I remember arriving for work on a Monday and one of my colleagues — a lady in her fifties, not a football fan — did the Dele hand/eye goal celebration at me.

Such an iconic footballer. In my eyes, one of the most iconic players in our recent history.

What a glorious player to watch. A player who, when he first joined, was noted for having the fearlessness of youth — in both his creative play and tendency to get involved in altercations — but who had the movement and positional awareness of a much more experienced player.

I remember, in the early days, regularly tweeting things like ‘Dele needs to come off now, he’s done nothing’ only for him to pop up with a late goal and make me look foolish. He was one of those players that often seemed to be on the periphery of a match but then would suddenly come alive and do something that no other player on the pitch could do.

Though I think that diminished overtime — he seemed to become more involved, want to feel the ball more. That was potentially a direct result of him moving from playing from the left (I liked him a lot there) to playing more centrally. He mainly played centrally — and crucially very high — in 2016/17, his most productive season.

Social media encourages ‘takes’, as people clammer for likes, and this has led to an overbearing abundance of definitive statements. Footballers are no longer human beings who have up and down times in terms of their own self-confidence and psychology, have space for improvement in one or several aspects of their game or who can evolve over time and adapt to positions, roles, or tactics. They are either world class or shit. ‘End of’. They should either be kept for the first team or sold to make room for the next signing.

I am guilty of this myself and don’t want to appear above it. I have been very dismissive of Moussa Sissoko and Lucas Moura (and others) – essentially writing them off as assets that are no longer viable, that should be moved on as soon as possible. Sissoko has proven me wrong by showing his utility in a number of ways. Lucas gave me the greatest moment in my Spurs-supporting life; had it been up to me he’d have been long gone.

The point I’m trying to make is that because Dele’s form has somewhat dwindled over time, we shouldn’t assume that it will always be so. It’s so short-sighted to think that this is Dele now, that he will never get back to his wonderful best.

This video is what Spurs’ YouTube channel calls ‘DELE ALLI’S TOP 10 SPURS GOALS!‘. You should watch it, it’s really fun. Clearly it’s missing some important moments but, that aside, what struck me is the number of individual pieces of brilliance from Dele that these included. And some — magic against Man United and a gorgeous finish against Brighton — as recent as December 2019, just over a year ago.

There’s absolutely no doubt that Dele has dropped off — for a whole variety of reasons, but the main one being, in my view, a drop to a deeper role under Mauricio Pochettino — but his level of productivity cannot be questioned, even in spite of this.

These are good-to-elite numbers, even in seasons where he has been perceived to have been ineffective. This is a good player who has been an elite player. He will likely be elite again.

But the thing with Dele is that it’s not just about numbers. It’s about fun. It’s about tricks and flicks and boisterousness and shithousery and handshakes and hand/eye celebrations and what’s your favourite chocolate bar. He’s as inquisitive and ephemeral on the pitch as he is off it.

He is also really fucking cool. There are children who are Spurs fans because of Dele. He only cost £5m (he’s better than Ozil, etc etc). As the piece of commentary from the Wheeler Dealer Radio podcast theme goes: ‘This young man is a sensation, Dele Alli, out of League One into the Premier League’

I have feared that this was the end of the road. I initially wrote this piece as a goodbye and I’ve been feeling quite sad about it. But Daniel Levy has once again vetoed a talented young midfielder leaving and given me a glimmer of hope.

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I tend to write each year about the 25-man squad and the implications of the home grown players rule and how it will impact on Spurs’ transfer strategy. The home grown player numbers could impact on how many signings José Mourinho can make, the nature of those signings and/or the size of our squad for the rest of the season.

The Premier League ‘Home Grown Players (HGP)’ Rule

The misconception about the requirement itself is that clubs must name eight home grown players in their squads. We could name fewer than eight HGPs, but would need to also name fewer than 25 players in our squad — for example, if we only have seven HGPs, we can name a 24-man squad, 6/23, 5/22, etc. 

Remember, an HGP is defined as one whom, irrespective of nationality or age, has been registered with any club affiliated to The Football Association or the Football Association of Wales for a period, continuous or not, of three entire seasons, or 36 months, before his 21st birthday (or the end of the season during which he turns 21). Source: Premier League.

As ever, we will not need to name players who are under 21 on our squad list, so could augment our squad with youngsters. This would mean that we could manage with, say, a 22-man squad with just five HGPs, but would need plenty of under 21 players who are ready to play (particularly if we qualify for the Europa League). For the 2020/21 campaign, players considered ‘under 21’ will have been born on or after 1st January 1999. This means that for the current season we still have a number of ‘freebies’ who are fairly well-known names: Brandon Austin, Gedson Fernandes (if he stays…), Japhet Tanganga, Jack Clarke, Jamie Bowden, Harvey White, J’Neil Bennett, Malachi Fagan-Walcott, Dennis Cirkin.

Remember, we also have some players out on-loan – these players could also have been classified as ‘freebies’: Jack Roles, TJ Eyoma, Ryan Sessegnon, Oliver Skipp, Troy Parrott. More players may well move out on loan in January.

The Europa League ‘Home Grown Players (HGP)’ Rule

The Europa League rules are a little different to the Premier League rules — have a look at article 42 (‘Player lists’) of the regulations. UEFA don’t just want clubs to have players trained elsewhere in the FA structure — they have additional requirements for club-trained players. They want to encourage clubs to bring through their own young players.

If we want to name a ‘full’ squad in the Europa League, we would need at least four ‘association-trained’ players (we currently have: Hart, Dele, Doherty, Sessegnon, Clarke) and four ‘club-trained’ players (we currently have: Bale, Georgiou, Kane, Marsh, Rose, Sterling, Tracey, Whiteman and Winks). Many of these players are on-loan (Sessegnon, Sterling, Tracey), or simply not likely to be selected (Georgiou, Marsh, Rose).

Summary

When we named our Premier League squad list in October, we included exactly 25 players, nine of whom were HGP: Dele Alli, Gareth Bale, Ben Davies, Matt Doherty, Joe Hart, Harry Kane, Joe Rodon, Alfie Whiteman, Harry Winks. If we were to sell or loan Dele or Winks, we would would be able to add one additional HGP or non-HGP without removing any other players from the squad list. If we were to sell or loan both, we would only be able to name a 24-man squad unless we signed a new HGP.

It’s a more delicate situation in the Europa League, though. The bottom line is that, if we were to sell or loan Dele and/or Winks, our Europa League squad would be reduced. We could replace Dele with another association-trained player were we to sign someone new, but we could only replace Winks with a club-trained player (Georgiou, Marsh, Rose, Sterling, Tracey). Of course, we could also sign a non-locally trained player and remove another from the Europa League squad.

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I’ve been openly quite skeptical of José Mourinho’s approach to managing us so far, partly because I don’t like him as a person (I’m doing my best to put that to one side, honest) but mostly because I’ve not believed that he’s yet maximised our potential.

That sounds really stupid when you look at our results (and when you consider that José Mourinho is one of the most successful football managers of all time and I am an idiot with a laptop) but stick with me for a moment whilst I explain what I mean.

The purpose of a football manager or coach – for me – is to make a team greater than the sum of its parts. You could have eleven brilliant footballers, the best in their positions in the world, and they would probably win the majority of their matches because they are the best. But a manager should be able to put them together in a way that makes them – as a collective – even better than that.

Are we good?

I think we have a really, really good team (and squad). I have been pretty big on how good our team is since we signed Sergio Reguilón and Gareth Bale – here’s a clip of me talking about the strength of our team on The Extra Inch back in October.

Maximising potential

The coaching/system/tactics being deployed by a manager/coach should be able to improve the players, put them into a shape that suits them, give them a set of instructions that suit them and, therefore, improve the output. The output could be performances or the output could be points. One would hope that strong performances would ultimately lead to points, and that’s sort of the the crux of this.

A prime example of what I mean is the way Graham Potter has got Brighton and Hove Albion playing some really fantastic football. He has a group of pretty unfashionable players and yet…

Brighton are currently the fifth best team in the Premier League in terms of xPTS (Expected Points). The fact that they are 16th in the actual table reflects a few things, but probably mostly missed chances (Neal Maupay has been especially wasteful). But this also illustrates what I’m coming onto… Mourinho isn’t bothered about how progressively his team plays or how much of the ball they have.

Mourinho is focussed entirely on the end result, and what this means is that we take the most pragmatic route to points that is possible. Graham Potter might have Brighton playing some outstanding possession-based football – football far more eye-catching and impressive than one might expect given the quality of their team – but ultimately they are not getting the points on the board. He’s sort of the anti-Mourinho at the moment. Caveat: I think Brighton will eventually start to improve on how many points they obtain because I think they are playing a sustainable style that does elevate their players. Graham Potter is a very good manager.

This would typically lead us onto the age-old discussion about how accepting we are, as fans, of a style of football that is less easy on the eye. The truth is probably that we’re accepting as long as we’re winning. But I think, even ignoring that discussion, there’s a separate conversation to be had about whether the style is the best way to maximise points.

My view is that the current style we are playing is probably unsustainable – that with the quality we have throughout our side, we should play a more expansive, possession-based style and put the weaker teams to the sword, rather than scraping 1-0s (Burnley, West Brom) and banking on not conceding (Newcastle). Our style puts pressure on the few chances we do get and especially on set pieces (which I’m happy to say we’ve been working on). At the moment, though, with results going as they are, it’s very difficult to argue with what Mourinho is doing. We’re top of the league!

The issues will come if and when the Harry Kane and Son Heung-min hot streaks come to an end because I don’t think – as a team – we are creating the volume of chances that our team should be able to create, and if we don’t have two of the most ruthless attackers in the league taking them, we might find that results start to change a little. But, for now, we can just sit back and enjoy the run we’re on, because everything is coming up José.

I want to also say that I think the low-block-and-counter approach that Mourinho employed against Manchester City and Chelsea – and, indeed, in the second half against Southampton – is absolutely ideal for those sorts of matches. Albeit I would have liked to have seen a bit more ambition in the second half of the Chelsea match.

In an ideal world, though, I would like to see us develop a possession-based model too, for the majority of matches that aren’t against City, Chelsea, Liverpool, etc. How are we going to play against the rest, the majority? I saw some good signs in the first half against Newcastle, but haven’t really seen it since.

Tactics

It’s worth touching on the tactics deployed so far this season, I think. Last season we saw Mourinho play around the with lop-sided full-back formation, but since we introduced Sergio Reguilón, we’ve done away with that. The full-backs start deep, but have license to break forward when they can. Reguilón is ideal for this system, because he has the athleticism to cover the entire flank.

The main innovations this season have been:

• Kane playing deep.
• The back six.

Kane playing deep

If you boiled down Spurs’ identity this season so far to a particular ‘play’, it would be Harry Kane dropping into his own half to collect the ball, turning, and – without looking – playing a perfectly-weighted pass over the top of the opposition defence to an on-rushing Son Heung-min, who has angled a run from the touchline.

Kane has always been a fantastic passer, but we have never before seen it realised in this way, with both he and Son given such specific instructions and being so elite at the particular tasks as to make them endlessly repeatable.

I used to characterise Kane as a number 10 when he played for the Under-18s, and then he has been very clearly a traditional number 9 (or at least a 9.5) for many of his years in the first team. I think the reality is that Kane is such a talented all-round player that he can excel as a 9 or a 10 and can and will do the job that the tactics require.

The back six

The particualrly interesting part of the defensive displays against Manchester City and Chelsea was the way that Pierre-Emile Højbjerg and Moussa Sissoko dropped in between the centre-backs and full-backs to make up a back six, with Tanguy Ndombele then filling in deeper in midfield when required.

This was designed to defend against the roaming number eights that City deploy – Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva – and worked well in terms of restricting their space and movements. It allowed the full-backs to stay wide and defend doggedly man-to-man and meant that the penalty box was so crowded that we were able to block our way to a clean sheet. It then also came into play again against Chelsea, where Mason Mount and Mateo Kovačić played similar roles.

Projects

To finish, indulge me a little as I’ve been busily working on some projects that I want to tell you about. Firstly, The Extra Inch has launched a Patreon. We’ve been able to produce a lot more content that we expected (videos, podcasts, newsletters, live Q&As), plus there’s also a thriving community of like-minded, analytical fans on our dedicated Discord server. We have some fantastic contributors and we make sure that they are all paid for their work. If that sounds like your kind of thing, we’d love to have you. You could always sign up for a month, binge on the content we’ve already produced, and then decide if you’ve had your fill or if you’d like to continue.

Alongside this, I’ve been working on The Extra Inch website for the past few weeks. This includes our new line of merchandise! I’m not going to lie, this has been a bit of a nightmare, and ultimately we are going to struggle to break even given the costs involved, but it’s a way for fans of the pod to be able to have something tangible to say ‘I’m a fan!’. Or maybe you just really like xG.

Finally, I’ve been working with Flav from The Fighting Cock on a non-football podcast called 15 Minutes (With Flav and Windy). We put 15 minutes on the timer and discuss a chosen subject until the timer sounds. Wherever we are at in the conversation at that point, it ends. It’s really fun to do and we think that fun comes across pretty well in the pod. It’s a good time filler, so if you’ve got 15 minutes to fill, please do give it a listen. It’s on all of your usual podcast platforms including Spotify. I recommend FIRST JOBS as a gateway if you want to try it out.

I wasn’t sure whether to do this or not but, after the week I’ve just had, it’s good to get it off my chest. Plus, I have a platform, and occasionally I ought to use it to raise awareness of the impact of issues affecting me that might also affect others – in this instance, it’s online bullying and pile-ons.

It’s been a tough few months. On the 1st October – the day that a clip of a video of me got mass tweeted and retweeted by hundreds of people telling me I’m a nonce, paedo, melt, snowflake, cunt, not a Spurs fan, everything that’s wrong with our fanbase, that I should find a new club, that I should fuck off and die and/or that they’ll celebrate my death – my partner and I were waiting for a paramedic for her dad. That was the culmination of a number of months of him being desperately ill, becoming more ill, and of us helping to care for him, and of me helping to care for her and for her mum (who has also been in and out of hospital). I was exhausted – between giving practical and emotional support to my partner whilst working 10-hour days in my very intense day job, I was feeling pretty high levels of stress. Her dad, Alan, a man who I cared about deeply, passed away four days later. It’s been devastating for everyone. RIP, Alan.

I am kind of used to Twitter abuse (not that that makes it okay) but this was a bit of a wake-up call. ‘What am I doing here? Why am I wasting so much time and energy on this god-awful platform?’.

I adored Twitter – I’ve had insightful conversations and hilarious interactions for a decade. Recently, few conversations happen in good faith: football Twitter is about point-scoring, showing off to the cool crowd and proving what a massive fan you are. It’s about likes and retweets and shoe-horning memes and calling people nonces. I have failed to accept and adapt to this. That’s definitely on me.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have blindly retweeted a two minute snippet of me appearing on a one hour show, particularly when I made a divisive comment within it. I said flippantly that ‘I wouldn’t swap the two and a half years that we had under peak Pochettino for 10 trophies’. And then in my Twitter replies I said 100 trophies.

10 imaginary trophies. 100 imaginary trophies. I was making a point. Of course, if Spurs were to win 10 trophies it would be over a number of years, having built a successful, sustainable team and squad, probably playing good football (because you couldn’t win repeated trophies not playing good football in modern football in my view), creating a dynasty akin to Manchester United in the nineties. That journey from an also-ran to a successful, sustainable club would no doubt be one of the greatest times to ever be a fan of any club, not just Spurs – that’s the point!

For me, it’s always been about the journey, not the destination. Would I swap Arsenal’s last six years for ours because they’ve won some FA Cups? Absolutely not. Many would and that’s also fine. Football fandom is a personal thing. I don’t believe that the point of football fandom is ‘trophies’ or ‘winning’. I believe that football is about escapism, family, friendship, community, values, belief, optimism, culture, history. If football was solely about winning, everyone would just go and support the team most likely to do so, no? That’s what happened at my Primary School in the mid-nineties, when all of my classmates became Manchester United fans and my dad was unendingly proud that I was the last remaining Spurs fan in my class.

Do I want Spurs to win matches? Do I want Spurs to win trophies? Of course I do! To see my club successful makes me incredibly happy. Watching Ledley King lift the League Cup at Wembley in 2008 with my dad next to me made me cry happy tears. But I don’t define my success or my fandom by numbers of trophies (though, again, it’s fine if you do). I desperately wanted Pochettino to win the league or the Champions League or at least a domestic cup – my god, he deserved to achieve his goals because he had us punching so far above our weight for so long.

Alan was a Liverpool fan (from Liverpool) who had followed them loyally since childhood. He saw them win the league in his final year on this planet and, for that, I am grateful. When I mentioned this to his eldest son the day after we lost him, he said ‘but we couldn’t enjoy it together, we couldn’t be there’. He said it with tears and a look of sorrow in his eyes – because winning isn’t the be all and end all – him sharing this experience with his dad would have meant the absolute world. To be sat in two different living rooms, in two different houses, in lockdown, watching apart, was not the way he dreamt it. It felt somehow empty, an unfulfilling experience.

For what it’s worth, I really enjoyed being on the Elite Football Show and I had a great chat with Haider, who seems like a really great person. I nearly always say ‘yes’ when asked to appear on other people’s channels and podcasts – I know they’re normally asking me because they see I have a large following rather than my being a source of particular insight – it’s a way to grow their channel, and I am very happy to help out. He absolutely did not set out to deliberately create this level of controversy – and he had my back by taking the video down (and messaging me support throughout the day that this happened).

Here’s an example of the lack of good faith I mentioned at the start of this piece – the clip was right there, the words that I wrote in a subsequent tweet were right there, and yet I had people telling me over and over that I had said something that I hadn’t. They’d filled in the gaps and created a straw man argument – to what end?

It felt very much like a ‘right vs left’ argument that I see regularly on social media – one side arguing against an imaginary point that had simply not been made because they were so aggressively angry. Why? How had I insulted their values so deeply?

I also saw people saying that I should have just shrugged this all off. Just block and move on (I blocked at least fifty accounts). That if I’m going to say something as outrageous as how much I enjoyed Pochettino being our manager then I deserve everything that follows. It’s an opinion on football. On a sport. A hobby. This is meant to be the fun part of life! I mean, if I’d said something outrageous about asylum seekers or Brexit or Covid – actually, no: I still wouldn’t deserve what followed.

Also, more than one person said that it’s hardly surprising given how I talk to people…

…honestly, I am endlessly polite on Twitter when, at times, I am gritting my teeth. I have never abused anyone. I’ve probably been rude a handful of times across the last decade, we’ve all had bad days.

I initially had some nice tweets back and responded to them, and then responded to a couple of the people who were criticising me. Then the quote retweets with clown and bell emojis racked up. The hundreds of tweets and sub-tweets started pouring in. There were multiple threads popping up across the whole Spurs Twitter community, talking about me as if I didn’t exist – like I was my avatar and not a real human being. Even people I have conversed with on good terms for most of the last decade decided to jump on the bandwagon. I saw people I thought were Twitter friends slating me on threads about me.

I’ll briefly describe what it felt like. And bear in mind the context described above, as I was already under immense stress and so my reaction was pretty extreme. It felt like I was utterly hated. Like I had embarrassed our fanbase. I was a figure of ridicule, I had let down my friends at The Extra Inch and The Fighting Cock and become a laughing stock. I briefly considered closing my account. I just wanted it to all go away. Of course these were irrational, heat of the moment feelings – responding to an avalanche by jumping off the mountain rather than waiting it out and trekking back down. But that’s how I felt.

I’m not looking for sympathy and I’m really only writing this because it’s cathartic. But there are a couple of points about what happened to me on 1st October to clarify, as it’s not nice to see rumours repeatedly tweeted about yourself:

1. After this all happened I was regularly accused of blocking anyone who’d disagreed with me. Trust me, if I blocked everyone who disagreed with me, I wouldn’t have any followers left. I don’t need to justify it, because I can block who I like, but I didn’t block and have never blocked a single person for simply disagreeing with me. I blocked people because – in the midst of an immense pile-on – people were being rude, abusive, quote retweeting to belittle and bully me, tweeting about me to encourage the growing pile-on, wishing me dead (I know) and retweeting a clipped up video (not Haider’s I hasten to add, someone else had made a new version, zoomed in on just me) to ridicule me. Why would I *not* block people that were doing these things? Knowingly and deliberately adding to the misery of my day to score Twitter cool points and then saying afterwards ‘he blocked me because I disagreed’ like butter wouldn’t melt.

One person sent me a very polite DM from their alt account saying I’d blocked them unfairly, they’d only sent an emoji of a clown and they love my account. I unblocked them. If I have ever blocked anyone, it’s for a good reason, not on a whim. It means I don’t want to hear from that person again (for a variety of reasons but mostly abuse, bullying behaviour or racism/xenophobia/homophobia/transphobia/etc).

2. I tweeted as it was all kicking off:

I’ve had people say ‘teenagers and gammons’ was the wrong language to use. At the time I tweeted this most of the accounts retweeting and being obnoxious were called things like LoCelsoSZN or TanguyzTottenham or some derivative: teenagers – or had flags in their names and were calling me a snowflake cunt: gammons. Sure, both are shorthand terms, but it was pretty clear what I meant and I still mean it. Anonymous troll football Twitter and angry shouty sweary gammon football Twitter are toxic swamps that I want no part of in my Twitter experience. I think it was pretty reasonable under the circumstances to be dismissive of these types of trollish, hateful accounts.

To the people who tweeted, direct messaged or emailed me support: thank you, it’s really been hugely appreciated. I have received way too many messages to respond to everyone but it really meant the world to me and I’m sorry to have caused drama and hassle. I’m sorry to have made you feel the need to take time out to send me a message – it was lovely though, and you’re ace.

A bunch of people are going to think I’m a ‘melt’ for writing this. But if I’ve discouraged one person from making a throwaway but potentially hurtful comment online, it’s been worth it. This whole experience has certainly been an eye-opener for me.

What have I learned? I need to remember what football Twitter is now. I need to be a lot more selective about what I share. I need to choreograph my account. I need to save my ‘takes’ for platforms where they can be discussed in good faith (I’m not moving over to Parler, don’t worry).

So I’m going to be using Twitter differently from now on and scaling back my use. And I’m going to extend my Twitter break too. It’s been really welcome. You can still hear from me on The Extra Inch, of course, and 15 Minutes (With Flav and Windy). And you can still email me and I’ll (nearly) always respond.

Let’s end on a positive…