"Now Roman, I know you're upset, but you can only hoard thirty youngsters instead of your usual seventy"
I can't see why some "nearly" players can't come to Spurs. 1.They will learn how to play football and 2. They can't get a better shop window for joining the Real's of this world!! So come on lads,senors,monseuers….come join us......
Where have you read that? Got to be honest but I am definitely calling building on that one! Can you imagine the **** storm Levy would kick up if that were true? In 2006...when Chelsea were top top dogs and we had just finished in our highest ever place ... 5th... Chelsea tapped up out DoF, Frank Arnesen in the close season. Levy went ape ****, we ended up with a fee of £6m from them and an agreement that they could not bid for any of our players or staff for 6 years. Fast forward to 2019...do you think a war would not have broken out if what you read was true?
You’re right, it is potentially a big spend for a “maybe”. But as the old saying goes, “throw enough **** at the wall and some of it will stick”. - this is what we’re up against. If one player doesn’t work out, another one is purchased in quick succession. We’re punching well above our weight. All I was getting at was if we made those improvements I mentioned earlier, we could be the ones top of the pecking order.
I agree with most of what you’re saying, and you’re right time will tell. - especially when it comes to the margins of error. It’s not going to look like much of a fine margin if Liverpool beat City tonight, though. Even a team like City will struggle to overhaul that gap.
The margin of error for Citeh tonight is effectively zero. As I said elsewhere, a draw is no good to them as the home team.
The trouble is you can’t actually check the counter factual. I know @Dier Hard doesn't agree but I think Winks has been one of our best players this season. Imagine we had bought Grealish and Ndombele for 80m combined to replace Winks and Sissoko. We could easily have had fewer points and people would be saying what a success they were because we were doing better than last season.
There’s no doubt about it, some clubs pay hefty fees and don’t get much of a return. We’ve made some a bit like that in the past, but when the money wasn’t like it is now. Sanchez is the only player we’ve spent in excess of £40m on, (which i guess is now the entry level amount for “big money”), and he’s turned out to be a great signing. Yes we’ve spent lots of £10-12m’s on players like Nkoudou which it could be argued add up to a big waste of money over all, but I think we’re slowly but surely learning from these. A lot of our other lower cost signings have also been very good in recent windows. -Lucas, Dele, Foyth etc. Part of me just wonders what we could achieve if we did go all out and brought in a couple of £50m+ players right now. I have much more confidence that we’d get it right under the current manager, yet we seemed to spend far more with coaches who hadn’t proven themselves anywhere near how much Poch has. Anyway, I’ll leave it there. This is the rival watch thread after all.
I get what you’re saying, but look at it this way. - we knew Dembele was struggling last season, and we knew Wanyama was the same. So how many points could we have GAINED if we had NDombele and Grealish?
We’ve won 15 matches so they could have only made those worse. Would they have changed the other five positively if signed instead of Wanyama and Dembele? We will never know.... but my opinion is that they could have been selected instead of Winks and Sissoko which would have led to those players losing confidence and not improving and we have a worse outcome. We’ve had our best start to a PL season ever. Makes it more likely we made the right choices than the wrong ones I would have thought.
Grealish has done nothing this season. It's similar with Siri...lots of comments about how we should have bought him but he also has delivered little or nothing. Against Arsenal he was directly responsible for for one goal with a terrible performance and did not follow a player for another...and I have seen him do that on countless occasions this year.
We’ll never know the answers to your questions. But one thing is for sure, having 2 players (Grealish and NDombele) who weren’t injured, would have been a better option than 2 are, and have been for a large spell of the season!
It’s easy to look at players who are at inferior clubs with inferior players around them and then say “they’ve done nothing”, though. Quality players around them, with a top coach can make a huge difference.
We could also easily have more points on the board if we had Grealish and Ndombele. Having extra options is better than having no other options - at least in my opinion. Just look at the AMs, our main three are Eriksen, Dele and Son, yet both Lucas and Lamela have made vital contributions this season including match-winning performances. If we had Ndombele and Grealish to assist the cause at CM, what's to say they couldn't have done similar and helped us close the gap on Pool? As for Winks, naturally completely disagree. Worst CM we've brought through since Tom Carroll. Mason and Bentaleb were far better and the little I've seen of Skipp already gives me hope he will be too. I'm genuinely tired of his lack of ambition on the pitch, one of the most frustrating players we've had in ages. If it weren't for the fact he was HG and we're in dire need of those at the moment, I'd happily sack him off. Really not sure what you see in him to be honest, mate.
It's a lot harder to shine at an inferior club than it is at a top one. There are exceptions of course but it's very hard to tell the true value of a player until they're surrounded by better talent, that's what helps unlocks a players true potential. No one would've imagined Dele to become one of the best players in Europe while he was at MK, likewise when Dier was playing for Sporting team, sometimes you need to take that risk on a player and put faith in them to come good when around the right talent. For me - and I genuinely mean this, no joking about for once - I think Jack Grealish would absolutely flourish under Poch's tutelage, Grealish himself supposedly said he'd make the England squad if he played for Spurs, I completely agree with him. As for Seri, he's an excellent CM, mate, he just made a horrendous decision to join Fulham. Let's not forget, in the summer of 17 he was a couple of dotted I's away from being a Barcelona player. Granted, he never sealed the deal and got it over the line due to them signing Paulinho () but the sheer fact Barcelona were close to signing him surely tells you the calibre of player he is(?). Why he ended up at Fulham and not elsewhere I'll never know (seeing as us, City, Chelsea, Arsenal as well as Napoli all held an interest) but he is a very good player who's just being wasted in a very poor side. I'd happily sign him this January to add some quality at CM if Fulham were willing to sell although that's never happening.
