too. Conte and Tottenham have descended into the realms of disappointment. And the best way to exit them is surely separately.