Jamie O’Hara claims Tottenham sporting director Johan Lange was ‘clueless’ when he worked with him at Wolves and says the Dane should not be ‘making decisions at a big football club’.
Former Spurs midfielder O’Hara, 39, has hit out at the club’s hierarchy amid their alarming slump towards the Premier League relegation zone in recent months, with clips of a despairing O’Hara being wound up by his talkSPORT Sports Bar co-host Jason Cundy going viral.
O’Hara has already made it clear that manager Igor Tudor must be sacked immediately and replaced with either Harry Redknapp or Sean Dyche to ensure the club avoids a dramatic drop to the Championship.
Now, speaking to Daily Mail Sport, O’Hara has taken aim at Lange – who was assistant boss to Stale Solbakken for six months when the midfielder played at Molineux in the early 2010s – and Spurs’ chief executive Vinai Venkatesham.
‘Johan Lange needs to be sacked,’ said O’Hara. ‘He cannot be making decisions at a big football club. He was my assistant manager at Wolves in the Championship. I’ve never even said this, but he was clueless at being an assistant manager.
‘Now he’s the sporting director at Tottenham, making the big decisions at a football club of this magnitude – are you having a laugh? It’s unbelievable that he has got to that position.
Jamie O’Hara has claimed Johan Lange was ‘clueless’ when he worked with him at Wolves
Lange was Wolves’ assistant manager when O’Hara played at Molineux and is now Tottenham’s sporting director
‘Vinai, who is this guy? He’s got to get sacked. If the club goes down they (the club’s owners, the Lewis family) should sell it, but they won’t because they’ll lose loads of money because they’re in the Championship.
‘So, you’ve got to get rid of the hierarchy in charge. You’ve got to get some football people in who know how to run clubs and make the right decisions.
‘With these guys, it’s unbelievable. If you were in any other job in London and you made all these terrible decisions, you’d get sacked.’
O’Hara, who played for Spurs between 2005 and 2011, joked that a ‘donkey’ would do a better job than Tudor, who has lost all four of his games in charge since replacing Thomas Frank. He believes his old boss, Harry Redknapp, is the man to steady the ship in Spurs’ hour of need.
‘You could bring in Harry Redknapp to manage these players, make them feel like they’ve got a bit of confidence, a bit of belief,’ he said.
‘You’d need to have someone alongside him who’s been around the Premier League in recent years to help him with set pieces and the tactical side of it. But for me you can bring in Harry Redknapp as a man-manager.
‘Or you go and get Sean Dyche and you say, “Listen, I’ll give you £5million to keep this club in the Premier League”. Because he’s been around the Premier League in this sort of moment.’
‘I’d rather Harry Redknapp because I know him. I’ve not been in the dressing room with Sean Dyche.
‘When he (Redknapp) first came in at Tottenham, we were in a bad spot. Harry put his arm around the players, told them to go and express themselves, made everyone feel like they were superstars and simplified it.
O’Hara has been mocked by Jason Cundy on talkSPORT amid Tottenham’s poor run of form
Cundy has been wearing an Ange Postecoglou mask in videos that have gone viral online
‘There weren’t any genius tactics. It was, “Go and play, lads. You’re all top players. You’re playing for Tottenham. You’re no mugs. Go out there, enjoy yourselves, have a bit of fight, go and press, go and attack and take the shackles off and die out on the football pitch”.’
O’Hara, who moved into broadcasting in 2021, says it has been ‘horrendous’ to be the butt of the joke on his talkSPORT show alongside former Chelsea star Cundy, who has been wearing a mask of former Spurs boss Ange Postecoglou to wind him up in recent weeks.
‘He (Cundy) annoys the hell out of me,’ O’Hara said. ‘I want to punch him in the face when he’s talking about Tottenham and the way he is.
‘But I also love him because if you’re in a bar and you’re with your mates… they’re the conversations that we’re having. We’re just having them on air and taking the mick out of each other.
‘That bloody mask that he keeps wearing is killing me. But it’s so funny. I think there’s no other show like it, and that’s why I love doing it. But when Spurs get beat, it is torture.’
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