Deadline Day Shenanigans
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He used to play for Brann Bergen (anyone remember THAT Fowler goal?) but they realeased him as he couldnt find a position in their reserve team in 2012. Something is very strange here.
He's rivaling Caulker.
Taking travel advice from man-about-town Joey Barton.
Insane that the top ten net transfer "league table" in the Premier league includes:
Watford, Bournemouth, Newcastle, Sunderland, West Ham, Leicester and West Brom.
We're 9th, Chelsea 14th, Arsenal 16th and Spurs bottom.
Watford have spent 61 mill this season. Insane.
Watford, Bournemouth, Newcastle, Sunderland, West Ham, Leicester and West Brom.
We're 9th, Chelsea 14th, Arsenal 16th and Spurs bottom.
Watford have spent 61 mill this season. Insane.
To balance this though - Stoke hardly spent anything in the 2 seasons before. Hughes paid just over 3m for the pair of Bojan and Arnautovic over 2 summer windows, while Diouf was a free transfer. This season, the big spend in the summer was Shaqiri (12m) and that cash came from selling Bergovic and Huth. Imbula's fee is partly funded by N'Zonzi's sale in the summer.
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Half glad we did no business. Saves us the bother of getting rid of some feckless cocksucker for half the amount next year.
We didn't sign any variation of spelling of that name but don't worry we might in the summer. We'll still be hearing loads about him.
My disappointment that we've missed out on Maddison is tempered by the fact that Spurs didn't get him. We were both linked with him and I had hoped that our recent loaning of Ryan Kent to Coventry might have included some discussions about Maddison. He's a huge talent and exudes a real self-confidence on the pitch. If the fee was £2m then we're idiots for not taking a chance......he could prove as promising as Dele Alli.
Pochitino is so impressed with the Alli signing that apparently Spurs are focussing more than ever on the lower leagues (about time someone did....but why them!) and the 3 names I've seen mentioned most are Maddison, Dembele (Fulham) and Lookman (Charlton) and all 3 look hugely talented (all 3 are forwards although Maddison is more of a McManaman-type* than an out-and-out forward (but unlike McManaman he doesn't disappear from games when he is doesn't fancy it).
The problem with Lookman and Dembele is their teams will be looking for Walcott/Ox-Chamberlain type of money i.e. £10m+ which is obviously a risk whereas Maddison was always gonna be cheaper (although I would have thought Coventry could have got at least £4m for him).
Spurs nearly got Dembele too based on reports; 6m and a loan-back was what Fulham wanted / accepted, and they killed the deal when Spurs insisted on keeping Dembele for themselves for the rest of this season. That's what was reported anyway.
Dembele is a free agent in summer and had agreed to join Spurs for about £5m, but it fell apart over the loan-back arrangement for the rest of the season. Spurs have always been pretty keen on scouting in the lower leagues and smaller teams domestically and abroad, as have Arsenal on occasion, That strategy does involve a fair amount of risk in terms of the volume of players you need to bring in before you find a genuinely top class player, but it is something we should be doing.
Everton seem to have had some success too (Coleman, Baines, Stones) but it really does require a club that is in a position where they can bring these players into the team and really test them, while at the same time not really having too high expectations of instant success or trophies. A lot of the reasons why clubs like Liverpool, City, United and Chelsea haven't done it as much is because they can't wait that long, or take that many risks with the first team
I didn't realise Dembele was gonna be a free agent in the summer! It makes no sense for Spurs to pull out of that deal; Dembele is no where near ready for the EPL and would be much better off finishing the season at Fulham. I have a preference for lookman over Dembele but if he's available on the cheap next summer we should buy him and loan him to a newly promoted EPL team (ideally).
As a big fan of lower league football I've got an inherent hatred of the big teams having youth teams as the vast majority of these kids would be better off learning their trade in the lower leagues and working their way up. Because of the voracious nature of the top teams most of the obvious good young talent end up there so very few exciting 18 or 19 years old appear in the lower league. What does happen and what we should be looking at is some of the 22-25 year olds whose talents were overlooked or dismissed as teeneagers but have developed very well at lower levels. In recent seasons the likes of Ings, Austin, Vardy, Arter, Pugh, Cresswell, Bolasie, (Callum) Wilson etc have been picked up for buttons and I reckon most of them would improve our squad.
I know I'm kidding myself that we're gonna cherry pick the best of the lower leagues and become European Champions but I do think if our UK scouting team was up to scratch we would find a couple of hidden gems to augment the Suarez, Coutinho and Firmino big money foreign acquisitions.
I think the vast scouting networks make it less likely we will unearth star players like Ronnie Whelan from Home Farm, or Alan Hansen from Partick Thistle etc etc, but perhaps there are lots who slipped through the big clubs, or were released and worked their way back up. Delle Ali was pretty well known in football circles, and we simply didn't offer enough money, or perhaps time and effort, into securing a player we had met and knew all about.
Compare that to the effort that Baconface used to put in, getting to know parents, personally meeting them, giving them tours, popping round the house. It's no wonder Beckham chose United over Spurs.
The likes of Vardy is a bit more tricky, in that he's already 29, and only really first got any major attention in a great display against United last season, while scoring a total of 5 goals all season. It's not hard to see why Chelsea, Liverpool and whoever else didn't show much interest then.
Liverpool had a £22.7m offer for Inter Milan and Argentina striker Mauro Icardi, 22, turned down on deadline day as the Italian side did not have enough time to find a replacement. (Corriere della Sera via Football Italia)
Sign him in the summer - and have a front 3 of coutinho-xxxxx-icardi ... delicious.
Should've spent less time chasing an impossible target.
A propos Enrique: I remember reading about this bloke who tried to get rid of his old fridge by leaving it outside with a sign saying 'Free - please take' but everyone ignored it. So he put a sign saying '£30 or near offer' and someone nicked it overnight. That's what we've got to do with Enrique: tie him to a post outside with a sign saying 'Buy him for £2.5m or near offer'. Hopefully a Geordie will have carried him off by the morning. Or at least someone will have beaten the shite out of him.
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