STAN COLLYMORE
Football’s ultimate maverick sounds off
THE big beef I’ve had with Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy in recent years was that he didn’t give Mauricio Pochettino the keys to the kingdom after taking them to the 2019 Champions League Final.
And I can’t help feeling a little sad and frustrated for Poch when I see Antonio Conte being handed £150million to set about the rebuild the Argentine wanted to oversee that summer.
But at least Levy is digging deep now to keep his manager happy – and why wouldn’t he when, in Conte, he has the one manager in world football you could really back to go toe-to-toe with Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp?
Now, before anyone gets excited, I’m not saying Spurs will challenge for the title next season.
But I could well see them pushing for second or third because, beyond those two, he’s the next-best manager in the Premier League.
He has won it for starters and what I like about him is the fact he has his own very defined style.
If Guardiola is a cerebral coach who likes to keep the ball and build through the lines, and is the template for modern managers, and Klopp is the rock ’n’ roll, pulls-onthe-heart-strings and makespeople-happy kind of boss, then Conte is almost the halfway point between them.
He wants to play rock ’n’ roll football, passionate football, football from the heart, and he wears his heart on his sleeve, but he’s also a very good tactician, too.
Being the third-best manager in the Premier League wouldn’t have meant much a few years ago, but there’s an argument it could even mean him being the thirdbest manager
in the world
these days. Certainly, it puts him in the top five.
And when you look at Conte, you’re looking at a winner, someone with the ability to attract the kind of players who can come into a top-four team and do some damage, with Ivan Perisic a case in point.
Spurs, with their new stadium and this summer’s transfer kitty, won’t want to mess around, they will be aiming to be compete and win trophies.
Winning
And I hope that, even with the Champions League on the horizon,
Conte is looking at the League Cup and
FA Cup and telling his players that winning one of them is an absolute must.
What Spurs must do now is keep feeding the beast, because it’s all well and good giving him what he wants this summer but not backing it up in a year’s time.
Because even though he’s all smiles now, with Conte, there’s as much chance that he’s manager of Juventus, Paris Saint-germain or Bayern Munich in a year’s time as Tottenham.
I’m pretty certain he will have said to Levy, ‘Look, we can compete with Liverpool
and Manchester City in the next two or three seasons and we can win trophies, but it’s going to not just cost you money.
It will mean you taking a step back sometimes to let industry professionals within the dressing room rule the roost’.
I don’t think Levy (below) has always done that but it’s important because, with such as Conte, it’s not all about money, sometimes it’s about trusting a person with power and responsibility, too.
With that, I can see him closing the gap on City and Liverpool to nine points, maybe six, and that would be success.
I’d like to see him bringing in a new keeper, central defender and central midfielder at least to strengthen the squad for all competitions.
And for every Perisic – he’s 33 – Spurs will need to bring in two or three at 25, 26 or 27 because that’s where the club will be judged.
This is still fundamentally a squad that got into a Champions League Final and finished second in the Premier League, though.
With Conte at the helm, there’s no reason they can’t reach lofty heights again.