Tottenham finished fourth in the Premier League but will not be playing in the Champions League next season after Chelsea won the trophy and took the last place designed for English teams in the competition. It was a painful finish to the season for the team that at one point was playing the best football in the country and fully deserved a place in Europe's elite competition. The summer was a turbulent period for the North London club as they fought tooth and nail to keep Luka Modric but the problems off the pitch led to an unsettled team and Spurs suffered two thumping defeats in their first two games of the season against the Manchester clubs. But the season turned on in the last couple of days of the transfer window as first Modric was kept and then Emanuel Adebayor joined on loan for the season and Scott Parker was added to the squad to provide the stability needed. Tottenham took off from then on like an irresistible force with Modric running the show, Gareth Bale in devastating the form on the wing and Adebayor looking decidedly back to his best form. Tottenham dropped points just once in 11 games in the league and were sitting pretty at third place towards the end of 2011. With the teams above them dropping points, the talk of a title challenge in the second half of the season really started to get prominence. The game in which Spurs had the chance to really throw their hat in the race was against Manchester City and they came back from two goals down to level the game but then missed a great chance to win it and conceded a penalty deep in added time to suffer a 3:2 defeat. That loss was a real blow and meant that they just need to keep third place in the table. However, the speculation about Redknapp and the England job began to hit the headlines at that moment and Tottenham's form just collapsed. Their season really took a turn for the worse in the game against Arsenal at the Emirates when they were leading 2:0 but ended up losing 5:2. They lost their next two games in the league too and suddenly the Gunners were above them in the table while Tottenham had to sweat about their top-four spot. They never really recover from that slump and were mixing some decent performances with abject ones, like in the FA Cup semi-final against Chelsea when they were emphatically beaten 5:1. They still won three of their last four games to hold to the fourth place but were left ruing the dropped points away at Aston Villa which meant that they would not pip Arsenal for third. At the end that proved a very costly draw and Redknapp faces a very difficult summer when he will try to keep a very good side together despite the absence of Champions League football.
