Don't Lock Harry in the Aircraft Hangar

What's especially irritating about events at White Hart Lane is the undermining of my joyful, spiteful assumption that Spurs could be in real danger of relegation. Perhaps the immolation of expectation is a key component to loss in general - "Every time we say goodbye, I die a little" - each departure is a rehearsal for the ultimate departure that we encounter at death. Teary scenes at King's Cross station pre-empt the eventual funereal send-off for the final journey each of us must make.

Now, because of West Ham's own Harry Redknapp I must wave goodbye to the idea of Spurs going down. Redknapp has graffitied a whole new chapter across the biography I had anticipated for him. He is already a hero to Tottenham supporters, in a handful of games he has not so much rejuvenated Spurs as redesigned them.

In the popular 80s TV show The A-Team there was in each episode a mandatory scene in which the hapless gang would be imprisoned in a barn or a workshop only to emerge with a tractor that they'd expertly souped up into an agricultural killing machine like Blue Peter terrorists. "Uh oh," I used to think as a child. "Don't lock Hannibal up in that aircraft hangar - he's a CDT Rodin." Still, week after week hubristic super villains would intern the A-Team in craft-fair weapon's factories instead of simply shooting them in the head.

Harry Redknapp has created this team of Liverpool-vanquishing Euro champs with bits and bobs he found lying around White Hart Lane. "Hang on! If I just put Luka Modric behind the forwards." It's not as if Modric's previous position had been the car park or in the bath, he'd just been deployed too deep or too wide or too something; it's not like Ramos was giving him booze before matches and yawping "Get stuck in mate". Now Modric is again looking like a world-beater.

This is the sort of thing that confuses me in football; was Juande Ramos actually a blithering idiot? A chancer from Sevilla riding his luck making decisions on the roll of a dice and the kinky whims of his missus? No, he was a brilliant, experienced and successful manager, so what the hell was going on? Did Ramos prior to games deliberately unsettle David Bentley, perhaps staying the night at his house deliberately knocking over ornaments and scoffing at family photographs? No, he was probably encouraging and nice.

I suppose in a way it's not that baffling; one could use a Stradivarius to fiddle out Vivaldi or to smash a prostitute over the head - it's not the violin that decides whether to be a maestro or a misogynist, it's the operator. Again we must return to the inherent simplicity within football, a game built around the most basic of tenets - when it becomes over-complicated it falters.

Seldom do I play football on accounts of being a deadly combination of unreasonably proud and rubbish but this week I had a kick about with my mates on Venice beach. "Don't worry Russell," I assured myself joining the other three who were already bounding across the sand, "just enjoy yourself - no one's judging you." With this liberating abandon I hurled myself into a game of "heads and volleys" caring not that I lacked grace, not troubled one whit that I hadn't scored a single head, or volley, just happy to be lost in the simple bliss of football.

"Who cares if I'm not that good? It doesn't make me less of a man, plus no one's interested in me; my ballooning narcissism is not externally validated, other people are more concerned with their own lives and their own foibles and insecurities - so I'm gonna head and bloody volley like it's 1999. That woman walking her dog isn't concerned by my lack of pace, those kids building castles are untroubled by my lack of balance, that man taking photographs of me couldn't give a monkey's if I ... hang on!" And sure enough a paparazzo was, with sneaky fastidity, snicker-snapping every mistimed kick and each ill-judged header.

"Right lads, we shall have to raise our game!" came the cry, heralding a further, presumed impossible, deterioration in my skills. How I'd love to convert these dissonant components into a symphony but it cannot be, I lack the knowledge for conversion and I don't know where the tools are kept. I cannot transform the hopeless into the sublime. You need Harry Redknapp to do that.