The Ramanamurthy Spectrum

The basic point of the protests ongoing throughout India opposing the recently passed Citizenship Amendment Act is that it doesn’t follow the “Ramanamurthy Principle“. Let me explain.

The Kannada classic Ganeshana Maduve (1989) is set in a cluster of houses owned by one Ramanamurthy, where all houses apart from his own has been let out to tenants. His battles with his tenants is one of the running themes of this comedy.

One notable conflict has to do with whitewashing. Ramanamurthy decides to get his house whitewashed, but his tenants demand that their houses be whitewashed as well. After a long protracted hilarious battle (starring a dog, also named Ramanamurthy), the tenants come to an agreement with Ramanamurthy – that if he gets his own house painted, he has to get the entire cluster painted.

In other words, the conflict between Ramanamurthy and his clients had only two permissible solutions – all houses are painted or no houses are painted. All solutions in the middle were infeasible. This gives us what we can call the “Ramanamurthy spectrum”.

Here it is visually.

 

 

The protests against India’s citizenship amendment act can be summarised by the fact that the act fails to follow the Ramanamurthy Spectrum. The act, as it has been passed by parliament, uses an arbitrary criterion (religion) to determine which incoming refugees will be given Indian citizenship.

And the protests against that come from both ends of the Ramanamurthy spectrum. In Assam and the rest of the North East, areas that will be most adversely affected by the act, they want the solution that Ramanamurthy finally adopted in the movie – “I won’t get my house whitewashed as well”. They don’t want any of the incoming people to be given citizenship.

Elsewhere in the country (now I must admit I haven’t been able to follow this crisis as closely as I would like to, since it is very difficult here to separate news from “reaction to news“), the protests seem to be at the other end of the Ramanamurthy spectrum – that everyone should be let in.

In any case, the incumbent government has utterly failed in recognising this important principle of politics, and going ahead with a regulation that is neither here nor there in terms of the Ramanamurthy spectrum.

No wonder that the whole country is rioting!

This year on Spotify

I’m rather disappointed with my end-of-year Spotify report this year. I mean, I know it’s automated analytics, and no human has really verified it, etc.  but there are some basics that the algorithm failed to cover.

The first few slides of my “annual report” told me that my listening changed by seasons. That in January to March, my favourite artists were Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd, and from April to June they were Becky Hill and Meduza. And that from July onwards it was Sigala.

Now, there was a life-changing event that happened in late March which Spotify knows about, but failed to acknowledge in the report – I moved from the UK to India. And in India, Spotify’s inventory is far smaller than it is in the UK. So some of the bands I used to listen to heavily in the UK, like Black Sabbath, went off my playlist in India. My daughter’s lullaby playlist, which is the most consumed music for me, moved from Spotify to Amazon Music (and more recently to Apple Music).

The other thing with my Spotify use-case is that it’s not just me who listens to it. I share the account with my wife and daughter, and while I know that Spotify has an algorithm for filtering out kid stuff, I’m surprised it didn’t figure out that two people are sharing this account (and pitched us a family subscription).

According to the report, these are the most listened to genres in 2019:

Now there are two clear classes of genres here. I’m surprised that Spotify failed to pick it out. Moreover, the devices associated with my account that play Rock or Power Metal are disjoint from the devices that play Pop, EDM or House. It’s almost like Spotify didn’t want to admit that people share accounts.

Then some three slides on my podcast listening for the year, when I’ve overall listened to five hours of podcasts using Spotify. If I, a human, were building this report, I would have dropped this section citing insufficient data, rather than wasting three slides with analytics that simply don’t make sense.

I see the importance of this segment in Spotify’s report, since they want to focus more on podcasts (being an “audio company” rather than a “music company”), but maybe something in the report to encourage me to use Spotify for more podcasts (maybe recommending Spotify’s exclusive podcasts that I might like, be it based on limited data?) might have helped.

Finally, take a look at my our most played songs in 2019.

It looks like my daughter’s sleeping playlist threaded with my wife’s favourite songs (after a point the latter dominate). “My songs” are nowhere to be found – I have to go all the way down to number 23 to find Judas Priest’s cover of Diamonds and Rust. I mean I know I’ve been diversifying the kind of music that I listen to, while my wife listens to pretty much the same stuff over and over again!

In any case, automated analytics is all fine, but there are some not-so-edge cases where the reports that it generates is obviously bad. Hopefully the people at Spotify will figure this out and use more intelligence in producing next year’s report!

Gults and Grammar

Back in IIT, it was common to make fun of people from Andhra Pradesh for their poor command over the English language. It was a consequence of the fact that JEE coaching is far more institutionalised in that (undivided) state, because of which people come to IIT from less privileged backgrounds (on average) than their counterparts in Karnataka or Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra.

Now, in hindsight, making fun of people’s English doesn’t sound particularly nice, but sometimes stories come up that make it incredibly hard to resist.

This one is from Matt Levine’s newsletter. And it is about an insider trading ring. This is a quote that Levine has quoted in his newsletter (pay attention to the names):

According to the SEC’s complaint, Janardhan Nellore, a former IT administrator then at Palo Alto Networks Inc., was at the center of the trading ring, using his IT credentials and work contacts to obtain highly confidential information about his employer’s quarterly earnings and financial performance. As alleged in the complaint, until he was terminated earlier this year, Nellore traded Palo Alto Networks securities based on the confidential information or tipped his friends, Sivannarayana Barama, Ganapathi Kunadharaju, Saber Hussain, and Prasad Malempati, who also traded.

The SEC’s complaint alleges that the defendants sought to evade detection, with Nellore insisting that the ring use the code word “baby” in texts and emails to refer to his employer’s stock, and advising they “exit baby,” or “enter few baby.” The complaint also alleges that certain traders kicked back trading profits to Nellore in small cash transactions intended to avoid bank scrutiny and reporting requirements. After the FBI interviewed Nellore about the trading in May, he purchased one-way tickets to India for himself and his family and was arrested at the airport.

You can look at Levine’s newsletter to understand his take on the story (it’s towards the bottom), but what catches my eye is the grammar. I think it is all fine to refer to the insider-traded stock as a “baby”, but at least be grammatically correct about it!

“Enter few baby” is so obviously grammatically incorrect (it’s hard to even be a typo) that when intercepted by someone like the SEC, it would immediately send alarm bells ringing. Which is what I suppose possibly happened.

So my take on this case is – don’t insider  trade, but even if you do, be grammatical about your signals. If you’re so obviously grammatically wrong, it is easy for whoever intercepts your chats to know you’re up to something fishy.

But then if you’re gult..

Fancy stuff leads to more usage

A couple of months back, I decided to splurge a bit and treat myself to a pair of AirPods. Not the Pro version, which hadn’t yet been released, but this was the last generation. For someone who had hardly ever bought earphones in life (mostly using the ones that came bundled with phones), and for someone who would incessantly research before buying electronics, this counted as an impulse purchase.

A few months back a friend had told me that he had researched all the earphones in the market, and concluded that the best one for making calls is the AirPods. As it happens, he has an Android phone, and so decided it’s not worth it in the absence of an iPhone. And when he told me this, I figured that with an all-Apple lineup of devices, this is something I should seriously consider.

In the past I’d never been that much of a earphone user, mostly using them to listen to music when seated with my laptop outdoors. I hardly ever used them with my phone (a cable jutting out of the pocket was cumbersome). Based on that rationale, when I was in the market for a pair last year, I ended up buying a random cheap pair.

What my AirPods have shown me is that having a good device makes you use it so much more.

The UX on the AirPods is excellent and intuitive. Right now, for example, they’re connected to my laptop as I listen to music while writing this. If I were to get a call right now, I can very quickly switch them to pair with my phone, and talk on. And then after the call it’s two clicks to get them back to pair with the laptop.

This kind of experience is something that cannot be quantified, and because you cannot quantify and compare this across competing devices, in deep research you can miss out on this. This is one of those points that Rory Sutherland makes in Alchemy, which I read last month. And you fail to appreciate things like experience until you have really experienced it.

The amazing UX on the AirPods, not to talk about the great sound, means that I’ve, in a month, used them far more than I’d use other earphones in a year. Even when alone at home, I don’t blast music on my computer now – it’s always through the AirPods. I sometimes wear them while going on walks (though long walks are reserved for introspection with nothing streaming through my ears).

I was in Mumbai on Tuesday, and on the flight on both ways, I listened to podcasts using the AirPods. I’m surprised I had never thought of the idea before – it’s incredibly neat since you can close your eyes and listen, and sleep at your leisure. On commutes between meetings in Mumbai, I listened to podcasts in taxis. And so on.

So this is a learning for the next time – when I’m researching for a product that I think I may not use frequently, I need to keep in mind that if I like it I will use it far more than whatever it replaces. And if that is going to make my life better, the premium I would have paid for it will be really really worth it.

Oh, and coming back to AirPods, one question I keep getting is if they’re easy to lose. Based on the evidence so far, the biggest risk on that count is the daughter running off with one or both of them and misplacing them somewhere!

More On Direct Listings

Regular long-time readers of this blog might know that I’m not a big fan of IPO pops (I’ve written about them at least four times so far: one, two, three and four). You can think of this as Number Five, though this is specifically about Direct Listings.

In case you don’t have patience to click through and read my posts, what is the big deal about direct listings? And what is the problem with traditional IPOs? To put it simply, companies looking to raise capital through IPOs are playing a one-time game (you only do an IPO once), while companies that are investing in them are playing a repeated game (they participate in pretty much every IPO that comes on the market – ok may be not WeWork).

This means that investment banks, which stand between the buyer and the seller in such cases, have an incentive to structure the deal to favour the (repeated) buyers, and they price the IPO conservatively. This means that when the company actually lists on the market, it usually does so at a price higher than the IPO price, resulting in a quick win for the IPO investors.

This is injurious for the original investors in the company (founders, VCs, employees) since they are “leaving money on the table”. A pop of 10-20% is considered fair game (a price for the uncertainty on how the market will react to the IPO), but when MakeMyTrip lists 60% higher, or Beyond Meat lists 160% up, it is a significant loss to the early shareholders.

Over the last few months (possibly after the Beyond Meat IPO), Silicon Valley has woken up to this problem of the IPO pop, and suggested that the middleman (equity capital markets divisions of investment banks) be disintermediated from the IPO process. And their vehicle of choice for disintermediation is the direct listing.

A direct listing is what it is. Rather than raising fresh capital from the market, the company picks an auspicious date and declares that on that date its stock will list on the exchanges. The opening auction in the exchange on that day sets what is effectively the IPO price, and the company is public just like that.

Spotify was among the first well-known companies in recent times to do a direct listing, when it went public in 2018. Earlier this year, Slack did a direct listing as well. Here is Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley (a venture capitalist) on the benefits of a direct listing.

Direct Listing is all well and good when a company doesn’t have to raise capital. The question is how do you go public while at the same time raising capital (which is what a traditional IPO does)? Slack and Spotify were able to do the direct listing because they didn’t want capital from the IPOs – they just wanted to offer liquidity to their investors.

The New York Stock Exchange thinks it can be done, and has proposed a product where companies can use the opening daily auction to price the new shares being offered. There are issues, of course, about things like supply of shares, lock-ups, price support and so on, but the NYSE thinks this can be done.

NYSE’s President Stacey Cunningham recently appeared on the a16z podcast (again run by a VC, notice!) and spoke eloquently about the benefits of direct listing.

The SEC (stock regulator in the US) isn’t very happy with the proposal, and rejected it. Traditional bankers are not happy with the NYSE’s proposal, either, and continue to find problems with it (my main source of this angst is Matt Levine, who is a former ECM Banker and who thus has solid reasons as to why ECM Bankers should exist). In any case, the NYSE has refiled its proposal.

So what is the deal with direct listings?

In a way, you can think about them as a way to simply disintermediate the market. The ECM Banker, after all, is a middleman who stands between the buyer (IPO investor) and seller (company raising capital), helping them come up with a smooth deal, for a fee. The process has been set for about 40 years now, and has become so stable that the sellers think it has become unfair to them. And so there is the backlash.

Until now, the sellers were all independent entities with their own set of investors, and so they were unable to coordinate and express their displeasure with the IPO process. The buyers, on the other hand, play the game repeatedly, and can thus coordinate among themselves and with the middlemen to give themselves a sweet deal.

The development in this decade is that the same set of VC investors invest in a large number of go-to-public companies, and so suddenly you have sellers who are present across deals, and that has changed the game in a sense. And so direct listings are on every tech or investing podcast.

Among the things I wrote in my book (which came out a bit over two years ago) is that one important role that middlemen play is to reduce uncertainty and volatility in the market.

One concern with direct listings is that there can be a wide variation in the valuations by different players in the market, and the opening auction is not an efficient enough process to resolves all these variations. The thing with the Spotify and Slack listings was that there was a broad consensus on the valuation of these companies (more in line with public company valuations), a set of investors who wanted to get in and a set of investors who wanted to get out. And so it all went smoothly.

But what do you do with something like WeWork? The problem with private market valuations is that with players like SoftBank, they can be well divorced from market realities. In WeWork’s case, the range of IPO valuations that came up differed by an order of magnitude. And that kind of difference is not usually reconcilable in one normal opening auction (imagine a bid of 8 billion and an ask of 69 billion, and other numbers somewhere in between) without massive volatility going forward. In that sense, the attempted traditional IPO did a good job of understanding demand and supply and just declaring “no deal”. “No deal” is usually not an option when you do a direct listing.

OK I’ve written a lot I know (this is already 2X the length of my usual blog posts), so what do I really think about IPOs? I think all this talk about direct listings will shift the market ever so slightly in favour of the sellers. Companies will follow a mixed strategy – well known companies (consumer brands, mostly) with stable valuations will go for direct listings. Less well known companies, or those with unstable valuations will go for IPOs.

And in the latter case, I predict that we will move closer to a Dutch auction (like what Google did) among the investors rather than the manual allocation process that ECM bankers indulge in nowadays. It will have the benefit of large blocks being traded at time zero, at a price considered fair by everyone, and hopefully low volatility.

Uber in Mumbai

I’m writing this from the Terminal 2 Lounge of Mumbai International Airport. I was in the city for a day of meetings today, and I’m glad I stuck to my policy of booking outgoing flights only from Terminal 2. I just can’t imagine spending an hour and a half (the length of my flight delay) waiting in the bus stand that is Terminal 1.

It was one of those visits where I’d bunched together several different meetings with several agendas (or should it be agendae?), which meant that I took a lot of cabs. All my cab rides here were through Uber. Some pertinent observations.

  • Whoever decided that the WagonR is a good car to be a taxi? It may be a great own-drive vehicle, but the back seat is significantly inferior to the kind of back seats you’re generally used to in cabs.
  • Except for the first and last trips of the day, I was forced to take the aforementioned WagonRs. in Bangalore, I instinctively book Uber Premium, and am usually rewarded with sedans (Etios or Swift DZire) driven by drivers with high ratings. In fact, in Bangalore, Uber sedans are so liquid that you sometimes get them even when you book an UberGo.

    Not the case in Mumbai. Liquidity of sedans is far far inferior to WagonRs. Once today, the sedan waiting time was 15 minutes (and only one was nearby) while hatchbacks were plentiful around, and one materialised in two minutes. The other occasions I checked and simply booked WagonRs.

  • On the one occasion when I waited for a long time for a sedan to appear, and then cancelled and booked a WagonR, I was thankful I did so since the route involved some impossibly narrow roads (this was after Uber had failed to recognise a one way road)
  • In general, all the drivers I encountered today (I did five trips in total) were rather professional. Arrived and drove quietly. Air-conditioners always switched on. No calls either to me or anyone else. Occasional polite conversation. This was very different from my experience with Ubers in Mumbai on my earlier visits this year, when I encountered paan-stained cars, nonstop chattering on mobile phones and a driver who gave me a virus.
  • Both in Bangalore (on the way to the airport this morning) and in Mumbai (on the sea link), the taxi drivers hadn’t installed FASTAG. The former resulted in significant delays, and my reaching the gate just in time to board my flight.

 

The Yegnanarayana Problem

Bayya Yegnanarayana (“Yeggi”) was a professor of Computer Science at IIT Madras. Among other things, he taught a course on Speech Technology that I happened to take in 2003. He taught us well, and I learnt a lot in that course, but there is one thing that I remember from it.

We developed the technology to recognise speech (artificial neural networks and a precursor to deep learning, I realise in hindsight) all those years ago, said Yeggi, but people told us then that our computers are not fast enough to recognise speech. It has been so many years since then, and computers are an order of magnitude faster than they were when this technology was developed, but we are no closer to getting computers to recognise speech, he went on. He also added that leave alone recognising speech, we can’t even get computers to convert text to speech.

A year later, I graduated. A year after that, Yeggi retired from IITM and moved to IIIT Hyderabad. Computers continued to become faster. And then less than five years later, computers became fast enough that deep learning became a thing. Now deep learning is everywhere, and speech recognition is so commonplace that leave alone computers, most smartphones can support it.

I don’t know what Yeggi tells his students at IIIT nowadays.

Now, I don’t intend to pick on Yeggi. He was a wonderful teacher, and I learnt a lot in that speech technology course. However, I want to associate his name to the kind of lament that comes just before something hits a point of inflexion, where there has been slow and steady progress for a long time, but without bearing fruit (yet), and then suddenly progress happens.

This is not limited to technology alone. It happens everywhere. You want to get somewhere and you come up with a process to get there. You diligently follow the process but nothing happens, for a while. And then sometimes, rather than keeping at it, you give up, and then you see progress would have happened.

Inflexion points are everywhere. The problem is that you don’t know when they will occur. The best you can do is to get together as a group and follow the process.

Changing game

Yesterday we reconnected Netflix after having gone off the platform for a month – we had thought we were wasting too much time on the platform, and so pulled the plug, until the paucity of quality non-sport content on our other streaming platforms forced us to return.

The first thing I did upon reconnecting Netflix was watching Gamechangers, a documentary about the benefits of vegan food, which had been recommended to me by a couple of business associates a few weeks back.

The documentary basically picks a bunch of research that talks about the benefits of plant-based food and staying away from animal-based food. The key idea is that animals are “just middlemen of protein”, and by eating plants we might be going straight to source.

And it is filled with examples of elite athletes and strong-persons who have turned vegan, and how going vegan is helping them build more stamina and have better health indicators, including the length and hardness of erections.

The documentary did end up making me feel uncomfortable – I grew up vegetarian, but for the last 7-8 years I’ve been eating pretty much everything. And I’ve come to a point of life where I’m not sure if I’ll get my required nutrient mix from plant-based foods only.

And there comes this documentary presenting evidence upon evidence that plant based foods are good, and you should avoid animal based food if you want your arteries to not be clogged, to keep your stamina high, and so on. There were points during the documentary where I seriously considered turning vegetarian once again.

Having given it a day, I think the basic point of the documentary as I see it is that, ceteris paribus, a plant based diet is likely to keep you healthier and fitter than an animal-based diet. But then, ceteris is not paribus.

The nutrient mix that you get from the sort of vegetarian diet that I grew up on is very different from the nutrient mix you get from a meat-based diet. Some of the examples of vegan diets shown in the documentary, for example, rely heavily on mock meats (made with soybean), which have a similar nutritional profile to meats they are meant to mock. And that is very different from the carb-fests that south indian vegetarian food have turned into.

So for me to get influenced by the documentary and turn back vegetarian (or even vegan, which I’d imagine will be very hard for me to do), I need to supplement my diet with seemingly unnatural foods such as “mock meat” if I need to get the same nutritional balance that I’ve gotten used to of late. Simply eliminating all meat or animal based products from my diet is not going to make me any more healthier, notwithstanding what the documentary states, or what Virat Kohli does.

In other words, it seems to me that getting the right balance of nutrients is a tradeoff between eating animal-based food, and eating highly processed unnatural food (mock meat). And I’m not willing to switch on that yet.

Why Mourinho failed at ManYoo

Yesterday, Baada and I decided to try and record one of our recent WhatsApp conversations and release it as a podcast. I was in charge of tech, and I messed up massively. I was using Skype, and for whatever reason, it appears that my phone picked the microphone input from the phone itself and not from the AirPods I was using, so my voice came very faintly. Baada’s voice came well, though.

Leading up to the podcast, both of us had done our homework, so it’s a pity that it didn’t come out well and we can’t release it. The topic of the podcast was what kind of strategy, tactics and formations Jose Mourinho will use at Spurs. As part of our preparation, we had looked at the formations that he had used in each of his previous six clubs (Porto, Chelsea (1), Inter, Real Madrid, Chelsea (2) and Manchester United). There was one clear trend.

There are a number of positions that Mourinho prefers, and we were able to identify players in his first five clubs who occupied that position. And when it came to ManYoo, we drew a blank. This happened repeatedly as we talked through his possible formations and possible personnel to use at Spurs.

For example, Mourinho has a history of playing a Number Ten, and giving him a largely free role, encouraging him to get forward and score. Deco at Porto, Lampard at Chelsea 1, Sneijder at Inter, Ozil at Madrid, Hazard at Chelsea 2. And nobody at ManYoo! Through the Mourinho years, ManYoo didn’t have a proper Number Ten (and they don’t have one now) – it’s almost like a Number Ten wasn’t part of the ManYoo school of playing.

Then, people like to talk about Mourinho parking the bus, but an interesting feature of his game is that he uses a defensive midfielder who is good on the ball. Costinha at Porto. Makelele at Chelsea (he’s not that ultra-defensive midfielder commentators make him out to be – read Michael Cox’s Mixer to know more about him). Motta, Cambiasso and Zanetti at Inter. Xabi Alonso at Madrid. Nemanja Matic at Chelsea the second time round.

And again ManYoo didn’t have a comparable player. Mourinho took Matic along, but he didn’t do particularly well there (maybe he was past his prime?).

Then Mourinho likes a box-to-box midfielder who doesn’t mind doing dirty work. Essien in Chelsea 1, Khedira at Real. Ramires in Chelsea 2. Again ManYoo lacked such a player by the time Mourinho arrived (had he taken over earlier, maybe he might have used Paul Scholes in the role).

You can go on.

The remarkable thing is that Spurs actually have good personnel for most of the roles that Mourinho likes. They have an excellent Number Nine in Harry Kane. Dele Alli, Christian Eriksen and Hyong-Min Son are all capable of being the Number Ten (Alli is most likely to play there). Moussa Sissoko will be the box-to-box hardworking midfielder. Harry Winks can actually play the ball from central midfield. And so on.

So I expect Mourinho to do better with Spurs than he did with Manyoo. Even if he doesn’t have the budget to buy players of his choice in the next window.

Spurs right to sack Pochettino?

A few months back, I built my “football club elo by manager” visualisation. Essentially, we take the week-by-week Premier League Elo ratings from ClubElo and overlay it with managerial tenures.

A clear pattern emerges – a lot of Premier League sackings have been consistent with clubs going down significantly in terms of Elo Ratings. For example, we have seen that Liverpool sacked Rafa Benitez, Kenny Dalglish (in 2012) and Brendan Rodgers all at the right time, and that similarly Manchester United sacked Jose Mourinho when he brought them back to below where he started.

And now the news comes in that Spurs have joined the party, sacking long-time coach Mauricio Pochettino. What I find interesting is the timing of the sacking – while international breaks are usually a popular time to change managers (the two week gap in fixtures gives a club some time to adjust), most sackings happen in the first week of the international break.

The Pochettino sacking is surprising in that it has come towards the end of the international break, giving the club four days before their next fixture (a derby at the struggling West Ham). However, the Guardian reports that Spurs are close to hiring Jose Mourinho, and that might explain the timing of the sacking.

So were Spurs right in sacking Pochettino, barely six months after he took them to a Champions League final? Let’s look at the Spurs story under Pochettino using Elo ratings. 

 

 

 

 

Pochettino took over in 2014 after an underwhelming 2013-14 when the club struggled under Andre Villas Boas and then Tim Sherwood. Initially, results weren’t too promising, as he took them from a 1800 rating down to 1700.

However, chairman Daniel Levy’s patience paid off, and the club mounted a serious challenge to Leicester in the 2015-16 season before falling away towards the end of the season, finishing third behind Arsenal. As the Elo shows, the improvement continued, as the club remained in Champions League places through the course of Pochettino’s reign.

Personally, the “highlight” of Pochettino’s reign was Spurs’ 4-1 demolition of Liverpool at Wembley in October 2017, a game I happened to watch at the stadium. And as per the Elo ratings the club plateaued shortly after that.

If that plateau had continued,  I suppose Pochettino would have remained in his job, giving the team regular Champions League football. This season, however, has been a disaster.

Spurs are 13 points below what they had scored in comparable fixtures last season, and unlikely to finish in the top six even. Their Elo has also dropped below 1850 for the first time since 2016-17. While that is still higher than where Pochettino started off at, the precipitous drop in recent times has meant that the club has possibly taken the right call in sacking Pochettino.

If Mourinho does replace him (it looks likely, as per the Guardian), it will present a personal problem for me – for over a decade now, Tottenham have been my “second team” in the top half of the Premier League, behind Liverpool. That cannot continue if Mourinho takes over. I’m wondering who to shift my allegiance to – it will have to be either Leicester or (horror of horrors) Chelsea!