Sticky Starts

There are bad starts to the season, and then there's 1912/13. Tottenham Hotspur

hobbled out of the traps with 4 consecutive losses (including a 6-1 drubbing at Ewood

Park). The first victory of a wretched campaign stubbornly refused to arrive until late

November, the team's 13th (THIRTEENTH!) fixture of the season. (It was actually their

14th league game, but the home match with Notts County a month earlier had been

abandoned with only 10 minutes remaining due to fog. Spurs had trailed 3-1 at the time,

but failed to make the most of the reprieve, losing the replay 3-0). Remarkably,

Tottenham rallied after Christmas to avoid being relegated alongside bottom club

Woolwich Arsenal. The Gunners managed just three wins all season. Fatefully, they

purged themselves of the experience by immediately relocating north of the river.

Two years later, Spurs were back in the losing habit: 2 points from the opening 5 games

signposted the struggle ahead. 26 points from the remaining 33 fixtures left Tottenham

marooned at the foot of the table. It took four years, however, for their demotion to be

confirmed. Football was suspended at the end of the season as Britain's young men

were dispatched in their droves to die in the foreign fields of WWI. When the league

resumed in 1919, the top flight was expanded to 22 teams. Spurs were not in that

number. The established convention from previous extensions of the division, whereby

clubs who had finished at the bottom were retained, in addition to promoting from the

lower tier, was dispensed with. Instead, the team that had finished fifth in Division Two

were inexplicably voted into the top flight at Spurs expense. Arsenal have remained

playing at that exalted level uninterrupted ever since.

The 1974/75 First Division season saw Tottenham replicate the horrors of 1912 as Bill

Nicholson's charges failed to muster a single point from their opening four matches.

Nicholson - despondent following the violent scenes that had marred Spurs appearance in the 1974 UEFA Cup Final and dismayed by his increasing inability to connect with a generation of players born after WW2 - stepped down as manager, abruptly ending the most successful era in the club's history.

Having bounced back from 1977's relegation at the first time of asking, and acquired a

pair of World Cup winners in Ardiles and Villa, optimism abounded in August 1978. And

then the referee blew his whistle. Spurs failed to win any of the first four and were drubbed 7-0 at Anfield to round off the dismal sequence. Keith Burkinshaw quickly hit his

straps and the team rebounded to finish securely in mid-table.

The Premier League's launch in 1992 was to herald a brave new world for football -

according to its marketing materials and Richard Keys at least. Such notions rang

hollow in N17. Spurs, guided by the unlikely duo of Ray Clemence and Doug Livermore,

got off to a stinker. The team was winless after five games, failing to score in three of

those matches. The signing of Teddy Sheringham - completed with the help of a

£50,000 cash payment handed over in a service station that resulted in a near four-

year-long enquiry into bungs - and the emergence of Darren Anderton and Nick Barmby - enabled Tottenham to course-correct and end the season in the table's top half.

All of which, as you knew it must, brings us to the opening weeks of 2008/09. Two

points from eight games is almost as much a part of Tottenham Hotspur's lexicon as

Audere est Facere. The words have even transcended Spurs. Utter them aloud, and

any English football fan's mind will instantly race to the man with whom they are

synonymous. But let us savour the story. Tottenham had won the League Cup the

previous season under the inscrutable Juande Ramos. The triumph's afterglow didn't

last long.

The team's sublime strike force, Dimitar Berbatov and Robbie Keane, wanted

out. The way their respective suitors - Manchester United and Liverpool - courted the

pair put Daniel Levy's back up. Keane was grudgingly sold ahead of the new campaign.

Berbatov's departure, by contrast, went to the wire as Tottenham tried to extract the

maximum fee. With only a few hours left in the transfer window, Spurs finally sanctioned

the sale on the proviso that United send youngster Fraizer Campbell on loan to plug the

gaping hole in their attack. Campbell joined a team that had already suffered dispiriting

defeats to Middlesbrough and Sunderland before securing its first point of the season at

Stamford Bridge. Home fixtures with Villa and Wigan yielded a solitary point, and two

points from five games alarmingly became two from eight as Tottenham listlessly

succumbed to three of the league's lesser lights, Portsmouth, Hull and Stoke.

Ramos was jettisoned along with Sporting Director Damien Comoli - whose headline

summer signings Modric, Pavlyuchenko, Bentley, Gomes and Dos Santos had all made

stuttering starts to life at Spurs. Having placed great stock in a European style structure at the club, Levy made a handbrake turn. Ramos's replacement was no continental coach; he was a manager, plain and simple. Harry Redknapp had picked his first

starting line-up in the English Football League in 1983 at Bournemouth. Since then,

during six years at West Ham and two spells at Portsmouth - where he won the 2008

FA Cup and received the Freedom of the City - he'd been feted for his man

management, crowd-pleasing football and "tell it like it is" persona.

His impact at White Hart Lane was immediate. With the HR barely embossed on his

THFC tracksuit, Spurs beat Bolton. Next up, his team travelled to the Emirates. It was a

North London Derby for the ages. Ex-Arsenal man David Bentley put Tottenham ahead

with a 35-yard lob. The hosts recovered to lead 4-2 going into the 89th minute. Then

goals from Jermaine Jenas and Aaron Lennon rescued an improbable draw, and

Redknapp's Spurs were off to the races. Liverpool and Manchester City were both

swept aside as relegation fears quickly receded. Redknapp's penchant for self-

promotion ensured that no press conference for the remainder of the season passed

without him referencing the club's plight before his arrival. No doubt students devised

drinking games predicated on his utterance of "two points from eight games". But who

could begrudge him? Eighth place in the league and a penalty shootout defeat in the

League Cup final left Redknapp in plenty of credit. He was primed to build the most

exciting Tottenham team in a generation.

With two points from five games so far in 2026, most Spurs fans would gladly see a

similar outcome salvaged.

Ewan Flynn is the author of When the Year Ends in One: How Tottenham Hotspur's 1991 FA Cup Win Saved the Club and Transformed English Football