BLAME CONTE NOT LEVY!

Riath Al-Samarrai’s column

IT has been a good week for Tim Sherwood. That brief period he spent in management tends to be seen in warmer shades when Harry Kane breaks a record, so it was with decent timing that he retold the story on talkSPORT a few days ago about how Daniel Levy considered selling his striker for £600,000 in 2014.

We know Sherwood’s role in preventing a gaffe for the ages, because he usually accepts the invitations to bring it up. And fair enough, actually. He made a judgment, he judged right and Levy and Tottenham owe him for nine great years.

But judgment can be a funny and inexact thing in football and so are Spurs. There was a yarn I heard a few years ago, not long before the Kane scenario, and again the details involved Levy and his bunch, except it was one they got wrong.

It went back to 2011 and 2012 when their former player Gerry Armstrong, a La Liga expert, had repeatedly been in the ear of Pat Jennings on the coaching staff to tout about a Spanish lad called Michu. Has it all, Armstrong would rave, and at one stage they could have had him for free. But the hierarchy didn’t fancy it and Sherwood, Levy’s technical co-ordinator at the time, soon settled into a weekly routine with Jennings. As the lad they snubbed tore his way through a 22-goal season for Swansea, they would say to one another: ‘Don’t mention Michu.’

One-year wonder, as it happened, but football is littered with those decisions — you win some, you lose some and, if you’re Daniel Levy, the perception tends to be that Tottenham have not won nearly as much as they should. That in a broader sense they play the money game better than the actual game and their lack of adventure off the pitch has conditioned the mediocrity on it.

It’s a touch unfair, or up to a point anyway, and it is interesting within all that how Levy has gradually become something of a punchbag over time and one who is good for a pounding whenever Tottenham hit the skids. Which feels like the right moment to introduce Antonio Conte and the art of redistributing blame in a crisis. Or, put another way: let’s think about last Saturday and how he threw grenades in all directions but mercifully spared himself. His evisceration of his players was quite astonishing and more so his dressing of their inability to withstand pressure as a symptom of Tottenham spending 20 years under ENIC and Levy.

Blimey, all that went unsaid in his flagellation of the club’s culture was the word ‘Spursy’. When Conte goes, he goes hard, and yes, it’s always good content. But putting the boot into Tottenham’s ownership, and therefore Levy, felt cheap in the context of his players failing him at Southampton. It was punching upwards but it was also punching down, because it played to sizeable elements of the fanbase for whom Tottenham’s failings start from the top. It was, above all, misleading, because it didn’t stand up to basic scrutiny.

To accept his stance would mean overlooking that the single most relevant figure in the culture of a squad is the manager. If we go back to the group that drew 3-3 at Southampton you will see five starters brought in on Conte’s watch. A further three of the substitutes were also signed under him and two others joined a couple of months before his appointment. That’s half of the matchday squad.

Whether they were directly wanted by Conte or foisted upon him, the work of those 10 at Tottenham has been done entirely, or near enough, in an atmosphere he created. If they aren’t winners, if they lack ‘fire in their eyes’, as he put it, it isn’t something they picked up through the general ambiance of Tottenham. It isn’t something you pin on Levy, Joe Lewis or anyone else in the treehouse.

Conte would perhaps like us to think they aren’t his fingerprints on a fading season, which sits horribly with how we credit a manager’s control and input during the good times. The good times are when we might buy into the idea that a substitute will respond better by being known as an impactor. That Mandela quotes by the treadmill will put some bounce in a step and a rounder table in the canteen will inspire cohesion in a group.

Accordingly, we choose to see alchemy in gimmicks, but I prefer to go along with the assessment of one former Premier League player who was less fussed by the feng shui of his boss: ‘Mate, it is a f ****** table.’

SOMETIMES a table is indeed a table. And sometimes a problem at Tottenham is not Levy’s fault. Much of it is; bottling a lead at Southampton is not. Creating an aura that is considered toxic is not. Harry Kane starting on the bench in the FA Cup against Sheffield United is not. Defeat against a weak AC Milan side is not. The public demeaning of Richarlison is not. The overlooking of a gem of a midfielder in Yves Bissouma is not. The suggestions of repetitive training are not. Slow starts in masses of games are not. The decision to accept a £14m annual salary and then regularly indicate the club is beneath you? Not on Levy, either. .

It is easy to like Conte from a safe distance. It is easier still to admire his managerial record because he has had remarkable success and with big leaps — Juventus were seventh the year before he made them dominant. Chelsea were 10th. Inter were fourth. And he lifted Tottenham back into the Champions League, so he is far more than a manager whose best gift is the application of finishing touches.

But this gig always felt like the wrong suit for the wrong man. Levy can share blame in that error of judgment and he needs to do a better job of fitting the next one to Tottenham’s limitations.

The rest of the responsibility ought to be worn by the man who accepted the job, picked the players, trained them and thought a flamethrower was the best way to introduce a spark.