David Ginola may be yesterday's musketeer in France, but in America suddenly he's hot. This week, Newsweek magazine's Paris bureau chief descended on the Spurs training ground at Chigwell for an interview.
The L'Oreal haircare advert has made Ginola an unlikely star in the United States. As he passed the plaque boasting that Tony Blair opened Tottenham's new academy in 1996, Christopher Dickey might have thought that all was well with London's most raffish and retrospective club.
Ginola and Chigwell are an unlikely match. Ginola and Christian Gross are also an unlikely pairing. Gross, say the critics, is what Tottenham Hotspur have become: stolid, regimented, joyless, plain. Ginola, say the romantics, is what Spurs always were: maverick, foppish, extravagant and sometimes errant.
Tottering Hotspur face Newcastle United, another creaking, nostalgia-obsessed plc, at White Hart Lane today with just two points and one place between them and the relegation zone. It is not the time to be noticing that the training centre Alan Sugar built near his mansion is not much more than a Ginola chip away from Chigwell Sewage Works.
Against Barnsley last Saturday, Spurs displayed enough innate class to suggest that they will survive a gruelling and gruesome season. Does Gross agree? His answer, before today's match, might serve as a synopsis of his wider doctrines on the game. "Listen, in our particular situation it's more than class that counts. It's the heart that shows. I need brave players, tough players with a big, big heart, committed to Tottenham. It's more important than class. Ambition and desire is what will count for us." A synopsis, but a memo, too, to the grumblers inside his own dressingroom.
The ghosts are gathering around Sugar and his club, Gross and his team - the team Gerry Francis built before he resigned mournfully in early November. As the players squared up to their three vital games against Newcastle, Wimbledon and Southampton, it seemed apt that the guest of honour marching cheerfully on to the Wembley pitch for the England-Portugal match was Bill Nicholson, creator of the Spurs league and cup double-winning side of 1961, the first this century.
The clutch of Tottenham addicts huddling outside the gates needed no reminding that the red enemy from Highbury might just be heading for their second double since the 1970s. Tottenham are no longer the biggest club in north London, never mind London. In the Premiership table Arsenal, Chelsea, West Ham and even Wimbledon sit above them pushing (and possibly willing) them down.
The self-crucifying tendencies of football fans can take on a parodic, hysterical tone. It could be argued that, to borrow a line from L'Oreal, Spurs are merely having a bad hair year, and that tantrums are being thrown prematurely by supporters obsessed with the club's past and so-called birthright. But enough people are willing to whisper that the problems go much deeper.
The neutral observer is encouraged to believe that the club is short-circuiting, like one of Sugar's cheaper Amstrad computers. Optimistic Tottenham fans or former players are about as numerous as Juergen Klinsmann's goals. The club is, the consensus goes, a living parable of what happens when businessmen and short-termism get hold of a sacred tradition.
Here, without comment, is the saloon bar prognosis of the average N17 masochist: The coach is a clueless sergeant-major who picks the wrong team and doesn't understand the Tottenham heritage. He'll be sacked over the summer anyway. The club's saviour, Klinsmann, substituted at half-time last week, is using the place as a kind of gym to get ready for the World Cup; Ferdinand is a decent player but was over-priced and is injured too much; Anderton is a Tottenham type but could hurt himself licking a stamp; Ginola is sublime and is playing the Tottenham way; Campbell is talented but has lost his confidence; and the rest of the squad are an assortment of castoffs and mismatches with great cars and terrible body language.
Oh, and give us players of the calibre of Hoddle and Waddle, not more twaddle. And Gascoigne and Lineker, and Ardiles and Greaves and Blanchflower and all the other buccaneering souls whose portraits around the walls of White Hart Lane are in danger of turning to sepia.
It is the tiny glimpses of things that add up to worrying portents for a club few neutrals would have found reason to dislike: Gross, trudging along troubled and alone after training on Thursday; Ian Walker berating himself relentlessly after making a tiny mistake against Barnsley last Saturday; the players, in the most crucial three weeks of the club's life, complaining to the media about everything from team selection to training routines. Not that they are doing too badly. The latest signing, Moussa Saib, had his Porsche Boxster delivered on time.
The fault-lines are not difficult to locate. Amazingly, Spurs have won only nine of their 35 league games and their goal difference is a poor minus-18. Ginola, a midfielder, is their leading scorer in the league with only six goals to his credit.
