Last season filled every single Spurs fan with an enormous amount of pride. For the first time in recent history, the White Hart Lane outfit had not only managed to keep up with their North London neighbours in the league, but also provide stiff competition in the North London derbies.

So what to expect for the season ahead? A repeat performance, improvement or decline? To examine the potential of the season ahead, I will look at several factors; Michael Carrick, transfers and tactics.

Michael Carrick

The sale of Carrick to Man Utd was the best possible outcome of that particular saga. Now Levy, Comolli and Jol have a substantial amount of money in invest however they see fit.

Putting aside financial reasons, there are still positives to draw from the departure of Carrick. Over the course of last season, it was clear to see Tottenham were slowly becoming more dependent upon Carrick to be the driving force within the team. It was Davids who had this role at the beginning of the season, flying head first into just about everything.

Ultimately Carrick was not able to fill the role that Davids slowly faded out of. Rather than asserting himself in a game he would just float around waiting for an opportunity to find him. What this resulted in was a lot of negative play, with the dominant direction of passing being backwards.

So his replacement seems to be the binary opposite of the Man Utd man; dynamic, direct and no-nonsense. Zokora himself claims that he wants to emulate Roy Keane and Patrick Vieria, how ironic it is that he was lined up to replace both of these great players, but chose Tottenham instead. While Zokora may lack the creativity of the departed Carrick, he does instead posses an intense fighting spirit that will certainly serve us well at the slightly more obscure teams of Europe.

Transfers

When will a left winger be brought in? It seems as though this question has been asked for the last 3-4 seasons. Andy Reid arrived full of promise, but sadly was unable to raise his game, or keep in shape. Zeigler puzzles me, in his first season he seemed like a good quality player, anyone who saw him against Everton will agree. So then why was he loaned out? Back in the squad again for this season, maybe he will show us once again why he impressed so much.

Having seen the match vs. Bolton, the blatant lack of balance on the flanks is worrying. There was no pace, penetration or attacking flair at all, even Aaron Lennon was surprisingly off colour. The need for a left winger is reaching crisis point, and finally, some positive activity is being taken to recitfy this situation, as Martin Jol claimed that Spurs had made yet another improved offer for Stuart Downing. To me, this seems like a good option but by no means the best option.

Downing is a player who has shown flashes of brilliance in amongst masses of mediocrity, but is it enough to justify what is essentially a reported £10m gamble?

But perhaps more important than a left winger is a player who can get the ball to the feet of Berbatov, be it from low crosses or through balls from midfield. That’s why I think one of last season’s forgotten men will become crucial this season, Danny Murphy. He has the ability slice open defences in a Riquelme-esque fashion, and supply the ammunition that Berbatov needs. Berbatov is essentially a Ruud Van Nistelrooy type player who is lethal within the area, as was demonstrated with his excellent close control to set up Defoe for our best effort vs. Bolton and his input into the goals against Sheffield.

Thus far Spurs transfer window activity has been excellent, it really just needs a top quality left winger to top it off.

Tactics

Against Bolton the entire team looked lost, not knowing where each other was supposed to be. There is one simple reason for this; through pre-season the first team played in a highly effective 4-3-3 formation throughout, but then to suddenly change back to 4-4-2 for the first match of the season seems to me to be an elementary mistake.

However, against Sheffield United we saw a different Spurs team, playing in what was a kind of 4-3-3 with Aaron Lennon floating around in all attacking areas and a central three of Tainio, Davids and Jenas. Personally I feel that this would not bring the best out of Aaron Lennon, however it would play to the strengths of our abundant central midfield department.

The most effective deployment of the 4-3-3 was in pre-season with Robbie Keane given the free role and license to roam. While 4-4-2 is the best formation for the current Tottenham squad, it certainly is useful to have another formation which the team are comfortable with, so that a tactical change can be made in an attempt to catch a team off guard and swing the game.

Verdict

So to sum it all up, what are the realistic expectations/ambitions/demands for Tottenham? Well, firstly in the league the least that is to be expected is to qualify for the UEFA cup once again, whereas the highest expectation, I believe, can be anywhere as high as 3rd.

The top 2 will be Liverpool/Chelsea, 3-5th will be fought between Tottenham, Arsenal and Man Utd and there is no reason why Tottenham can’t get a better set of results over the course of the season than either of those two teams. There can be no doubt that losses to Bolton and Everton are major setbacks in the pursuit of the higher echelons of the Premiership, however this can easily be overcome by some positive thinking and not becoming overly negative. i am of the opinion that the return of King will be the Catalyst to get Spurs season going once again.

Now for Europe, this is tougher to foresee, as a lot of it is down to the luck of the draw. In the first round Spurs have been paired with Slavia Prague, by no means an easy team to play but certainly beatable. The nature of the next phase of the competition is heavily in favour of Tottenham, as 3 out of 5 group members go through to the next round so one or two losses-that-should-be-wins won’t matter a great deal. So progressing through the group stages would be a minimum expectation, while winning the whole thing would be an optimistic expectation. However, this may not be such an insurmountable task.

Last season, Spurs showed that they could beat any team, except for those above them in the table and certain Bolton bogey teams, but in the UEFA cup, the teams that would finish higher than Spurs aren’t there at all, leaving just teams of a similar or slightly lesser calibre.

If Tottenham can move on from Carrick, the powers that be bring in a left winger of suitable quality and Martin Jol becomes more tactically astute, then Tottenham fans have every right to be optimistic for this season.