Mourinho at Spurs:It may start well, but this could turn into a marriage from hell

YOU can smell when an era at a football club is coming to an end.

The manager’s words, eyes and body language say he’s gone as far as he can. Sensing it, the players look for escape routes, their collective fight goes missing at crucial times and the results nosedive.

The crowd gets angry, the bean-counters nervous and the owner wears a twitchy look as he calculates the cost of shifting the blame.

All of which have been bubbling away at Spurs throughout 2019, as 18 months without squad replenishment saw them tire and sink down the league table. The run to the Champions League Final was merely a glorious distraction from the major reboot the squad needed to keep pace with Manchester City and Liverpool.

Daniel Levy should have set that overhaul in motion days after the Madrid final to keep the coach who had turned Spurs from a perennial joke into major contenders energised and happy.

Call it pay-back for the magnificent job Mauricio

Pochettino had done while all potential transfer funds were funnelled into the new stadium project.

But with Levy being someone who jealously guards his reputation as the shrewdest poker player in football, the summer transformation didn’t happen. He now has four players running down contracts, the best manager the club’s had since Bill Nicholson run out of town and fans mostly stunned and saddened.

To compensate, Cool Hand Levy has bet the house on Jose Mourinho coming up trumps. Which feels like a pretty wild gamble. If his problem these past few months has been a high-maintenance manager rocking the boat through public demands for money, wait until he gets to fully know the new guy.

Mourinho has been out of work for three weeks short of a year yet no big club has gone near him. Pochettino has been out of work for just over a day and some of the biggest clubs in the world are reputed to be weighing up an approach.

Mourinho is a manager whose habit of winning big titles has been in steady decline for a decade and whose tactics seem dated at elite level.

Would Chelsea swap rookie Frank Lampard and his exciting brand of youthful football for their old idol? No. As mediocre as Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s reign is, would Manchester United welcome him and all his baggage back? No.

Mourinho was sacked by those clubs after he lost the dressing-rooms and his politicking became unbearable to the owners. The fans were simply relieved because the football had become dire.

I can see Mourinho starting well at Spurs as this is an under-performing squad with the kind of players he can use to effect. They have defenders who have stopped defending as a unit and workers who seem to have either fallen out of favour or lost their way. He will sort that out.

That will give him the base to play his counter-attacking game with the speed of Son Heung-min and Lucas Moura feeding into the perfect target man, Harry Kane. It would be no surprise if he takes the fourth Champions League place and ends the trophy drought by lifting the FA Cup. But unlike Pochettino, he won’t wait for promised payback from Levy to materialise. Next summer he will demand he’s allowed to compete with Europe’s richest clubs for the biggest talents, only to be reminded he was told at the interview Spurs don’t have the cash or the pay structure to secure them. A year, maybe two, from now, Levy could face exactly the same problem with Mourinho as he did with Pochettino. Once Jose’s Spurs honeymoon is over, this could swiftly turn into the marriage from hell.