Tottenham Hotspur Astonishment Watch 2 - The North London Derby

Never dull, is it?

Tottenham Hotspur's Premier League season became that bit more incredible tonight as they drew 4-4 at the Emirates Stadium.

It began with a 43-yard screamer from David Bentley, a player seeming transformed in terms of his confidence within a few days of the managerial change at White Hart Lane, and ended with Aaron Lennon's cat-like reflexes bagging his first goal of the year, Arsenal fans silenced in their droves and what was unthinkable only a week ago - a point away from home against a free-flowing Arsenal side - a reality.

I'm no neutral, but even I managed to enjoy the spectacle of the match, one of the most exciting and competitive North London derbies I've ever seen.

While shipping four goals is concerning, the defensive frailties can and will be worked on and considering the opposition it’s far from a disgrace. Managing to score four times against a team with such an ability to retain the ball, given our form before the match, is very encouraging, not least because two of thethe strikes came in such spectacular fashion.

But perhaps the most significant factor in all of this is that the players never threatened to give in and simply refused to capitulate. It is this kind of resilience which has been so sadly lacking since the start of the campaign and is surely the stepping stone towards achieving the most pressing objective for the club: survival in the top flight.

To sum up... (or, Tottenham Hotspur Astonishment Watch)

I think my head has now stopped spinning as a result of the last 24 hours in the world of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. I became aware of developments at the Lane late last night when I turned on Sky Sports News to find that, not only had Juande Ramos, his two assistants and sporting director Damien Comolli all been sacked but 'Arry Redknapp had been appointed as the new manager.

He was already on the phone to the channel telling them how much money he'd cost his new employers. Something tells this is one they'd had in the pipeline for the while...

By far the biggest cheer I gave all weekend was at the news that Comolli would not be replaced, signalling a return to the traditional style of management, no longer dividing what most proper football fans will tell you are the indivisible tasks of managing player movement and coaching the team. Halle-bloody-lujah. As the BBC's Phil McNulty put it: "out with the new and in with the old".

This underlines just how significant a factor the presence of a sporting director was in the club's abject failure so far this season and I can only hope that, for the good of the game in this country, this isn't the last time we hear of a 'head coach' becoming a 'manager' as clubs move back to the way of running a football team that seemed to have worked perfectly well for a good century or more.

It would be churlish to suggest that Daniel Levy’s decision to hold out for the best price for Dimitar Berbatov was a bad one, but in squeezing an extra £5million out of Manchester United he put the club in jeopardy of losing so much more. Berbatov’s departure was, in truth, the tip of the iceberg but it does demonstrate a crucial failure in the money men’s very relationship to what happens on the pitch.

Hopefully it won’t mean Harry Redknapp will be the recipient of pressure from the board because at least a sporting director, in removing responsibility for transfers from the manager, meant that head coaches weren’t subject to bullying from the chairman with an eye on the bottom line. Then again, not allowing the man picking the team to have the biggest say in who is and isn’t in the squad means that clubs can find themselves with shirt numbers to allocate, cash to spend and a general air of panic about how to replace the team’s very heart, as happened with Spurs at the start of this campaign. The faith that must now be shown in Harry Redknapp is crucial.

Pavlyuchenko is a good player, as are Darren Bent and Frazier Campbell. They are not, however, Dimitar Berbatov or Robbie Keane. £50million is a lot of money, but given only a few days or even hours to spend it leads to rash decisions and is not conducive to developing a well-balanced side.

Ramos made some bad choices, that much is undeniable. Poor selection, too much rotation and endless tinkering with the formation unsettled the entire side so much that they have looked like a pub team for large periods of the season. The players must take some of the blame, but the effect that confidence in their coach and the integrity of the people responsible for hiring and firing them should not be underestimated.

While it’s too soon to judge, Tottenham recorded their first Premier League win this afternoon against Bolton. Clive Allen and Alex Inglethorpe were officially in charge, but Mr Redknapp spoke volumes when he said liked to think he had something to do with today’s 2-0 overhaul.

I remain tentative about the future, yet cautiously optimistic that the board appears to have made a very good, if overdue decision.

The first ever black President of the United States

At work yesterday afternoon I was writing the last story for one of my news feeds, about an online video series that has been spoofing the weekly developments in the US presidential race, when I had what can only be described as an epiphany.

It came as I wrote a short contextual paragraph at the end of the piece, something I had put into words seemingly countless times before, when I found myself stopping what I was doing to stare at what I had just written.

"On November 4th the United States will go to the polls in a historic election which could see the first ever black president of the United States."

Those last eight words really stopped me in my tracks.

I thought for a moment about what they meant. The simple, core statement of fact behind them I had written, said and heard in one form or another probably a thousand times ever since Barack Obama decided to stand for the Democratic nomination, not least since he defeated Hilary Clinton and was declared the chosen candidate.

But at about 2.55 on Friday afternoon was the perhaps first time I really had some sense of what they meant. I found myself struck by prospect of what they might mean for America and, as a Briton, for the entire world.

At the heart of it, I think, is that it will show how much America has grown. For all that might be said about a vote for Obama being as much a one for the man himself as it is a vote against eight years of what has become deeply unpopular, almost catastrophic Republican governance, Barack Obama becoming the first black president in American history would be something to be cherished.

If it happens (and I, like many others, hope and almost expect it to) then I shall be glad to be alive to see it. Just as I am thankful that I have never had to suffer the indignity of being considered by great swathes of people, certain laws and, at one time, a national government that I am an inferior being because of the colour of my skin.

I don't pretend to feel empathy with any victim of persecution as I have never been on the receiving end of such a thing, and having never been an American citizen I am not as aware as I might be of the scale of racism and prejudice that sears through American history from its beginnings as a independent nation to the present day.

In light of the obvious scale of sentiment against Barack Obama and black people in general alive and well in America, the fact the country may well be about to elect a black man to run it from the White House seems remarkable, brilliant and astonishing to me.

It would be easy to explain away this piece of history in the making. John McCain is not necessarily a strong enough challenger to the skilled, principled oration of Barack Obama. His choice of running mate was, to many people, a cheap trick which while pleasing a select few has seen many more alienated and further distanced from his message. The legacy of the outgoing president, one of the most unpopular in history, has seen to it than the Democrats were a virtual shoo-in for the Oval Office this November.

All of these things and more may well be true. But the fact remains that a country which once enshrined slavery of the black races in its very laws is on the verge of putting a 'person of colour' into the most powerful job in the world.

I think yesterday I gained a sense of just what that might mean.

Tottenham Hotspur Bullshit Watch - it could become an ongoing series...

After last night's woeful display in Italy, my attention is drawn even further to the kind of rubbish that is currently coming out Spurs players' mouths to go along with the rubbish they're shipping out on the pitch.

Today, my thanks go to first-choice central defender and possibly our most consistent player Jonathan Woodgate for the following slices of fried gold. That's right, not just one but several little gems to share with the world.

On the BBC Sport website today, Mr Woodgate said the players were "one million per cent" in a relegation battle. What, pray, could have prompted this revelatory statement? Was it the fact that in the history of the Premier League only one side has managed to survive the drop with this few points at this stage in the season (Southampton in 98/99, trivia fans)? Who knows, but wait, he isn't finished.

"People say we are too good to go down but we aren't. I've seen it happen at Leeds and they had a better team than we do here". Firstly, no they don't: it's hard to pin down exactly, but my bet is that sometime around 4:45 on Saturday afternon, as the final whistle blew and with that they slumped to a 2-1 defeat to Stoke, people stopped saying Spurs are too good to go down.

Secondly, ten out of ten for the assertion that we aren't as good as the Leeds team that were relegated a few years back. As a fan, I don't know what to take issue with first: a key player, in effect, talking down the squad or the implication that he doesn't much fancy our chances.

It seems that, such is the sheer extent of the mire in which we find ourselves that, unbelievably, our team has actually run out of platitudes and cliches and has now been forced to talk outright nonsense.

Watch this space for more updates on the lengths to which Tottenham players are able to expell hot air in the national media

I remain a faithful Spur and I love my team but this is really trying my patience. I'm on the verge of resigning myself to the fact that next year we will be playing Championship football. And that, sports fans, is what really hurts.

The big match

I write this sat in front of the television, minutes away from Tottenham's UEFA cup tie against Udinese, all the while ruminating David Bentley's stunning assessment, printed in the sports section of the Guardian this morning, that so far this season has been "a bit shit".

Far from questioning such a towering philosophical figure in this otherwise plebian game, I wonder if the utterance of such a damning critique might put the figurative boot up the players' collective arse and force a decent performance out of somewhere. Here's hoping.

Is this the best they can do?

This weekend I saw BBC Switch for the first time. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it's a new 'youth' TV brand on BBC2 on Saturday afternoons, alongside the odd show on Radio 1. Think of it as like T4 but funded by licence-payers money. Or rather, think of it as slightly like T4, but without being entertaining.

Admittedly, at 23 I am a few years older than its target demographic and this might be behind my not getting it.

For example, one of the shows on offer, Fresh, documents the escapades of a bunch of university first-years during their first few days at university away from their overbearing, controlling 'rents. Pondering this show I had to remind myself, to my horror, that the label of 'fresher' applied to me no more recently than 4 years ago, which made me feel quite old and deeply out of touch.

The show could be taken as either an enticement to bettering yourself through tertiary education or a cautionary tale about what you might have to endure - and consume - during university, depending on your constitution.

So far, so ambivalent. Then, then Switch went all Robert Kilroy Silk with open debate show The Surgery. Discussion programmes featuring young people are nothing new. But while I can tolerate the occasional, slightly cringey editions of Question Time where the audience is given over to an intelligent, ponderous bunch of late teenagers, this show went too far.

To summarise, it started badly, before getting consummately worse. While I'm all for covering a wide sweep of society, I found myself wondering if there wasn't some way that the BBC could have vetted the contributors for at least a basic grasp of the English language.

If I had counted the amount of times one audience member used the word "like" in expressing his view, I would have probably had run out of fingers and had to take my socks off to start using my toes. Fortunately the host, in a deft and charitable move, interrupted and uttered something of the lines of: "So, you're saying we’re living in a real melting pot?"

That alone was enough, and I turned off the television. I wondered if the presenter had never seen The Office and therefore not realised that the term 'melting point' is now officially off limits. For good.

More than anything, I was struck by how badly wrong the people overseeing BBC Switch seem to have gone. Young people aren’t all inarticulate yobs who spend their time binge drinking and walking around with the arses hanging out the back of their jeans.

While this may describe the majority (I jest), even the most cynical mind might admit that the efficacy of seeing such people supposedly ‘representing’ their age group would be greatly improved if: a) a half-way intelligent counterpoint were present, in the form of someone who appeared to have completed their secondary education without a brush with the law; and b) the presenter hadn't so readily fallen into speaking in platitudes and clichés to appease the studio audience.

In mentioning Radio 1 and T4, two of the best examples of how to do this kind of broadcasting only serve to highlight in relief Switch’s lack of quality. T4 aims itself at a similar age range and manages to be funny, accessible and not in the least bit patronising all at the same time.

Radio 1 has an even broader demographic and provides news which only occasionally sounds like a spiced up version of Newsround (which is hardly surprising, mindful as it is of its being listened to by a fairly large number of young teenagers). Yet it relies on some solid content, which is the quality of its music. Switch doesn’t have that, but something tells me that this is more than a scheduling issue. To justify its own existence it can’t rely on imports. Instead, it has to do what the BBC is renowned for doing, namely commissioning and producing original programming.

At the moment, the problem seems to be one of approac: not to making youth-specific programming but rather its desire to do such a thing in the first place. I would argue such a specific bracket in society doesn’t actually need its own cross-media brand. It has E4, Radio 1 and a whole raft of things on television and the internet that, while not necessarily made specifically for it, it finds very appealing nonetheless.

On reflection, it seems that BBC Switch is a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.

My appaling attitude to writing regular blog posts

I'm in no doubt that my slackness in writing anything on here for weeks at a time is a symptom of my new job.

For the last four weeks I've been working for a small news agency in Docklands, doing something that vaguely resembles journalism in return for cash, as is the fashion. As enjoyable as the job is I'm a bit concerned with how much money I see drop into my bank account each month, and given that I want to move out sometime in the new year while attempting to save up enough to travel the world some more (my recent winter sojourn to Canada and the US having only whetted my appetite rather than got anything out of my system), I feel impelled to keep looking for something a little better paid.

What my job also means is that I sit at a keyboard for eight hours a day and so, by the time I get home, I can think of very few things I'd like to do less than write.

But I think I'm adjusting. Slowly. I will make more of an effort in future, I promise.

Post-Whistler Blues

A few days ago I was looking at the Facebook page of a friend I had met while spending last winter in Whistler and I noticed he had changed his status, the crux of which was that his Canadian visa had expired, marking exactly one year since he left the country to start the ski season. The note of sadness, present even in such a short missive, was palpable. And with that, it was confirmed: someone else was suffering the Post-Whistler Blues.

I've found myself caught in a mood of longing and nostalgia over the last month or so, something which is not unknown to me by any means, but has been heightened recently due to a couple of factors. After leaving university last June I hardly had time to let my feet touch the ground, as I made a brief return to Sheffield for graduation week before embarking on what turned out to be a short-lived and utterly vain attempt to make some money developing property, back when there was a housing market to speak of (ah, those were the days...).

By this time our plans to spend the winter working in Canada were already in motion. Our interviews took place in July; by the middle of August we - to our utter delight - had been given the ok, had booked our flights, and had already begun getting to know some of our fellow seasonnaires in earnest. By the time September came around the paperwork was mostly in order and we had attended a fairly well-lubricated departure party. I remember looking around the office at everyone present, each looking slightly more giddy with excitement and anticipation than the last at what the next nine months would hold.

The season itself (and this may be just the misty haze of nostalgia obscuring my vision again) was a fantastic experience. Being freezing most of the time was only occasionally tolerable. Being broke was downright shit. But I would not have swapped it for anything in the world. Spending five weeks travelling down the American west coast was everything I had hoped for and much, much more. We returned at the start of June, beginning a relative flurry of events that kept the wolf from the door, disappointment-wise. I did a week's work experience at Empire (brilliant); then my birthday and the attendant festivities came around; then I secured a place on an NCTJ journalism course; then I got some temporary work to keep me in curry and beer at the weekend; then I went on holiday to Barcelona; then I started my new job, which is the first consistent bit of paid writing I've ever done.

And so, about four or five weeks ago, it hit me. I noticed the weather had begun to draw in and not only did I miss being in Whistler I also found a greater-than-expected longing for university because I hadn't really been able to feel that way when I left more than a year ago. It had all come at once. While my visa still has until the end of November to run the point it hardly seems the point, and the process of coming back down to earth after the experience has been tough, the transition difficult.

My girlfriend of three and a half years and I have gone, once again, from living in each others pockets to being more than a hundred miles, several hours and about thirty quid away from one another. My burgeoning career in journalism feels like it’s at a hiatus. The nationals are not exactly knocking down my door. I mean, where are you? Do you not read this thing? Clearly not.

Ok then, morose semi-rant over. I'm fine, honestly. Positivity only from now on.