Transfer Rumours Tottenham in the Summer Transfer Window - 2015 Edition

I agree to an extent - it is exceptionally difficult to find a quality striker (or any player for that matter) and hold onto them for more than a few seasons with the silly money that gets thrown around. Look at Bony, Remy, Hernandez (until recently), Ings - all quality players just as a PL example who are wallowing away their careers at big clubs who simply 'hoovered' them up despite not really needing them.

However, in our particular case I can't escape the fact that when the reality of the hoover kicks in and we lose top-notch goalscorers like Berbatov and Bale, our recruitment policy to locate replacements has been shambolic. Every idiot and his dog could've told you that Bent and Soldado were completely unsuited to the system we wanted them to 'improve'. That's £40m right there flushed down the toilet. Same goes for Pavlyuchenko - a last minute panic buy who never really settled. Make that £53m.

What's frustrating is that the Keanes, Berbatovs and Defoes of this world indicate that we know what we're doing. But for every Berbatov we bring in a Rebrov, Bent, Soldado and Postiga.

 

Don't forget Pav!

 

Over the same period Man City have bought in Santa Cruz, Jo, Dzeko, Adebayor and Jovetic amongst others and none of those were exactly a rip-roaring success despite most of them being at the top end of our price range. Liverpool and Chelsea have also had a fair share of disasters. Most posters on here thought Pav, Bent and Soldado were good signings at the time. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

 

I don't think that this is accurate. There was a lot of moaning about Bent, in particular.
Concerns were voiced about Soldado's suitability and virtually nobody knew anything about Pavlyuchenko.

Some players make obvious sense and fail, while others don't appear to make any sense but work.
Modric was supposed to be too lightweight, which is how we managed to sign him in the first place.

 

I and many others never wanted Bent and could not believe we were wasting 16 million on him. Purely, in my view, on the strength of mania in the red tops. As PNP said few if any of us knew anything about Pav who for me is a bit like Rebrov we never game him a fair crack of the whip. Soldado is a bit different in that he is obviously a decent player who initially with us was not played right. By the time he started to get a bit of service his confidence was shot to ribbons.
As I have said many times Managers can sometimes cause more problems than they solve if they allow their pet theories to override who is actually playing in their teams.

 

Pav was a bit of a purple patch player, heart says be might have done it for us if he'd been given a proper run but head says perhaps he wouldn't really have.

 

I agree. nevertheless there will always be a nagging doubt, especially having seen him perform for Russia.

 

Comparing us to the likes of City is always going to produce similar results in terms of hit/miss, but for entirely different reasons.

Players like Dzeko, Negredo and Jovetic were clearly quality players who suited the system and PL well. They just don't come across as successful because City barely played them. Same could be said for Remy at Chelsea - he's proven at this level and is obviously a good player. The fact that they leave him on the bench says more about the club's hoover policy and the player's love of money than his level of quality.

Dzeko was a player I wanted at Spurs for years - he just couldn't nail down a place in a team that wanted to accommodate Navas, Aguero, Silva, Toure and Nasri. The same is now true for Bony.

Conversely, when we've dipped into the market to buy players ultimately deemed as flops, we've unquestionably done so hoping to land regular first team starters, not to hoover up potential threats from our rivals. In a perverse way, City and Chelsea and the like don't really give a toss if their 'B List' celebs don't make the headlines every week - they'll still chip in with plenty of goals and, more importantly, they are NOT playing for a rival. So they'll spend the odd £20m here or there without a care in the world, reserving the £40m bids for truly 'A-list' players like Suarez, Aguero, Costa etc.

By contrast, when we throw around £20m, every penny has to stick convincingly in the shape of a 25 goal a season frontman who will be a regular starter. Screw that up, and the whole system is screwed.

And we are rather good at screwing this position up as far as I'm concerned. Of all the clubs outside of the Sky 5 (I.e clubs who don't think they're playing with Monopoly money), name one team who've bought bigger attacking flops than us in the past few years.

 

IIRC he actually had a better goals per minute ratio than Keane, Defoe and Crouch. He reminded me a lot of Arshavin - both ridiculously good when they wanted to be, but had a knack of drifting out of matches or even entire seasons.

 

I think Bent got a lot of unfair criticism if truth be told (apart from the Pompey miss, that was dreadful and fully warranted any bit of abuse). His main problem was that us Spurs fans felt we didn't need to splash £16.5m on him when at the time we had a firing trio of Berba, Keane and Defoe, so there always seemed a bit of negativity towards him despite it not really being his fault. He had an average first season but was often the back-up choice with Defoe for Berba and Keane, then once Defoe went in Jan and Berba & Keane went the summer after, he actually came in pretty handy, topping our goal scoring chart for that season. I know he didn't impact the games much other than scoring a goal (which ironically, is what we could actually do with right now) but I wouldn't list him alongside Soldado and Pav as flops, Pav wasn't even much of a flop come to think of it. I think Bent averaged about a goal every 3 games in the league where as Pav was roughly a goal every 3.5 or so, not superb but not "flop worthy" either. Soldado, Rasiak and Rebrov on the other hand... Now that's a different story, though Soldado will be left with the crown of biggest flop in the striking department, £26m (even if we didn't actually pay all that in the end) for a handful of league goals, most of them penalties is just disastrous, I really hope we don't have a player in the future that takes that crown off of him.

 

Bent's problem, if I remember correctly, was that he was extremely greedy, and often made the wrong decision, trying to take the glory for himself, rather than making the simple pass that would have given us a better chance of scoring the goal. That's the main thing that used to piss me off with him!

 

What I remember of Bent is that he was a lazy, greedy ****er. He did very little to contribute to the overall team effort, seeming to believe that his job was just to score goals and not much else.

 

Anyone see this:
http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG/pdf/wp117_eng.pdf
At least we only made an appearance in the right bit.

 

Bent another mediocre footballer who made it to the PL because of statistics, as always they highlight the number of goals he scored what they don't tell you is how many his teams might have scored if he hadn't been in the team at all. I don't have to be kind to Bent because he has made a living from the game that many better footballers would have loved half of.

Lucky bastard!

 

Loved Pav's consolation against Bolton where he just wellied it in past a crowd of players from no angle.

£14mill was steep for the player we got but we all loved him. Then again we all loved Soldado too. What is it about disappointing strikers that we love so much?

I wanted us to sign Bent and thought he'd be a good signing. He was always a great finisher in the box for us, THAT miss aside, but he just never looked a good fit for us.

Soldado's struggles I saw coming but not to the extent that it happened. Lovely chap but he made Carlton Cole look prolific.

 

The familiarity

 

Never wanted Bent and never understood why we bought him when we had berbatov keane and defoe.
He just been relegated with charlton after previously being relegated with ipswich. We went on to have a poor league season season when he jojned followed by the worst start to a season in our history.
Sunderland did well with him but villa continued to be dog **** with him, as did brighton (when he was on loan) and after he joined derby they went from top of the championship to missing out of the playoffs and are struggling this season.
He may score goals but his teams struggle which tells it's own story.

 

I watched Pav score a fantastic chipped goal, over the keeper's head, in the second half, against Bournemouth, in a friendly. It was the same match that Bentley got injured after about 10 minutes on the pitch.

 

Heung-min Son has been granted a work permit.
Took their ****ing time, didn't they?

 

Surely he qualified automatically too by having played >60% of South Korea's internationals, or are they not ranked high enough?