Another open letter to Jose Mourinho

Dear Jose,

In November 2019, I wrote an open letter to you about what you were walking into as a club.

I can say without a single shred of doubt: You f—ked it up.

By now, you’ve removed all your things from Hotspur Way. You’re going to get one hell of a severance package as you leave another club in a scorched earth manner. To be fair, it’s not as bad as a couple of your previous sackings. We didn’t quite get third season “Full Mou” but it was close enough and the crime committed was egregious…

You made Tottenham Hotspur Football Club boring.

And not just boring. Painfully boring. Boring to the point where I dreaded watching every single match, wondering how I was going to force myself to get through two hours of something I suddenly didn’t want to watch. A few years ago, Spurs were the best part of my weeks. I watched as Harry Kane, Son Heung-Min, Mousa Dembele, Dele Alli and others would put teams to the sword and play with a level of relentlessness few teams had.

You took a group of players and made them dull as dishwater. I can forgive a lot of your antics if the team is winning and we aren’t playing a terrorizing style, but this team dropped so many points after being top of the table in the Fall. Did I like the bunker down, counter-attacking style of football? No, but it was working.

When it stopped working, you doubled down. You kept your feud with Dele Alli going, a player who just a couple of years ago was worth as much as £100m and we were worried about losing him to Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, and other mega clubs. Now he’s a shell of himself, wondering what he had to do to break into a squad that could use his creativity in the attack.

No doubt I’m going to hear from you and you’ll prop yourself up in some way. You’ll almost certainly paint yourself as a victim, saying you weren’t supported by ownership or you didn’t get enough time to mold the squad the way you wanted. While there will be defenders, I will not be one of them. I haven’t been shy about wanting you gone for several weeks now as we were bounced from Europa League and we watched any chance at the top four slip away.

If there’s one thing to thank you for, it’s for reminding me how much I care about this club when it’s going through a down period. Through all of the above, all I wanted was for Tottenham Hotspur Football Club to be an escape from my daily routine. I might get that back, now. Chris Powell and Ryan Mason have a week to prepare for a League Cup final that you did help us get to, but I had no confidence that we’d have a chance.

There’s suddenly a glimmer of hope because you’re no longer in charge, and I’m not upset about that one bit.