Poch’s men must share the blame

I DID not expect it to get as low as it has got at Tottenham.

I have been in dressing rooms, including at

Spurs, when things start to go south. It has gone stale.

You can feel it. You are doing everything you can on the pitch to get it right, but the confidence isn’t there. Players are not doing things instinctively anymore.

They know the club is under pressure.

I expected this group, having been together so long, to react positively.

Everyone in that team needs to start to be held accountable for their performances because they have been well below par.

At the same time the manager has been left in the lurch. The chairman? He has had his mind fully focused on the stadium over the last few years and took his eye off the ball. What you are seeing now are the fruits of that.

They’ve been thinking they’ve cracked it and it has slapped them back in the face.

This team would be still a good one if it had players under contract and thinking the club loved or wanted them.

If you are in the last six months of your deal a lot can go wrong by playing.

You could get badly injured. If you go out and are half-hearted, even if just one or two are doing that, it’s going to have a negative impact.

They have all got to take the blame. Mauricio Pochettino has to take responsibility because maybe he has been sulking a bit.

When you listen to his press conferences half of me wants to go, ‘Can you just get on with it. I get you didn’t get what you wanted in the summer, and you have told us, so sort your team out.’

Then you look at chairman Daniel Levy. He is on the pitch at the NFL game with a big smile on his face. Probably thinking, ‘Brilliant, we did it. We are making loads of money at the football club and everything is great.’

But the team is a mess, a shambles, and they probably won’t make top four this year, although I think they’ll sort it out.

The low point was the 7-1 Bayern Munich defeat. For the first half an hour Spurs were really good and probably should have scored three goals.

It’s the complete capitulation when something doesn’t go well for them that annoys me the most.

I’d be saying, ‘Look, we are a Champions League team for the last four years, and someone has to rise to the challenge and take a hold of it.’

You have a keeper who is constantly making mistakes. A right-back situation that is a joke. They let Kieran Trippier leave, of all players.

I don’t care what sort of season he had last year... because he was playing injured.

Who at that club, whether it be Pochettino, who I do think had a part to play in it, or the chairman, they’ve allowed a top right-back to leave and left themselves with Walkerpeters and a guy in Serge Aurier, who should not play for the club again because he is a liability.

I watched the Brighton game and I said at halftime, “Look at this team. Lamela, Son (left), Kane, Eriksson, Dier (below). All players who have been there years. You know what? They have just gone stale.“

I remember when I was there, and David Beckham came to train with us a few times when he was at LA Galaxy.

Even things like that raise the level of training.

You’ve got a player up front, Harry Kane who knows he is playing week in week out. He isn’t being pushed. He needs someone snapping at his heels.

By now Spurs should be a club like Man City, who have got players like Aguero and Jesus pushing each other.

JERMAINE is an ambassador for footie5 from thepools.com. footie5 is a weekly freeto-play football prediction game where you can win £25,000 by predicting the scores of five matches from the English and Scottish leagues. Download the app or play at www. footie5.com.