Danny’s Random Spurs Player Selector

Article by Daniel Norman - Twitter: @dannynormanCOYS

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I recently found my old collection of Spurs Monthly magazines in my Dad’s loft. What a publication that was. Adverts displaying lots of fairly ugly models wearing the latest garish Pony training wear. Hot off the press reports from training ground insiders on our secret Wunderwaffe (that’s Wonder Weapon) Neale Fenn, and if you were lucky, a centre page poster of Chris Armstrong, so close up it felt like the coco-pop on the end of his nose was in the room with you.

This nostalgia made me scratch my chin in wonder at some of those players that you may have forgotten. And yet these were troops we relied on as frontline warriors, at the coal face in our unending hunt for some kind of glory. I don’t want to bombard you so I’ll just throw a few names out there for you to digest, in the hope that you realise just how good we have it now.

Neale Fenn

I couldn’t mention him above and not tell you about this lad could I? I vividly remember his debut. Injuries had ravaged our frontline, and we were forced to bring in the fresh young strike partnership of Fenn and Rory Allen with the daunting task of overcoming Manchester United at Old Trafford in the FA Cup. I had hopes that these two whippersnappers could mimic the journey of opponents such as Beckham, Butt and Neville and become the youth products who would propel us to another footballing dimension. Alan Hansen was right in this case though, you can’t win anything with kids, especially when they couldn’t hit the farm with a shot never mind the barn door. Fenn’s record for Spurs, 11 games, no goals. He went on to play for Peterborough, Waterford United, Cork City, Bohemians, Dundalk, and Shamrock Rovers – as you may expect from an Irish Youth international…born in Edmonton (thanks Wikipedia).

José Dominguez

There’s a link to Neale Fenn here in that they were at the club together for a period of time (and that they both never won a header in their careers due to their diminutive stature). Dominguez was diminutive in the Maradona sense of the word though, a player that when I first saw him filled me with the kind of excitement that gets a young lad begging to be him in Wembley Doubles. With a sweet left foot and a low centre of gravity he was a player who looked to take people on as soon as he got the ball, a real Tottenham player in the Cliff Jones or Aaron Lennon mould. Sadly he never really reached those heights, potentially because there was no room for flair in a team that required grit and stubbornness just to stay in the Premier league. He went on to play for Kaiserslautern, Al Ahli in Qatar, and finally Vasco da Gama in Brazil. Here’s a show reel to pique your nostalgia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH2TIY42AhQ

Ronny Rosenthal

Ah, Ronny Rosenthal. I have chatted to a some fellow Spurs fan’s about dear Ronny and he actually does polarize opinion. My memories are of a player who was both sublime and ridiculous in equal measures, like Heurelho Gomes’ form in his final season as our number 1. Rosenthal arrived from Liverpool not only as our flair signing, but as someone with a cult following. This continued during his time with us with nicknames given such as ‘Fat Boy’ and ‘Tubby’ to adorn him alongside his already established pseudonym of ‘The Rocket’. A player who was as determined as they come, he like Dominquez above always looked to commit the opposition by running at them. The problem with Ronnie was that he never quite had the ball under his spell, hit and miss in in the most literal sense of the word. When he did hit though, he looked like Messi! I have to mention his most famous moment (not the open goal miss for Liverpool), that glorious hat-trick away at Southampton in the FA Cup. 2 nil down at half-time, Ronnie swept in his first from a Nick Barmby cross, and fired in a left-footed equaliser from outside the box after cutting from the right. To extra time and our man sealed the deal with a 30 yard thunder-bastard which flew into the top corner past a helpless Grobbelaar. Sheringham, Barmby and Anderton struck late on to make it 6-2 and the rest as they say, is history.

Bob Dylan once said, “Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.” With Youtube you can though, so here’s that hat-trick to as the end credits to this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29GpwMo0yII

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