Ramos gets taste of Spurs' love of a deal - the Observer

yiddo

Hard to take but lots of truth in it

Ramos gets taste of Spurs' love of a deal
·The Tottenham chairman's recruitment strategy can be damaging, but Juande Ramos has to accept it

* Duncan Castles
* The Observer,
* Sunday August 31 2008
* Article history

Levy and Ramos

Chairman Daniel Levy has taken a hands-on approach alongside Juande Ramos. Photograph: Akira Suemori/AP

When Juande Ramos says: 'You get the feeling the sooner the whole thing is finished the better,' you know he is getting a proper taste of being a Tottenham Hotspur manager; a flavour of the numbers-led myopia that descends on the north London club whenever the transfer window opens. This year's Dimitar Berbatov transfer saga is reminiscent of situations gone by

Summer 2006: Michael Carrick's move to Manchester United drags into the final weeks of pre-season as Tottenham squeeze the fee up to £18.6m. Martin Jol, the then Spurs manager, is left scrambling to compensate for the loss of his most important midfielder.

Summer 2007: Jol requests the purchases of three players: the left-winger Martin Petrov, a holding midfielder and an experienced centre-back. Daniel Levy, the Spurs chairman, balks at Petrov's wages, then buys attacking midfielder Kevin-Prince Boateng and defender Younes Kaboul. Both prove so ineffective, they are transfer-listed inside a year.

Summer 2008: Berbatov wants out for the second season running. Ramos argues for the forward to be sold quickly and replaced by one who wants to play for Tottenham, while also requesting an injury-free central defender. Levy has a war of words with Liverpool and Manchester United over their approaches for Robbie Keane, who is sold, and Berbatov, who is left unsettled, leaving Spurs with only one usable striker, while buying three playmakers and zero defenders.

It is the reiteration of the error that exposes its cause. Levy is first and foremost a businessman for whom the finance and fine detail of a deal is the most important thing. For him its better to force an extra £4m - and a negotiating victory - out of United than remove an unsettled and unsettling Berbatov from the camp and swap him for a player who will work for the team; cleverer accounting strategy to recruit youngsters with a potential resale value than a finished product in his late 20s.

If Levy has spent heavily this window, with over £45m committed on Luka Modric, David Bentley, Heurelho Gomes and Giovani Dos Santos, he has also recouped the best part of that sum in selling Keane, Kaboul, Paul Robinson, Steed Malbranque, Pascal Chimbonda, Teemu Tainio and Anthony Gardner. More importantly, the squad has been shunted into imbalance.

From the 2007 soap opera in which Jol and Ramos struggled to deal with the desires of four senior strikers, Darren Bent has become the only properly employable forward. The midfield is overrun with individuals whose best position would be as a free-floating No10, yet Tottenham generally do not line up with one. There is neither a single natural holding midfielder nor an unarguable choice on the left wing. Bought two years ago to be the elusive defensive screen, Didier Zokora continues to be shoe-horned into various defensive roles he can not quite master, while there is only one reliable selection in the centre of defence and none at left-back.

While some of this imbalance is being addressed by the acquisitions of Russia forward Roman Pavlyuchenko and Manchester City defender Vedran Corluka, the damage done by Tottenham's transfer window procrastination may already be too great to remedy. Six eminently winnable points have been lost to Middlesbrough and Sunderland in the club's two Premier League fixtures to date, and such is the present state of disrepair that few expect anything from Stamford Bridge this afternoon.

In last season's Premier League, six points proved the difference between relegation and 13th place, between mid-table and the Uefa Cup and between the title and third place. A nine-point handicap hardly sits well with a club attempting to achieve a first-ever Champions League qualification. With each Premier League place worth £725,000 and access to the Champions League as much as 40 times more, Levy's parsimony may prove profligate.

Left to hold the fort, Ramos is hardly happy about it. Quiz the Spaniard about the flaws in Tottenham's recruitment strategy and he will offer a knowing smile, delicately suggesting that it is an area beyond his own control. 'Without a doubt, it has had an awful lot to do with the start to the season,' he says. 'With the comings and goings, players are obviously trying their best to concentrate 100 per cent, but I think it has affected things slightly with their work on the training ground and even going into games. Our start has been affected by this.

'It would have been great to have been a lot calmer. But you have to grin and bear it and get on with things. Certainly the ideal situation is that you get your squad settled early and you work with all the players in the pre-season period. Unfortunately on this occasion we have not been able to work with every player.'

In contrast to his predecessor, Ramos refuses to criticise the club's inexperienced sporting director, Damien Comolli. After making obvious mistakes in recommending the likes of Boateng, Kaboul and Zokora, the Frenchman's own position is under review and it is not he who holds the final say on spending and selling.

'The contact [with Comolli] is daily; we have an excellent relationship,' Ramos says. 'We chat about everything and it is a very good working relationship. Every club works in it's own particular fashion. Here at Tottenham we have a system where the sporting director is in charge of transfers and we gain a consensus in conversation with him. Then it is the club itself that carries out the transfers at the end of the day. The person who has the capacity and the wherewithal to control the club is the chairman. That's what he's there for and that's what he does.'

At Chelsea there is sparse sympathy for a manager who denied London's richest club last season's Carling Cup. So little that Luiz Felipe Scolari is prepared to paint Stamford Bridge as a place of relative of penury.

'Look, I've brought in only one player at Chelsea - only Deco,' the Chelsea manager says. 'I think in this season Juande has brought in three, four or five, including Modric, Pavlyuchenko and Gomes, who started as a goalkeeper with me in Brazil. I put him in the [Cruzeiro] first team at 18 and now he's at Tottenham. At that time I had good vision.

'I think this season Tottenham spent more money than us and bought four or five players. Chelsea have bought only Deco. I buy one player and sell seven.'

If Scolari is playing mind games - ignoring the multi-million pay rises handed to Frank Lampard, Petr Cech and Michael Essien, while pressing for still more money to be poured into Robinho's ill-handled purchase - he does not seek to conceal the value his first Chelsea buy. Deco was considered essential, his transfer agreed as soon as Scolari signed on the dotted line. The player was in place for a whole pre-season so that Chelsea could be rebuilt around him.

'It's not just that he [Deco] is a good player; other teams maybe need one player or two players to mark him and that opens the space for other players in our team,' Scolari says. 'He's a unique player, one of the best in the world. If you remember [Zinedine] Zidane; when he played you expected a different way. Deco isn't Zidane, but it's near. You expect something and something changes.'

Unlike Tottenham, where they expect, but nothing ever changes.