Frustration of being a Spurs fan nowadays is very bad for the Sol

Matthew Norman
03.10.08

On Monday I awoke to find a message left on the mobile in the middle of the night by a friend whose voice suggested a little sorrow-drowning after events on the south coast the previous afternoon.

"All right, you won't pay the £2.99," it ran, "and I accept that was a silly price to ask. You can have them for 49p the pair, payable in instalments of 1p per annum over the next half century, which includes an additional penny as an interest payment."

The pair in question are, of course, season tickets for Tottenham Hotspur, the offer following a performance of barely credible spinelessness at Portsmouth.

I rang back last night to check whether yesterday's thoroughly undeserved avoidance of UEFA Cup disaster in Poland had changed his mind. "Yes it has," he said. "I'll waive the interest."

At the end of a week in which two monstrously inept displays combined with an exhibition of vicious idiocy towards Sol Campbell to add an underlayer of visceral revulsion to the familiar top coat of bemused incompetence, it's hard to know where to start.

How about with the brutal irony that, within days of Jermain Defoe elegantly converting a penalty against the club that dispensed with him, fellow discards Robbie Keane and Dimitar Berbatov broke their scoring ducks in the Champions League while manager Juande Ramos feels unable to play Darren Bent, sole survivor of that Fab Four, alongside Roman Pavlyuchenko even when Spurs are trailing?

Or perhaps we can look to Germany, where Ramos's successor sits atop the Bundesliga with Hamburg? Martin Jol seems too good natured for schaudenfraude, but it's tempting to imagine a wry smile toying with the corners of his mouth.

Alternatively we might wonder whether, after a year in London, Ramos still speaks too little English to handle the post-match interviews, or whether he delegates them to the apparently deranged Gus Poyet, because they're beneath his dignity?

Then again, you could generalise, and wonder whether anyone at the club — the chairman Daniel Levy, survivalist "sporting director" Damien Comolli, Ramos and his players — has the faintest idea of what they are doing? But there, perhaps, the answer speaks for itself.

So I prefer to start and finish with those supporters whose Wildean wit extended on Sunday to chanting false claims about Sol Campbell.

Regardless of whether such chanting constitutes a crime (this may not be the ideal day to ask Sir Ian Blair about that), I offer this challenge to those who maintain a seething grudge over Campbell's departure for Arsenal in 2001.

Clarify for me exactly what Campbell would have gained by spending the last seven years at a club that sells its good strikers, keeps its poor ones and buys new ones it doesn't wish to play; at which managers who succeed brilliantly elsewhere mysteriously fail; one with a chairman who cannot master the economic necessity of buying land on which to build a much needed new stadium; a club which continues to live off ever more remote past glories because its present is hideous and its future dismally uncertain.

If anyone can persuade me that Campbell owed an ounce of loyalty to such a club, let alone to fans who disgrace themselves year after year with the incontinence of their misplaced spite, I may be able to put two season tickets their way at a quid a shot.

Extortion, I know, but even in a credit crunch a chap has to turn a profit.

Hard to feel injury-hit Chelsea's pain

The injury news from Chelsea, already disturbing enough, takes a dramatic turn with the announcement that a Didier Drogba book signing scheduled for this afternoon at the Stamford Bridge Megastore has been cancelled.

Exactly why an injured knee makes writing his name impossible is a conundrum best left to a physiotherapist, but I can't see why Drogba couldn't have turned up on crutches and left the signing to the book's ghost writer.

Sharing the treatment room with the dainty Ivorian, meanwhile, are a phalanx of stars including Deco, Michael Essien, Joe Cole and Ricardo Carvalho, while John Terry and Alex — the latter a martyr to a dodgy buttock — bravely soldier on with knocks.

There was a time long ago when a plague of wounds to high-profile players might have been cause for sympathy, but in the era of the massive squad any whining from giant clubs tends to invoke a wearily Jim Callaghanesque "Injury crisis, what injury crisis?".

Besides, if a club will insist on hiring a World-Cup winning coach such as Phil Scolari, it would be a poor show if he wasn't presented with the odd little stumbling block to allow him to prove his greatness.

So no tears here for Chelsea in this time of trial.

Not yet anyway. Not until it's officially announced that they've agreed a January transfer window £25million deal to bring Jonny Wilkinson down from Newcastle.

Whining Warne is music to our ears

Even when he's being a bit of a drongo, it's hard not to be charmed by Shane Warne. In London to play poker, the great man whinges that a ribald musical about him, cunningly entitled Shane Warne The Musical, will premiere Down Under in December despite his express disapproval.

"You should have permission off anyone," he argues, "to write about their life".

Somewhere here lies a misapprehension about freedom of speech. It would be peculiar, after all, if unauthorized biographies were automatically surpressed because their subjects weren't up for being exposed; or in the fabled text addict's case, teased by such elegant show tunes as What An SMS I'm In.

And then, just when you're wondering how he became such a pompous arse, Warne redeems himself with some larrikin common sense.

"I'm a pretty easy target for cheap jokes," he adds, "but I brought some of that on myself."

We'll let that superfluous "some of" pass, and wish him well.