 Friday, 21st Sep 2012 00:21 by Clive Whittingham It was another transfer window where Tottenham left everything until the last minute. How will the cards fall for new manager Andre Villas Boas?
OverviewThe transfer deadline day methods of Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy are becoming as notorious as Sky Sports’ anchor Jim White’s coverage of the bi-annual festival of hyperbole. Perhaps the best insight into how Levy operates as the clock ticks down can be found in the recently released autobiography of former Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan – although admittedly the stories within are probably to be taken with lashings of salt. Back in 2004 Palace had just won promotion to the Premier League under the management of Iain Dowie and academy product Wayne Routledge had been one of the team’s stars on the right hand side of midfield. He’d caught the eye of Spurs and at lunchtime on deadline day Levy contacted Jordan with an offer for the player in the region of £1m. Jordan laughed that off but says he was then contacted at regular intervals for the rest of the afternoon by Levy and people acting on his behalf increasing the offer in increments so small they barely covered the cost of the fax paper they were sent on. Eventually, at 11pm that night, the bidding had increased to £1.2m and Jordan lost his temper, saying the whole thing was going nowhere fast and in any case even if Spurs did make a serious offer for the player there was now only one hour to go until the deadline and it would be impossible to get Routledge to White Hart Lane, have a deal agreed and complete a medical in time. It was at this point that Levy admitted that Routledge – a contracted Palace player who hadn’t been given permission to speak to Spurs or had a bid accepted for his services – was sitting in a hotel round the corner from Tottenham’s ground with his agent Paul Stretford with everything in place ready to sign. That’s Levy: a hardnosed, ruthless businessman involved in a sport where money is tossed around like confetti. At the moment transfer windows fall into a set pattern with Tottenham. They’ve often got somebody the silly-money brigade want – Dimitar Berbatov, Michael Carrick, Luka Modric – and for however long the window is open the papers will be full of stories about the deal being done imminently to the point where everybody is sick and tired of hearing about it. What usually happens of course is a player gets his head turned by a club, he decides he wants to leave and his price crashes through the floor. What happens with Spurs is Levy hangs on – making Modric train on his own in the most recent example – until the last possible moment where either the buying club pays what he’s asked for or the player is forced to stay and get on with it. Last summer Chelsea played this game and lost out on Modric who had a great season for Spurs and subsequently got a move to Real Madrid this year.
This all often leaves Spurs with very limited time at the end of the window to spend the money they receive. A big slice of luck (if that’s what you’d like to believe) with a broken fax machine enabled them to get Rafael Van Der Vaart in after the deadline two years ago when they only apparently started bidding for him half an hour before the window closed, and this year Clint Dempsey was squeezed in with minutes to spare. Sometimes this brinkmanship pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. At one stage this summer it looked like Levy was going to shift on accident-waiting-to-happen Sebastien Bassong and injury prone Michael Dawson for the thick end of £13m with England international in waiting Steven Caulker ready and waiting to step into the breach for free after two years of strategic loan spells with Bristol City and Swansea. A masterstroke. Except when Dawson’s move to QPR fell through it left Spurs with a high earning, injury prone centre back who now knows he’s not wanted by the club. This would all be irrelevant had they brought in Gary Cahill last summer but they pissed Bolton around for too long, he stayed put and then eventually went to Chelsea instead. The other thing it does is make Spurs suffer more than most for having the transfer window active during the first three matches of the season. They were beaten heavily in their opening two matches last year – admittedly against the two Manchester clubs – while they haggled for the sake of haggling with West Ham for Scott Parker. The points lost in those games eventually cost them third place and the Champions League. This year Norwich and West Brom have already taken points from North London. It remains to be seen whether the Spurs supremo has performed a masterstroke, or cut off his nose to spite his face, by replacing Harry Redknapp with Andre Villas Boas this summer. Levy will say it was the collapse in Tottenham’s form while Redknapp made come-to-bed-eyes at the FA for the England job that cost them Champions League football rather than two matches against the eventual top two back in August. Redknapp also paid the price for flogging his best XI to death before Christmas and underusing the likes of Steven Pienaar and Niko Kranjcar in the lesser games – was it really necessary for a first choice Spurs side to batter QPR into the ground in this fixture last season, for example? Redknapp insisted throughout the loss of form that his links to England were having no effect on the team, then when he didn’t get the top job he had the nerve to angle after a contract extension at Tottenham saying uncertainty about his future could unsettle his lads. He was always going to get the sack after that but he did a wonderful job at White Hart Lane and Villas Boas has shown few signs so far at Spurs or last season at Chelsea that he’s capable of filling his shoes. Time will tell, and knowing Spurs it will go right down to the wire.
InterviewAs he did last season, journalist and Spurs fan Michael Pickard has taken time out of a schedule that I know to be busy (because we work together to the same deadlines) to give us his opinion on the current situation at Spurs. Beer will be his reward. A typically hectic transfer window from Tottenham - what have you made of the comings and goings? Who do you rate of the new boys, has Modric been adequately replaced, where are the strengths and weaknesses? There's never a quiet summer at White Hart Lane and this one proved to be no exception. The loss of Luka Modric was expected and yet Daniel Levy took negotiations down to the wire, proving again that he won't settle for anything but the best deal for the club yet also ensuring there would be another deadline day scramble to replace him. The departure of Rafael Van Der Vaart was more surprising as he was a superb buy in 2010 and proved to be a great addition to the squad. However, the reported £10m fee meant it was a good deal. Ledley King's retirement was sadly inevitable. Levy also cleared out a lot of squad players, with Niko Kranjcar, Giovani Dos Santos and Steven Pienaar among those who didn't have the chance they should have had as Harry Redknapp never liked to rotate the squad. Emmanuel Adebayor did enough to convince Levy he should become a permanent part of the squad during his loan last year, though he'll have to step it up after his protracted financial negotiations to leave Man City soured his belated arrival. We missed out on getting another centre-forward however, but Defoe has started the season on fire. Hopefully the pair can take us through to January where a third striker will be essential. Jan Vertonghen, arriving from Ajax will go a long way to replacing King, though Younes Kaboul's long lay-off makes us weaker at centre-back than we should be. His injury also ensured we kept hold of Michael Dawson, despite AVB apparently happy to sell him. Gylfi Sigurdsson looks like a great addition to the team, though not quite a like-for-like replacement for Modric that Moutinho would have been, while Moussa Dembele has hit the ground running and has already forged a good partnership with Sandro in central midfield. AVB will need to find a role for Clint Dempsey, while French goalkeeper Hugo Lloris should become our long-term number one. Would you have sacked Harry Redknapp? Did Levy just get the hump over the England thing or was there more to it? While I probably wouldn't have sacked Harry myself, I think he talked himself out of a job. Claiming the players weren't distracted by the England talk, but then saying they would be unsettled if he didn't get a new Spurs contract (after being snubbed by England) didn't do him any favours. He also didn't follow Levy's transfer policy of buying young players with a high potential sell-on fee. The fact he was unable to reverse Spurs' alarming dip in form following Capello's departure from England probably also made Levy's mind up. Would have have replaced him with AVB? What other names were mentioned and would you have preferred any of them? Villas Boas and Roberto Martinez seemed to be the front runners from the start. If Levy had wanted Brendan Rogers, he waited too long to sack Harry, by which time Rogers had joined Liverpool. David Moyes was probably the only other viable candidate and it would have been interesting to see what he would have done with a bigger budget, considering his ability to find hidden gems. Villas Boas always seemed the most likely candidate, however. What have you made of the start to the season so far? Why have you struggled in the two home games? The story of the season so far seems to be our historical inability to defend a lead. Harry had worked to shore us up at the back and holding onto those one-goal leads ensured our challenge for the Champions' League places. At Newcastle, a game we should have won was turned by an admittedly terrible challenge for the deciding penalty, while we just didn't turn up against Norwich. Although Reading didn't offer much, we showed plenty of ambition and drive that was lacking previously. Having a settled squad now the transfer window has closed certainly helps, while Villas Boas’ decision to play just one holding midfielder meant we could take the game to Reading, particularly on the break. What are the aims and ambitions for the season? Is this a year of transition and squad building or is the top four achievable? While a new manager and six new signings does make for a transitional season, finishing outside the top five and without a push for Champions' League would be disappointing considering the talent of the squad. Barely a month into the new season, the top four places are already taken by Manchester United and City, Arsenal and Chelsea, but after the win at Reading, if we can push on for three points on Sunday and not let our Europa League efforts distract our league form, we have enough quality to be near the top at the end of the season. Picking up a point at Old Trafford (after the QPR game) and two home wins against Villa and Chelsea would ensure we bounce back from our poor start, though anything at OT might be asking for too much. A new striker and a possible bid for Moutinho in January would then mean we also have enough to cross the finish line this season after stalling last time round.
Scout ReportIt was a relief to see QPR cope with Chelsea, and even outplay them for most of the game, last weekend because they’ll face similar problems here with Spurs. Through promotion and the early part of last season Rangers used the trendy 4-2-3-1 set up, primarily to get Adel Taarabt involved behind a lone striker with plenty of cover for his inevitable possession concession behind him. That developed to a 4-3-3 set up towards the end of last season after Samba Diakite arrived, basically because Mark Hughes had three midfielders who all had something slightly wrong with them – Barton conceding too much possession, Diakite killing too many innocent bystanders, Derry getting on a bit in years. The three of them babysat each other at times, sitting deep and tight together to protect the defence and then looking to release Cisse, Mackie, Taarabt or Zamora on the counter attack. This season Hughes took away Barton and Derry leaving Diakite to anchor the midfield alone with disastrous consequences against Swansea on day one. That chastening experience has resulted in a back-to-basics approach since then. QPR could not be set up in a less complicated way if they tried – 4-4-2, big man-little man combo up front. The problem with this is the risk of becoming a straight lines team. If QPR were to stick rigidly to that 4-4-2 set up then they would leave a gap between the midfield and defence into which a good few Premier League players would put three players, and the other two midfielders would be in the gap on the other side of Granero and co. But they coped with Chelsea, which was a relief because they had people like Eden Hazard in areas that Michu had ripped us apart in during the Swansea game. QPR were better, particularly in the centre of defence and midfield, and Fernando Torres wasn’t even close to being as good as Danny Graham had been at the top of the formation. Against Spurs, Rangers are again likely to face a team with one up top (Jermain Defoe in all likelihood) and a very fluid midfield behind him where Sandro sits deeper but not exclusively so, and Gylfi Sigurdsson is the furthest forward. I watched Spurs against Lazio on Thursday night, but in more detail against Reading last Sunday because the Royals were set up in a similar shape to the one used by QPR at the moment and I thought it would be interesting to see how they went. Let’s just say I hope QPR manage a bit better than Brian McDermott’s team did. The first issue Reading had was a strange one. Jermain Defoe doesn’t look like much of a lone striker, and with Alex Pearce and Kaspars Gorkss against him he probably shouldn’t have got much of a sniff in the air, but quite often Spurs went long and early and time and again Defoe’s positioning, movement and first touch got the ball under control and caused problems for his opponents. He played the role superbly.
The most obvious threats posed by Villas Boas’ men came from out wide where Aaron Lennon had a great game, although admittedly he was only playing against Ian Harte who was awful and a real weak link for Mark Hughes to target when we meet Reading on Wednesday. No goals since January probably explain Lennon’s bizarre aversion to shooting in the Lazio match, but Gareth Bale scored one from the other side at the Madejski Stadium. The trick to keeping those two out of the game seems to be stopping Moussa Dembele. He played deeper than I’d ever seen him at Fulham and dictated the direction and tempo of the game for Spurs, feeding their danger men when they were in space. He looked an ideal replacement for Modric who used to do the same thing and he is the man QPR must stop if they’re to keep this Spurs side from clicking into gear. Sigurdsson looked much less comfortable in his role further forward, and was replaced by Clint Dempsey on Thursday night which I wouldn’t be surprised to see happen again for our visit. What else can we go on? Well, Spurs have conceded late goals in home matches with West Brom and Norwich so far to surrender points against opposition not too dissimilar to ourselves. In both cases, and for a short period after half time at Reading where they went from obvious 4-0 winners to potential losers, I saw it simply as Villas Boas being too clever for his own good. The Portuguese was trying to shut up the shop and hold what they had, when in fact there was nothing to really shut it up against and in all three examples they simply invited pressure on when none had existed before. If QPR are a single goal behind with half an hour left they’ve a great chance of taking something from the game if he keeps doing that. I made a note during the Reading game after 55 minutes that simply says “what exactly are they trying to defend against?” The other potential weakness was from wide set pieces, which Spurs try and defend with a very tight, straight line of players high up the field. It was crying out for either an outswinging, low ball into the corridor of uncertainty between goalkeeper and defence, or a high inswinging ball to the back post and it was the latter that Reading tried repeatedly, sending Pearce in round the back, with reasonable results. Links >>> Official Website >>> Tottenham Hotspurs TV forum >>> The Tottenham Blog >>> Glory Glory forum Tweet @loftforwords, @mchlpckrd Pictures – Action Images Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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