Juande Ramos: We are in a relegation dogfight

Juande Ramos yesterday compared Tottenham's season to the stock market crash-and admitted his blue-chip side are not too good to go down.

The Spaniard's boom and bust year in England has seen his team win the Carling Cup before sliding to the bottom of the Premier League without a win in seven games. And he takes them to fellow strugglers Stoke tomorrow in a clash he admitted is already a six-pointer.

He is set to call upon captain Ledley King for a rare Premier League appearance and could drop playmaker Luka Modric.

But despite claiming he will see out his contract until 2011, Ramos admitted his team needed a quick bounce to avoid the fate of some big-name banks in these turbulent times.

"Football is similar to the markets," he said. "It is possible to go down and up. We hope the markets change and go up. Are we in a relegation battle? This is the situation." Spurs have spent a staggering £140m on players in the last three windows, although they have yet to recover from the £50m double sale of strikers Dimitar Berbatov and Robbie Keane this summer.

And Ramos sees a squad full of millionaire internationals as no guarantee against the drop.

"If we can't win matches, then we can't say we are too good," said the winner of two UEFA Cups with Sevilla.

'We need to score goals and we need the strikers to score. If we can't score, we can't win. It's a good squad but we need to improve to win matches.

"We have to show we are worthy to stay up. If we are not winning, then it does not count for anything.

"In this moment, we are in the relegation zone. We need to work very hard to go up in the table."

The Britannia Stadium is a testing venue to relaunch a season teetering on freefall. To cope with Potters' direct approach, Ramos will deploy King despite Spurs facing a UEFA Cup tie in midweek.

It shows how worried Ramos is that he is wheeling out the crocked England defender for this game.

"With his knee injury, it's only possible to play every two or three weeks," said the Spaniard. "What can I do if he's not in condition to play?"

With Modric still to acclimatise to the hurly-burly of the Premier League, he could be rested. "He has played two games with Croatia, so I will have to make a decision," Ramos said.

But the Spaniard also admitted his side could not outfight Stoke tomorrow, while admitting they were better suited to "other big clubs".

He added: "To win matches you need to play football. Fighting is difficult because Stoke are physically very strong. We need to play football. It is curious because the best match for us was against Chelsea. It was 1-1 at Stamford Bridge.

"We play with smaller teams and lose. I think at the moment I prefer to play other big teams."

Ramos said he felt "normal" pressure in his job and revealed he had a "very nice" meeting with chairman Daniel Levy on Thursday.

And there was no talk of bailing out in January. "Until the end of my contract is the timescale," he said.

"If I didn't think we could get us out of this, I wouldn't have come here in the first place."

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