Harry Redknapp was not at all happy with Gary Neville’s comments about Tottenham Hotspur on this week’s Monday Night Football programme.
“Tottenham for 30 years of our lives were spineless and soft, flaky, rubbish, you could be 2-0 down against them and think you would win 5-2,” Neville said in a heated debate with fellow Sky Sports pundit Jamie Carragher.
“That's just the way they were. You knew that one little bump during the game and they would fall over it. They were pathetic."
Redknapp said Neville’s comments were an “absolute disgrace”, sparking a feud between the pair that has continued all week.
Neville continued by saying that the current Tottenham team under Mauricio Pochettino is “the toughest, robust, most resilient” side we’ve seen.
But how does one player who played for Spurs in one of the eras that the former Manchester United defender mentioned feel?
Peter Crouch played under Redknapp in a team that included Gareth Bale and Luka Modric.
Crouch responds to Neville
That team reached the quarter-final of the Champions League in 2011, but they never did land any silverware.
And it’s for that reason that Crouch understands where Neville is coming from.
“We had some great players when I was at White Hart Lane and we had some fantastic times,” Crouch wrote in his column for the Daily Mail.
“Harry did a brilliant job taking us from bottom of the Premier League to the quarter-finals of the Champions League in two years. What we could not do, though, was make the last big step.
“We had a reputation for losing games that mattered and the 2010 FA Cup semi-final against Portsmouth is a prime example. It still grates with me that we lost that game at Wembley.
“When you think we had players such as Luka Modric, Gareth Bale, Jermain Defoe, Ledley King and Rafael van der Vaart, we should really have achieved something more but the criticism went overboard to say the past 30 years had been ‘pathetic’.”
Honest as ever from Crouch.
That group of players should have captured at least one trophy before it disbanded.