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The worst start by Spurs since the sinking of the Titanic... but if this lot go down I don't think it'll cause so much as a ripple.

At least we've now discovered why it took Ramos so long to speak in public. It's not that he can't manage the English, it's just his voice doesn't match his looks. Physically he's one serious hombre, but what comes out of his mouth wouldn't be out of place if it belonged to one of cousins.

Most tragedies work well cos you can see the disaster coming - unlike the people in the thick of it. In Spurs' case, last year's very good Carling Cup win seemed to suggest a top drawer season this year.

However, mistakes have been made. Bloody obvious ones. I mean you could call a meeting with George W Bush, chat to him for five minutes about the rules of football and then ask him if he would sell three strikers who scored all the goals in the last couple of seasons and replace them with virtually no-one, and even he would spit out his bananas in scorn.

I can't think of a worse piece of activity in the transfer market since the Beeb scooped up Vanessa Feltz from ITV. (What a catch that was, eh? She's got to take some landing hasn't she?)

Wrapped up in this sorry saga was Daniel Levy's bold pronouncements about how he was going to resist the tapping up of Dimi, and the bully-boy tactics of the likes of Ferguson. Really.

Until 20 minutes before the deadline, that is, when he caved in and replaced the world-class sulker (I mean striker) with a lad called Campbell. Campbell might be very good one day but the whole episode was like swapping for a pony. What were they thinking of?

No-one's saying, least of all Spurs fans, that you should keep hold of players who are dead set on going, but it might be an idea to have someone in mind to replace the turncoats. It's not like they haven't had time to sort someone out regarding Berbatov, who played the last dozen games of last season with all the enthusiasm of a grounded teenager.

I can't be listening to Levy, any road. He had Ramos lined up when he wanted the Dutch bouncer kicked out, didn't he? The way he treated Martin Jol last season was downright shabby and it's interesting to see that, while Spurs flounder like kittens in concrete boots at the bottom of the EPL pond, Jol's Hamburg are leading the Bundesliga by a point from Hoffenheim (presumably Germany's version of Hull).

It gets worse though, doesn't it? Bent (£16.5m) is keeping Pavluchenko (£14m) on the bench and Juande can't play them together, apparently. Only two strikers and they're identical? Presumably if you ever have brekkie at the Ramos's you can have two things on your toast... jam or jam. It's unbelievable.

Sitting in me humble Teesside home still licking me wounds from watching the usually reserved for lunatic fence-climbers at London Zoo, I can only be grateful to the kind folk at White Hart Lane for making life so much more bearable this season.

I keep seeing sporting director Daniel Comolli's name in the papers and I've yet to work out what the hell this bloke does, except interviews where he says it'll all be fine. Some clubs these days seem to have more layers of management than a flipping NHS trust.

It seems he'll be on his bike, as will Ramos... and I can't imagine there won't be a bloody long line of candidates waiting to replace him. After all, look at the squad... Hutton, Bale, Woodgate, Jenas, Lennon, Bentley, Modric, Huddlestone... maybe even Ledley King if they can get hold of that Eileen Drewery woman quick smart... it's not exactly a bad squad is it?

And of course then you come back to square one, don't you? Maybe they haven't got the gumption to fight for a bloke who helped them earn .

And maybe the manager, for all his and his employers' hopeless faffing about in the transfer window, deserves a bit more spine from his players than he's getting at the mo. I agree with Pulis. They should have the nerve to keep Ramos. They caused enough aggro to get the bloke in the first place.

And it'd be nice, for once in a blue moon, to see a manager fully backed by the club who hired him, rather than pushing him out the door and googling for a few 'resting' coaches to see what they're up to.

I imagine Levy and the board will still be there in a year's time. Cos, as this banking business has showed us, when someone's got you into a blinking mess it's important to trust them to get you out of it.