The AVB appointment a Dan Raywood guest blog

It was the evening of my third wedding anniversary when having dinner with my wife (and Arsenal season ticket holder) Vicky that the news broke – Harry Redknapp had been sacked by Spurs.

At first I was devastated. Harry had been a real ‘constant’ for Spurs, signed and managed some great players, overseen probably the best Spurs squad in 30 years and taken us into the Champions League. Not to mention achieving a fourth place, to which us fans were disappointed with.

This to me was a terrible idea, not to mention the following decisions to allow coaching staff Joe Jordan, Kevin Bond and Clive Allen to leave as well. Then I started to think about how last season had gone – I was at the 5-0 win against Newcastle which was the last great result before the season went downhill.

I’ll cite the excellent article by the BBC’s Phil McNulty, where he laid out some of the failures of the management in regard to the second half of the season. From my view, the biggest failings are what our newly appointed manager Andre Villas-Boas will have to correct, but one of the main failings was the refusal to rotate or rest players, despite Luka Modric looking visibly tired and too much reliance on Adebayor regardless of his low scoring rate.

Firstly, I have remained positive yet sceptical about AVB. I see him as a manager who has had a very good grounding via Bobby Robson and Jose Mourinho and who has seen the way management should be done. His success at Porto is pretty unknown, mainly because Mourinho signed a lot of his Champions League-winning team to Chelsea, and AVB arrived at Chelsea without such an impact as ‘the special one’.

His time at Chelsea was unfortunate; he was faced with an old guard that even the most experienced manager would have struggled to reason with. Yes his tactics were a little questionable, his direction is unorthodox and his high defensive line was the cause of some goals conceded.

The fact is that AVB was not given enough time at Chelsea because the fans, players and owner expected results and trophies; at Spurs I doubt he will face such a wall of demand. He will be expected to deliver results; otherwise he would not have been entrusted with such a heavy task.

However Spurs are not expecting to win the league, we expect a top six finish and the return of Champions League football would be a delight, but I expect that this demand will allow AVB to be given time to instil his tactics and signings into the squad and succeed over a longer period.

There were some Spurs fans comparing him to Juande Ramos, I don’t see that – I see a young manager with great ambition to succeed and with a task that can go one of two ways. And there will be no room for failure.

That said, there does need to be some changes and my suggestions are as follows:

1 – Sign some strikers: we looked woefully short last season with loan signing Adebayor, emergency signing Saha and squad player and perpetual bench-sitter Defoe our only available options. We do have Van Der Vaart as an attacking midfielder and this week’s signing of Gylfi Sigurdsson this week will add competition for places and offer a viable option for a 4-3-3 formation or 4-5-1 and to cover the right wing.

2 – Reintroduce the reserve team: this was removed by Harry and led to us loaning our players to lower division teams rather than sit on our bench. A credible argument, but this led to us being under-resourced with the likes of Caulker, Townsend, Carroll, Nicholson, Smith and Kane being on loan elsewhere. The reintroduction of the reserve team will allow these players to play regularly against their peers and alongside established squad players to be match fit and available to play immediately.

3 – Make decisions on squad players: I was happy to see the club make the decision to let Krancjar and Corluka go, mainly because you had to question what they brought to the first 11. More decisions need to be made on the likes of Jenas, Bentley, Gomes and Dos Santos (among others) and decide what they offer to the team. If the answer is nothing and they can be sold at a good price and replaced in the 25-man squad with a young player, then that should be done.

4 – Treat the Europa League properly: Ok so the Europa League is not the Champions League and I had no argument with Harry’s decision to use it as a run-out for the aforementioned young players, but with the right amount of ambition we can win this tournament and what we want is trophies, and a European one would be well received by all in AVB’s first season.

5 – Look at the long term for our goalkeeping options: We have been blessed by the form and presence of Friedel, Cudicini has been a viable replacement and the fans still love Gomes, but we need to look at a 20 something arriving in the next year who will be our next number one. A goalkeeper can take time to settle (see Szczesny at Arsenal, Krul at Newcastle) so having someone arrive sooner to work with these keepers can only be a positive.

I therefore welcome AVB with an air of suspicion – that it may take time to deliver the project and that we may have to see the AVB era as a long-term option. I hope Daniel Levy shares this view.

Many thanks to Dan Raywood a Spurs fan and friend, for his contribution and thoughts on the appointment of Andre Villas-Boas. Also check out his guest blog on Sol Campbell from earlier.