?”Martin Jol! Martin Jol!Martin, Martin Jol
He’s got no hair but we’d don’t care
Martin Martin Jol!”
In recent times has there been a Spurs manager as popular as Martin Jol. I certainly can’t think of anyone since Terry Venables, and given we had Tottenham legends Ossie Ardiles and Glenn Hoddle amongst those managers its’ quite an achievement.The widely held theory is that big affable, loveable Martin was unfairly treated and humiliated by Spurs. Since then he’s rebuilt his career at Hamburg and then Ajax and is now back in the Premiership at Fulham.
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In fact good old Martin gave an interview yesterday where he talked about his new job and ambitions at Fulham for all of about 30 seconds before promptly going off on one about how badly treated he was at Spurs but how apparently he’s not bitter. His ire seems to be mainly directed at our former Director of Footballer Damien Commolli.
“He [Comolli] was responsible. He was responsible for most of the football things,”And never short of raising a few laugh Big Martin then went onto claim“I said to Daniel when I came to England, ‘If you leave me, if you let me work for you, they will push you around the streets of London like a king.’
He then goes onto claim that he unearthed Gareth bale and Aaron Lennon, although the former was widely acknowledged as one of the best young talents in the game, whilst the latter is generally thought to be a Frank Arneson buy.He then cites Benoit Assou-Ekotto as a Commolli buy, good example there big guy. Pick our most consistent player for the last two seasons as a bad buy.
“And they never did, but he knew what I meant, you know?”
I’ll put my cards on the table. I think Martin Jol is a buffoon, a buffoon with a friendly voice but a buffoon nevertheless. I would concede his dismissal in the public eye did not do the club any favours but that doesn’t mean his time wasn’t up. He was a man out of his depth, that start to the 07/08 season was terrible. Jolt’s last game in charge was a 1-2 reverse to Getafe, our first ever defeat on home soil in Europe. For a club with a proud European record like ours it was a meek surrender and meekness was what Martin Jol was all about.
We were at low ebb, probably our lowest for many years when Levy bought in the dream ticket of Frank Anson, Jacque Santini and Martin Jol. Comical Jacques was on his way within a few weeks Frank defected to Chelsea and Martin was main man.In his first season full season in charge we almost made the Champions League before fate so cruelly betrayed us at Upton Park as the team got a dodgy stomach due to some bad Lasagne the night before the game.
However it should never have come down to that last game, how many last minute goals did we concede that season, how many winning positions did we stupidly throw away. I don’t think we won a single game by more than a two goal margin and if you thought our strikers were bad this season, you obviously hadn’t ever seen Rasiak in attack.
I actually met big Martin Jol once, I was working out in Japan, and Spurs went to play a pre-season tournament in South Korea and actually won the damn thing. We beat Lyon 3-0 or 3-1 in the final in Seoul if memory serves me correctly and that night at one of Seoul’s nightspots I happened to be at the same venue as the Tottenham team. I congratulated Martin on the team’s success and asked him not to sell Freddie Kanoute. He was a perfectly charming fellow but two weeks into the full season he did the unforgivable, he sold Freddie.
Freddie Kanoute was a god in my eyes, forget Berbatov, Freddie was all that and more. The biggest single mistake that Spurs have made in the last few years and there have been a few, was getting rid of Freddie. If we had Freddie spearheading our attack in the 2005/06 season we’d have made the Champions League and who knows where we would be as a club now.
However most of all Jol was manager who didn’t take risks. Who can forget the quarter final at Stamford Bridge, 3-1 up and he takes off Lennon and Berbatov and proceeds to defend the lead, we didn’t and Chelsea pulled it back to 3-3 and we went out in the replay.
Let’s not forget his dalliance with Newcastle as a negotiating manoeuvre for a new deal at Spurs. Yet this was a man who apparently loved the club but was willing to leave us for all teams Newcastle, who are a big club in, well in Newcastle but that’s really it.
He preached attacking football but was really an exponent of a more prosaic approach. He was a master of the media game but as a football manager he was sadly lacking. Since leaving Spurs he started wonderfully at Hamburg but petered out miserably. In Holland he came second to Steve McLaren.
Perhaps Fulham is his level but I don’t think Jol is a man who can take them forward. One thing I do hope is that when Spurs travel to Fulham in November, we don’t have some sort of mutual fan club for the myth that is Martin Jol.
He doesn’t deserve it, it’s a measure of how far we had fallen that such a limited man is held in such high esteem
Please find the original post in my Spurs blog The Glory Game
