I realise Yid that you are a well respected regular, but your final sentence strikes me as pointless (to put it politely). I could just as easily say that i get that you do rate him, so stop going on about it. For the record, I havent given up on him in the way id given up on paulinho by the end of his first season in england, but in a discussion comparing his performances to harry kane's, im right to point out his existing weaknesses in his all round game to highlight why his current performance is not as good as harry kane's, rather than relying on a couple of misleading stats. It's also reasonable imo to accurately point out to someone who is claiming that we bought him to win games, that we bought him (as our club record signing), to be a star player, and that he is not a star player. If this discussion was about whether the chairman would be pleased with the performance so far of his £30m player, then i would say that i suspect the answer wold be a resounding 'no'. Bale was already a better player at 20 than lamela is now btw, and there is no obvious prospect of lamela ever becoming the player bale is now, so im not sure i understand the comparison. We didnt pay 30 million quid for bale either. Yes lamela can improve, and let's hope he does, but he can only be considered a disappointment so far, and he's not been as good as free signing harry kane.
I was largely with you until your last point Rob, but virtually nobody's going to offer the same value as Kane, both because he was free and because he's been very good. How many of our players this season have hit his level of overall performance, regardless of their price tag? I try not to pay too much attention to how much a player has cost us anymore, though I'm not always successful, preferring to judge someone on how they're playing and their level of effort. Lamela's shown very patchy form, often going from the sublime to the ridiculous in one game, but I can't fault his attitude. He's not done enough to warrant a place in the starting XI in recent weeks, in my opinion. I don't think that he's playing in the right position, though his first half on the weekend was encouraging.
I might have been a bit of an asshole with a couple of my comments on this thread tbf, lol. Tbh, the thread was intended as a bit of banter mainly
Everyone we buy is bought to be at least value for money, otherwise we wouldn't sign them in the first place. Obviously he's not proven that to us yet but we didn't give him an 18 month contract so there's plenty of time for him to turn it around. You couldn't say I was going on about him because I wasn't. I'm not relentlessly positive about him, I do concede that he's not performing anywhere near the level he performed in Italy and I do talk about his flaws. On the otherhand the closest you've come to complimenting Lamela is saying you hadn't written him off after one season, the rest has been negative, negative, negative. Your point about him giving the ball away is as misleading as any stat, every player gives the ball away at one point or another, it's like complaining that not all Kane's shots are on target. Again with the Bale comparison you're missing the point, you're taking what anyone says out of context and twisting it. When you're not doing that you're making subjective points based on supposition and it's tiresome. So as I said, we get that you don't rate Lamela, give it a rest at least until Boxing Day and he gets sent off after scoring 3 own goals, then you can slate him until your heart's content and no one will have a problem, infact we'll probably all be joining you.
I thought his trick shot goal was f**ing amazing. There, how about that It is fair of me to pick lamela out for criticism over giving the ball away, because we have conceded several goals that were effectively his fault. Thats a perfectly valid and relevant observation, and assessing his performance to date with out that, would be misleading. I honestly havent set about having a dig at the guy by doing this article, i just kind of assumed that most people would agree with the conclusion. If they dont, and they want to say that my prediction - (which was pretty risky at the time), that kane would be a better player this season than lamela - was wrong, then that's up to them . Ps - smile it's christmas
Do you think Man U has him on their list for a future buy?I mean......United are on this planet to buy all the best British players so they can fill their trophy cabinets at our expense..... Chelsea are different in that they want the worlds best foreign players with their nasty rubles.Oh! Hang on.Isn't the ruble not worth crap?Oh my.Poor Chelsea.....
Van Galling doesn't seem interested in buying an Premier League-based players. Or playing too many who have actually played a Premier League game before this season...
Perhaps he thinks of United as the next Real Madrid,playerwise,if he's lucky.....and he's got to be very lucky and posess deeper pockets. I have been watching Real in matches this season and for the first time in many moons I just sit there and admire This season perhaps the best Real team ever,which is saying something. Oh to just sit there and enjoy Spurs on a regular basis instead of wanting to tear one's hair out half the time!
He has been responsible for conceding a few goals as well as losing the ball too often through trying to dribble through players too much. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not that concerned. Those are the kind of ragged qualities talented young players often have. It's not as if he doesn't like to pass. Most of his best moments as a Spur have been superb passes, including one yesterday. He's also not a star, as you point out. But I'd say we bought him to become a star. Someone who already is a star is out of our price range. Unless and until Lamela becomes one, nothing's certain, but I'd say he's making reasonable progress--certainly much better than Bale in his first year, (though Bale was younger, tbf).
Look, I feel quite strongly about this. I really feel the need to be a dissenting voice whenever this untruth is spoken. Bale looked absolute quality when he first came to Spurs. Scored three goals in his first four games. As a left back. And I'm not just making this up - I'm not just trawling Wikipedia for the above stat (though I did just do that). I remember how excited I was by him. I remember how gutting it was that he got those injuries and we were denied seeing him for the rest of the season. I remember that free kick against Arsenal that a 18-year-old left back scored. Bale looked a very, very good player right from day 1 for us. The oft-repeated claim that he took ages to come good is based purely on that freakish stat where he'd not been on the winning team for 20-odd games. That and it's a simple, but false, story for the papers to repeatedly drag out. To me it's important to remember this as otherwise people are tempted to think that maybe Lamela might turn into Bale. Truth is that very few players go from looking a bit crap to becoming superb. Maybe Lamela is one. Maybe. But he certainly looks nothing like as good as Bale did within a handful of Spurs games.
Lamela has been a tricky one. There's no doubting he has ridiculous talent but he does frustrate me at times. His vision is superb but his execution of the pass can let him down quite often, I think that's because he lacks composure. He's able to beat a man very easily but sometimes he tries doing too much and runs himself into a wall of players and I think he's also quite rash in the challenge, don't get me wrong I like seeing players get stuck in but Lamela's idea of getting stuck in is giving away a foul. Having said that, on Saturday he played what I'd say was his best game in the Prem for us and arguably his best overall, he made a good number of passes and when he ran at the Burnley defence he had a lot more conviction as to what he wanted to do and was unlucky not to get an assist when he beat his defender and saw his cross missed by both Kane & Chadli and then skied by Eriksen, that all on top of his superb goal is encouraging and a sign of just how talented the kid is/ can be. If all can maintain and improve on performances then we have a front 4 of ridiculously talented, young, attacking players with what I hope will be great futures with the club. If we could fast forward to say two or three years while keeping Kane, Eriksen, Chadli and Lamela, I reckon it could be one of the deadliest quartets in Europe. I think many of us have agreed that the potential of the squad is fantastic, it's just it seems to be taking sometime for some of them to show that potential, which is what is causing a lot of frustration.
Lamela does have an unusual collection of qualities, which include bags of talent, some brilliant instincts, an often bad footballing brain, a good work ethic, and a mercurial temperament. Even in the Burnley game I found myself hoping he wouldn't get the ball in midfield, since he was far likelier than our other players to dribble into blind alleys. On the other hand, when he gets the ball near the goal he can do brilliant things. His faults are more noticeable because the other three attacking starters in general, and Eriksen in particular, are making good decisions reliably. But Lamela's done quite a bit this year: he turned about three cup games, set up Chadli for the goal against Arsenal and had another big PL game or two. Stats do lie, of course, and the fact that he leads the team in assists and is second to Kane in goals plus assists in all competitions doesn't mean he's our second best player this year. I'd call him our fourth best attacking player pretty comfortably, though, with a huge potential to improve. I wonder why he suddenly looks good on the right myself. It was only a couple of games ago he'd get the ball, tap it onto his left foot, cut in and give the ball away, more or less like clockwork.
Walker. Our other right-backs have been fairly defensive, with only Chiriches offering anything going forward. The overlapping runs and occasional forays inside of our returning first choice in that position creates space for Lamela and puts doubt into defenders' minds. It's easy to deal with the Argentinian if you can double up on him and know that he's only got two choices: dribble inside or lay it back. It's a lot harder to control him if you can only put one man on him and you don't know what he's going to do. My preference would still be to have him playing in behind the striker, though. I think that it would play to all of his strengths and remove most of his weaknesses, plus his work rate and closing down would help to maintain Pochettino's system.
I agree he's been different with Chiriches and Walker. We tried Lamela in the center earlier this year, and in the Europa. He didn't do badly, getting a number of assists, but it's clear to me Eriksen is the best choice in the central role. You may be saying to play Eriksen further back and Lamela forward. It would be interesting, but I don't think we'll see it. I agree Lamela could be brilliant there, but I also like the way Eriksen directs traffic from the center of the box.
