Sack him, say the players.
Those delicate little flowers in the Tottenham dressing room who believe defence is what you construct around the garden are upset at Antonio Conte for calling them out. Remind me again which single one of them is qualified to demand he should go?
Harry Kane wants out in the summer anyway. He still hasn’t yet signed on, the power of just a year left on his contract in the summer means Spurs will either have to sell him or risk him running it down.
The rest? Son Heung-min apart, good luck to the flops with trying to even remain competitive without their triple Premier League Golden Boot winner to keep bailing them out. The players want Conte out because if the club were to actually heed at least one of their coaches’ words, a good many of them would be their way.
That they are even in the hunt for the top four is down to Conte - as it was last season. The football clearly isn’t pretty but how can it be when all hands have to be to the defensive pump?
His team need one man fewer in attack and one more at the back because right now, they could muck up a cup of coffee. Critics point to Conte’s decision not to play Kane in the FA Cup against Sheffield United.
But if, as a big six club, you need to send for the England captain against the Championship Blades, then you shouldn’t be aspiring for silverware anyway. Richarlison was bought for that kind of game, to ease Kane’s workload, to ensure that he stopped suffering the kind of midseason injury setback that would halt the club’s progress.
Kane played at Southampton last Saturday. He scored. It didn't stop the backline from self-destructing to share the points, did it? Solving the Spurs crisis isn’t even that difficult. First, they need to decide what kind of club they want to be.
If they want to win now, then they have to get rid of the dead wood and invest further. Continue the evolution. If they want a project manager, then they need to listen when that man is in a strong enough position to advise that they need to accelerate the investment.
For my money, they should keep Conte. Last year was a decent start to the changes needed when £60million Richarlison was signed with £25m Yves Bissouma. They were preceded by Rodrigo Bentancur and Dejan Kulusevski six months earlier. But Spurs still needed at least two new defenders, including a commanding left-sided centre-half. They also need a creative midfielder having never really replaced Christian Eriksen.
To be fair, chairman Daniel Levy has been transparent with fans about Spurs’ limited funds and underwhelming recruitment. But the solution is to go again. After £45m Gabriel Jesus last summer and £30m Oleksandr Zinchenko, Arsenal’s progress was such that a top-four bid turned into a title challenge.
What did they do in this year’s midseason window? They went again with £21m Leandro Trossard, £12m Jorginho to provide experience and £21m Jakob Kiwior to deepen their defensive ranks.
Do you agree with Darren Lewis? Have your say in the comments...
In 2012, when a top-four bid turned into a title challenge for Spurs, Harry Redknapp famously wanted a gettable Carlos Tevez and Gary Cahill. He ended up with Louis Saha and Ryan Nelsen. The solution is to learn from that. To listen to Conte, a winner challenging the people around him - above and on the ground - to be better.
To sack him conjures up images of Gordon Ramsey going into a struggling restaurant, taking a good look around the place and highlighting the reasons why it is going to pot - only for the owners to decide he’s the problem.
Like Mourinho, Conte has won more on his own than Spurs have in their entire history. Firing him would be to plunge themselves even deeper into denial.
Convince yourself that his passionately-articulated words at Southampton were the rantings of a man losing the plot and that would be your first mistake. My Spurs-supporting friends have said most, if not all of what he said last Saturday for years now.
In fact, name one thing that Conte said that was actually wrong? The players are defensively shambolic. The club has burned its way through a string of managers who have raised the same concerns while the underachieving players remain.
Why do you think Harry Redknapp, Mauricio Pochettino and Jose Mourinho were sacked? And what would have changed for Pochettino to return? If there was more money available, Conte would have extended his contract already and would be planning for the long term.
For those with short memories, Pochettino spent the last 18 months of his time at Spurs calling for the same kind of quality in depth that Conte wants. In fact, most of the reporters on the Spurs beat have covered around two decades of the same stories - managers’ coded pleas for more quality, fishing for transfer window bargains and the best players leaving to win things elsewhere.
So much in football goes unchecked because talented men act as a fig leaf for clubs’ failings. Arsene Wenger did it during the lean years at Arsenal. Pochettino did it for so long at Spurs he stopped biting his tongue and Thomas Tuchel did it during the chaos under Roman Abramovich at Chelsea.
Conte is seen as the problem, the firebrand because he tells the truth - a rare commodity in an industry of duplicity and misrepresentation so widespread that great swathes of the public are hoodwinked while men like him are seen as the problem.
Every journalist you know has genuine insight about key stories that bear no relation to what you may have seen in the public domain. Just on Tuchel, the idea that the Champions League-winning German would give up his wait for a super-power like Real Madrid (he is currently learning Spanish) to scrap for fourth place on a limited budget is fantasy.
So, here we are again, waiting for the puff of white smoke to signal the departure of a man who will almost certainly go on to win things elsewhere. Just as the likes of Dimitar Berbatov, Kieran Trippier, Christian Eriksen and five-time Champions League-winning Luka Modric and Gareth Bale did.
Conte leaving might put a few smiles back on faces at Hotspur Way but if you think it will suddenly make them more competitive, better defensively or even make Kane more likely to stay, then I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
