Brendan Rodgers would be a good Spurs manager – better than most Spurs fans are willing to admit

Brendan Rodgers’ departure from Leicester produced some pretty strong reactions from Tottenham fans.

And they were not positive reactions. Admittedly, few things are positive among Spurs fans at the moment. They are, quite understandably, feeling a bit f***ed off with things and there was an instant fear that Levy will now do something monumentally stupid like make Brendan Rodgers the next Spurs manager.

Rodgers was soon backed in to (an admittedly unconvincing) favourite in the betting with the previous holder of that particular title now seemingly Chelsea-bound instead.

Maybe that’s a part of it. Maybe if you’ve had Julian Nagelsmann metaphorically dangled under your nose it makes Rodgers look quite shit.

A bigger factor is perhaps that Brendan Rodgers is Brendan Rodgers and there is absolutely no escaping that fact. He can be an absolute cartoon character of a buffoon of a man at times and has a catalogue of cringe that few of his contemporaries can match.

He’s also a really good football manager. And one that all things being equal should really be relatively well received at Spurs. He certainly seems a better fit for the club than all these serial winner arseholes they’ve tried recently, whose relentless alpha male winningness has translated into some of the most unwatchable and ultimately non-winning football.

At first glance, he would appear to tick most of the boxes Spurs fans want – although admittedly not the most righteous box of all, which is of course the one marked ‘Being Mauricio Pochettino’.

Rodgers has significant Premier League experience, and relative success with a wide range of clubs. His teams play decent, progressive, passing football of an undeniably Spursish bent. His teams tend to go all to shit after two or three years but that’s also pretty standard now outside (and even very often inside) the absolute elite. Any plan built on a manager staying and succeeding for four or five years these days is already a pretty high-stakes, high-risk gamble. It’s one conspicuously paying off now for Arsenal but they’ve had to go through plenty to get there.

Rodgers also has an unusual managerial CV because whatever may have happened in the end, he can ultimately claim to have overachieved and succeeded along the way at every club. Spurs being Spurs they will undoubtedly test that, but still. His Swansea side were excellent. His best Liverpool side was absurdly good and should have won the league but for the Barclays’ most infamous slip. His Celtic side were conspicuously dominant in Scotland even for Celtic. And Leicester spent almost two entire seasons in the top four and won an FA Cup while sitting ninth on the spending table.

Now these are highlights picked out among the lowlights for sure, but it is precisely the sort of record at precisely the sort of clubs that should make him a Spurs contender, while at 50 years of age he should be entering his managerial prime.

There are perfectly decent reasons why Rodgers might not be anyone’s first choice – we understand that a manager who does well for two or three years before you’re back at square one isn’t ideal – but we must confess to some bafflement at the vehemence of the opposition to an appointment that would at the very, very least appear to represent a reasonable antithesis to the Mourinho-Conte sufferball that has so wearied this fanbase.

Even in the most immediate short term, it would represent something at least. Even if you’re violently opposed to the idea it became immediately clear at Everton on Monday night that ingenious Daniel Levy’s Continuity Conte (Contenuity?) masterplan cannot be trusted with even one more game.

Removing Conte but leaving his coaching staff to deliver his precise football in identically pedestrian and ultimately cowardly fashion has not, it turns out, magically solved things. Cristian Stellini may not have specifically called out Levy but that doesn’t necessarily mean he should remain in the job.

So committed was Stellini to his Conte-lite tribute act he even studiously ignored Arnaut Danjuma and preferred instead to bring Lucas Moura off the bench, with hilariously disastrous results.

Clearly it’s going to take quite some time for any manager to come in an de-Conte this squad. The man’s constant negging and moaning about not getting every present on his Christmas List has slightly blinded people to just how very much in his image this squad has become. He might not have got absolutely everything he wanted, but he got an awful lot. Certainly more than any other Spurs manager in recent memory.

Even had a caretaker manager wanted to move away from the failing and flailing 3-4-3 it was hard to see precisely how to do so with the players available. But Spurs really could do with a manager who will at least try and change the pattern.

And if they can get that manager in now rather than yet again marking time and completely wasting what might very well be Harry Kane’s final nine games for the club, Monday night was a profound reminder that they should do so.

That doesn’t make Rodgers the ideal candidate. His flaws are real and many. But he is absolutely a viable one and probably a far better one than most Spurs fans care to admit.

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