I just hope Ramos doesn't get the same treatment that Jol did

Pacman to the point / Jamie "The Pacman" Pacheco / 29 October 2007 / Leave a Comment

Pacman to the point - betting.betfair.com editor Jamie "The Pacman" Pacheco shares his take on the Jol debacle and his successor

I was sorry to see Martin Jol exit Spurs in such undignified circumstances, after giving the club his all during his time in charge. The Board at Spurs need to take a long, hard look at themselves for the way they went about sacking him. If you're a multi-million pound business charging punters over £50 each time they go to watch their team play and are raking it in from the sponsors and Sky, you need to be behave accordingly. You very rarely see other big PLCs making such a hash of dismissing a senior figure at the company, let alone a scenario where the whole of Fleet Street seems to know about it before it has been officially announced. I wonder if every hack in London knew about it before Jol himself did.

Jol did a fine job in his time in charge at White Hart Lane. He came in and steadied the ship after the Santini debacle (another example of the Spurs Board not handling the manager's departure particularly well) and guided Spurs to back-to-back 5th place finishes in the Premiership in successive seasons, their highest-ever finish since the start of the Premiership, by the way. His big crime appears to have been the fact that they missed out on that Holy Grail that is a fourth-place finish leading to Champions League football.

But I don't think Jol was sacked as a result of Spurs' league finish over the past two seasons, failure to win a domestic competition or make a real fist of a UEFA Cup challenge. No, he was sacked after Spurs made a horrendous start to the season in the League after they were tipped by many to realistically challenge for that coveted fourth place spot I mentioned earlier. Throwing away leads at Craven Cottage and Anfield (to name just two) didn't help the cause, neither did Robinson's howlers but the problems stemmed from before the season even started.

Darren Bent is a natural goalscorer who scored plenty of goals for a poor Charlton side. What he's not is a £17 million player, nor will he ever be. That money needed to be spent on central defenders, not on a fourth striker when they already had three at the club plus two players who can be play just behind in Malbranque and Lennon.

Ledley King is a top defender who only doesn't have more England caps because the national side have plenty of options in that position, but he's injury prone and always has been and there are no guarantees you're going to get a full season out of him. Dawson is error-prone, Rocha is tough and committed but lacks pace, Kaboul looks ok but will take time to settle. Spurs may well have got Woodgate for £7-8 million if they'd asked the question, Sylvin Distin may well have opted for Spurs rather than Portsmouth if given the chance and even Sami Hyypia would have done a job for them. I don't know who was responsible for the decision to buy Bent but if it was Jol then he got it wrong, pure and simple. And it may well have cost him his job.

Juande Ramos is a confident and imaginative manager who guided Sevilla to back-to-back UEFA Cup triumphs which is remarkable. His style of play where everyone attacks and everyone defends (just look at "right-back" Daniel Alves who gets to the byline more often than most wingers in the game) is the sort of total football that will go down well at White Hart Lane and I think he'll do well.

It's a long old season but I think too much damage has been done already to put them out of contention for a Top 6 finish (5.7 on Betfair) and on the flip side there's no way in the world they will even be flirting with relegation come the end of the season (19s if you fancy it). The 9.4 on Ramos guiding Robbie Keane and co to Carling Cup glory looks a fair price given they've got Blackpool in the next round and the ongoing doubts about how seriously the big guns take the competition.

I just hope that if Ramos follows his predecessors in getting the boot, Daniel Levy and his mates go about it in rather more dignified way than they did with Jol.

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