You can always tell when it’s nearing curtain-up time on a new season. Everybody starts to get tetchy, arguments break out, excuses start gushing forth – “Don’t expect miracles, we’re not in the same money league as them!”

No matter how hard they work on their pre-season lines, managers and players forget the lot and come out with a few unscripted ad-libs intended to rough up the opposition. In some cases, of course, they’re not entirely unscripted.

But the best one of all is when one club accuses another club of “tapping up” a player. Now this has been going on for years and it’s never going to stop.

Every club in the Premier League have been accused at one time or another of “tapping up” players at other clubs. It’s never going to stop until somebody has the nerve to stand up and say: “A contract is a contract, is a contract, is a contract!”

The method is simple; it’s a simple “whisper in the ear” job between two agents, two players, an agent and a player, an agent and a manager, or any two from the whole mix. Agent or player lets it slip to a friend who happens to know the drinking pal of a journo and, hey presto, said rumour appears in print somewhere.

But I reckon Spurs have leapt to the top of the hypocrisy table by their straight-faced complaint that Manchester United and Liverpool are guilty of putting the tap on Dimitar Berbatov and Robbie Keane to join them. Daniel Levy has even gone so far as to make an official complaint to the Premier League about these unscrupulous scoundrels.

This is the same Spurs, mind you, who sent a couple insurgent spies to Spain last year (while manager Martin Jol was in the throes of trying to get their season back on track) to “tap up” Juande Ramos in secret (behind the backs of Sevilla officials) to come to London and save the ailing cockerel.

It seems that even in Spain they understand the meaning of the pot calling the kettle black.

The president of Sevilla has gone so far as to accuse Spurs of “actions that amount to hypocrisy” in their back door attempt to lure Ramos to The Lane.

I quote (and this is a rough translation) from one of the Spanish newspapers I picked up this morning, the president as saying: ''They took our manager and now they accuse others of trying to take away their players. This was demonstrated by how they took Ramos from us.''

So perhaps Daniel Levy might have been better advised to check his own glasshouse before throwing that rock!