Thanks Mr Levy, now can you stop squeezing deals

As the long experiment with a continental command structure abruptly ended, with the firing of "sporting director" Damien Comolli, chairman Daniel Levy travelled back to the future by announcing not only the hiring of that stout, yeoman Englishman Harry Redknapp, but also that Harry will be in sole control of transfers - titter ye not - for the length of his stay.

This should be the headline news from a sensational yet oddly unsurprising development. That Comolli and Juande Ramos would go has been inevitable for weeks and it was predictable that Ramos would be replaced by someone revered as a relegation escapologist (on Harry's Portsmouth form, anyway, we'll ignore his failure at Southampton). The crucial thing was that Mr Levy would publicly go cold turkey from the "sporting director" addiction that proved not the panacea he imagined it but a lethal poison in the bloodstream of the club. This, thank God, he has done.

So complete is Mr Levy's humiliation today that it would be indecently churlish to linger on those he appointed with such uniformly hideous results. No one would suggest that David Pleat, Frank Arnesen and Comolli deliberately undermined Glenn Hoddle, Jacques Santini, Martin Jol and Ramos, by buying duff players or engaging in that brand of power politics whereby an ambitious middle man isolates a perceived rival (the coach) from the goodwill of his master (chairman). Machiavelli was a frighteningly clever chap, but he knew little of 21st Century English football.

Anyway, the point is that the fatal flaw lies not in the personnel but in a system cunningly designed to fracture the relationship between board and manager on which any club's success depends. Now that system has gone and at once all is turned on its head - or so it seemed yesterday when, rather than needlessly conceding penalties and red cards, as of late, Spurs benefited from Bolton committing the identical profligacy.

Struggling teams tend to overperform in their first game under new management and driving Spurs to safety is no gimme when gigantic doubts remain over Roman Pavyluchenko and Darren Bent's ability to replicate their scoring form of yesterday and no reinforcements can come until January.

Even so, Redknapp will make Tottenham hard to beat and the spectre of relegation is less oppressive.

To Mr Levy go thanks for finally listening to what many have been screaming at him for years and now he's mastered that lesson I urge him to learn one more. Put the clock back also on this tactic of squeezing every last ha'penny out of every deal. Thanks to the fiasco that resulted from screwing an extra three of four million out of Manchester United for Dimitar Berbatov, he must now give Portsmouth £5m compensation for Harry and spend even more paying off Ramos, Comolli and Gus Poyet. Factor in the millions that will be lost due to a lower than expected league finish, not to mention no European football next season, and we may agree that while false economising is one thing, false profiteering is worse.

It simply has to cease. But enough of the past. Change has come to Spurs and better late than never. Whether it is change we can believe in, time will tell. For now we can look forward to Arsenal on Wednesday and beyond in the unfamiliar company of hope.

Scolari's number is not up but Rafa's rammed home a worry

All Richie Benaud obsessives know that 87 is the Australian Test team's bogey number, because the old boy never stopped saying so but who knew it was Chelsea's as well? After 86 league games unbeaten at Stamford Bridge the 87th proved too much and with the end of that record a reappraisal of Liverpool's title chances must begin.

Until now the Scousers have been ignored as serious contenders partly because they have flattered to deceive too often before and because too many of their recent victories have relied on outlandish fightbacks of the sort that drain the mental energy. Yesterday was something different, a sustained and controlled storming of the domestic game's most heavily-defended citadel.

With Manchester United dropping points at Everton and Arsenal winning at West Ham, the widely anticipated rerun of last season's attritional two-way title scrap begins to look more like a four-horse race.

If Arsenal's youth and lack of leadership on the pitch suggest they will be the first to drop away, Liverpool hint at the stamina and self-belief required to stay with the pace. As for the Blues, they remain the bookies' favourites and rightly so.

Rafael Benitez has long had a knack of tactically outwitting Chelsea coaches (with the ironic exception of Avram Grant) and Phil Scolari won't be too disheartened by a single reverse. He will be aware, however, that winning the Premier League looks a touch more complicated today than it did yesterday morning.

Nadal will be wary after Murray takes two

Andy Murray's glorious run continued yesterday when he won the final of the St Petersburg Open, admittedly against an unknown Kazakh, for the loss of just two games. Although a minor tournament success compared with the two successive Masters series wins sandwiching the US Open final defeat, this is evidence of his growing maturity. Not so long ago he struggled against moderate opposition in unglamorous arenas. Now the boy is becoming quite the machine.
He now enters the more lustrous Paris Masters where he is seeded to meet Rafael Nadal in the semi final, for the first time since their epic at Flushing Meadow. The clearest sign of how Murray has cemented himself among the Big Four is that it's anyone's guess which of them will win.

Dowie back on the slow route to the top

On behalf of Shepherd's Bush, let me bid a fond farewell to Iain Dowie who was fired as QPR manager last week. Given the wealth and ambition of owners Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore, this always seemed an eccentric appointment, and he duly departed after 15 games in his post.

So things are looking up. Mr Dowie survived only 12 games in his last London post at Charlton, and at this rate of improvement it won't be long — no later than 2059, certainly — before he manages one of our clubs for an entire season. So long as it's in the 38-game Premier League. If not — and in this context "not" must start long odds on — we're looking at 2065.

Still, better to travel than to arrive, as someone smart once said, which is just as well because this one has the makings of a very long journey.