The Lamela debate really is an intriguing one. That's what I like about this forum; lots of different views all put across eloquently and respectfully, without the petulant childishness of other sites. My two cents on the matter: 1) The comparison to Bale is an interesting one; both players signed with huge potential, both experience multiple managerial upheavals early on in their spurs careers (Jol-Ramos-Redknapp / AVB-Tim-Poch) and lengthy injury setbacks too, both of which were probably incredibly unsettling experiences, especially for Lamela who arrived here apparently speaking less english than my patio. 2) I don't think his value will decrease much below the £10-15m we're hoping to get now if he stays on for another year. Selling him now is more a matter of pride than freeing up much-needed funds. 3) I tend to put price to one side in these debates as the cost v's worth paradox of the modern era got out of hand years ago there really isn't any point focusing too much on it. It isn't Lamela's fault some mug decided to throw £30m at him, just as it wasn't Andy Carroll's fault that someone threw £35m at him nor Torres at £50m etc. etc. Instead, I prefer to ask one simple question: If the player is still years away from a reasonable age to expect a peak, are they improving year on year, or are they plateauing or declining? If the former, I 100% feel they should be kept and invested in,no matter how slow the growth - as long as it is perceptible. In Lamela's case, he's years off of his peak, and is visibly growing game on game, albeit very gradually. But again, the only reason we tend to see it as unacceptably slow growth is because some muppet decided to spend £30m on him. We happily accept the realtively slow growth/impact of Chadli, Rose, Mason etc. because they all relatively speaking cost pennies. In other words, our judgement of players shouldn't be forcibly through seen the eyes of Levy's wallet and Baldini's notepad. In the case of Soldado and Paulinho, two vastly more experienced players who should've arrived at us at their peak but have spent 2 years plateauing or worse, it is more than understandable to be impatient and look to sell asap. Applying this question to each of our youngsters, creating a level playing field by simply forgetting price tags, reveals what most of us know anyway: that there are a few players in Lamela's age group who should absolutely be sold before we round on him. Namely those who have shown no evidence whatsoever of significant growth (Townsend, Chiriches). Bottom line: If you were stupid enough to sign a player for silly money, keep him as long as he is improving, unless someone else comes along who doesn't know what stupid even means (cf. Liverpool FC) and offers you silly money for said player.
Bale was excellent from August 2007 until he was half crippled by a Birmingham player in December. He was in crutches until the end of March and came back in Sept 08. He was a shadow of his former self at best...at worst he was ****e... and was dropped by redknapp and spent most of the 08/09 season on the bench. In 2009 he came on as a sub in a 5 nil will ending his "jinx"...in Jan 2010 he got a run in the team while BAE was not playing (think he was at the African Cup of Nations) he was pushed further forward when BAE returned and was vital for us from then on. lamela deserves one more season imo but I thought ramos should have been given more time so wtf do I know.
Lol. Yeah - WTF do any of us know half the time. Think that BAE actually ended up being injured during the ACON though we'd expected him to attend the tournament and, as I recall, Redknapp had already said that Bale would be getting a run then.
Supposedly getting £4.5m for Vlad from Napoli, although selling him is the right idea I actually think we possibly could've got more than that for him. Despite a dire second season, he did look good in his year with us and although his style isn't suited to the Premier League, he's got the ability to be a success in a my cultural league like Serie or La Liga. I'd expect him to do well in either of those countries so Napoli could be picking up a bargain there. Regardless, that's an extra £4.5m and probably £30k a week in wages that can now be used elsewhere should Poch and co see fit. As for Ade, if he does complete the Villa loan deal, then I'm 100% sticking him in my Fantasy Team. He's playing for a new contract and playing for a manager that he excelled under during his brief tenure with us, he'll also be the main man at Villa so I'd highly expect Ade to show the side of him that makes him one of the world's best strikers on his day.
Waiting for Lamela! CK suggests it's worth doing and I agree. This is where we need the experienced eye of people who know the professional game inside out and know a good player when they see one. Spurs are just one step of the top rung and the nature of the game is that finances dictate your position to a large extent. We cannot hope atm to compete with United, Chelsea, City or Arsenal in terms of signing or attracting the very very best players, but we can develop them. Once developed we are then under threat of losing them as with Bale. The trick for us would be to develop a number of top talents AT THE SAME TIME, thus projecting us into CL spots and thereby increasing our attractiveness to 'developed' top players. It's very much chicken and egg, atm we can lay an egg but it's soon stolen away by the foxes if' it's good. Lamela has potential let's develop it alongside our other talented youngsters.
I dunno if improvement is so important because, after all, they have to be improving into or beyond a level which is *good* enough. A player can come on in leaps and bounds and only go from a 2/10 (to over-simplify things) to a 5?10 and still be useless to you. Kyle Naughton had improved a lot, hadn't he? But was he really good enough? In fact we probably saw more improvement in Naughton (once he played a few games at RB especially) than we have in, say, Vertonghen. But which would you rather sell? And why should that criteria (improving) only apply to players that we paid a big load of money for? I honestly think that people with negative opinions of Lamela are the ones who are really seeing his performances/promise for what it is and the apologists who somehow see something I have just never seen are the ones putting too much emphasis on his price tag. As I said: If a youth player like Pritchard comes into the team over the next couple of years and puts in Lamela-level performances I'm pretty sure most people would say "Shame - he simply doesn't look good enough" and if an offer of 10m came in for him we'd be laughing all the way to the bank. But I, like everyone else, still have some pathetic, child-like hope that he's gonna somehow become an absolute bollock-load better somehow. I have no idea why - probably just because I read people on here who seem to think it and their drip-drip-drip of weird optimism has an effect on the evidence gathered from my own eyes. And he seems like a nice, honest, hard-working lad and I sort of feel sorry for him and think he has a great attitude. He's just not that good at football, I don't think. If Spurs were to face a team with Lamela in it I would feel absolutely no fear whatsoever.
Anyone who thinks they don't need to look at data shouldn't be any sort of manager. Neither should anyone who thinks that data is the only important thing.
Absolutely, and for what it's worth I think that's exactly what we're doing. Our squad was the youngest in the Prem last season and it doesn't look like we'll be changing that any time soon. Wimmer and Trippier are both under 25 (Toby is only 26 as well), we've shifted a lot of deadwood and also brought Pritchard and Alli (plus Carroll if he's not sold) into the first team which now makes the average age even less. It now means we have Rose, Dier, Yedlin, Trippier, Walker, Mason, Bentaleb, Lamela, Townsend, Pritchard, Eriksen, Chadli (albeit he'll be 26 in a couple days) and Kane that are all 25 or under, every one of those have the capacity to develop a lot further and a number of them are already established Premier League players, some even have international experience. Many of them contributed to finishing 5th in the most competitive league in the world last season, if we can keep all of these for another couple of seasons then the future is looking very positive in my opinion and that's forgetting the likes of Onomah, Winks, Walker-Peters, Ward, Carter-Vickers, Oduwa, Azzaoui and Amos who have all shown great promise and potential to be future stars. I read an interview the other day that Pritch gave (sorry can't remember where I read to post link) but he mentioned along the lines that the academy at Spurs is the best it's ever been, he said that even at the time when the likes of him, Andros, Harry, Ryan, Tom etc were mixing it up with each other in the U21s and youths that there was a vibe of it being a special bunch and it seems he was correct. The next crop coming through who I mentioned at the end of my last paragraph are also really exciting me, Azzaoui just won the best player of the tournament that we were recently in, we've seen Winks and Onomah make first team debuts and they also featured with Walker-Peters and Ward in the post season matches, Oduwa seems to have been our best player in pre-season thus far, Luke McGee now seems 3rd choice keeper replacing Brad, it's a really exciting time for a Spurs fan if you follow the youth setup.
Read that we were giving up on Bolasye (excuse spelling) as Palace want £25m for him. Don't blame palace as they obviously wanna keep him but thats way too much. Now the mirror claiming we now want ashley cant stand up young...never have I wanted a rumour to proved wrong as much as this before.
I thought it was Adebayor kicking off about getting dropped for Kane? Kaboul and Lennon backed him up and the data was produced to show that he wasn't doing enough work during games or something? Given the subsequent fallout, that would make sense. He's wearing the ****ing kit, so you'd hope so!
Chiriches will make Napoli glad they signed him, at least if they use him at RB. We may judge players too much on their weaknesses. These may be and often are easily correctable (and sometimes not--it's been impossible to stop Townsend from cutting in and launching a useless shot time after time, for example). What you can't teach is talent, and while you can buy it, it's extremely expensive. I also remember the absolutely epic Chiriches blunders first. But if you could fix the problem of periodically awful decision making, you'd have a RB who tackles and blocks exceptionally well, is good on the ball and can be dangerous getting forward. Most of what Lamela did wrong last year was dribble into blind alleys. He'd do that a couple of times, then lose confidence and misplace routine passes in a way that was painful to watch. It looked like he'd solved that problem the last few games. In any case, nobody was so good at finding through balls--to Kane against West Ham, to Chadli against Arsenal, for example. Remember the couple he slid across goal on a plate, one of which Paulinho back-heeled last year, and the other Kane managed to somehow not knock in this year? I'm all for patience with Lamela, because in his brief time here and despite his level of play being mostly bad, he's been able to find spectacularly good passes in a way no one else has, not even Eriksen. (Eriksen is better at the very good passes, though, no doubt.) I wish we could use him somewhere other than the right, on the other hand. His right foot just isn't good enough. A big no to Ashley Young from me as well. What we've done at this point isn't necessarily a bad idea: seriously shore up the defending, since it needs to be much more solid, but take our chances on our young attackers continuing to develop. In a game where goals are rare events, in other words, a safe choice makes sense for defending, but not for attacking.
The Ashley Young rumours make so little sense to me: he plays mainly on the left wing, an area we're well stocked in, and he isn't an improvement on players we already have - yet he'd presumably expect to have higher wages than the likes of Chadli. It reminds me a lot of the talk that we were 48 hours away from signing Ezequiel Lavezzi in the same role...and those 48 hours were in late may, yet I don't see Lavezzi at Spurs Lodge, do you?
For what it's worth, Ashley Young has a house in Hertfordshire not very far from our training ground.
Isn't the Ashley Young thing just a Man Utd press suggestion, as they're in talks with him about a new contract? Another "Spurs miss one of the targets" load of balls? He's a talented player, but he's a cheating bastard and a childhood Goon. Those two facts might be connected.
Some very interesting points here Lenny, thank you. In response I would begin by saying that an inherent problem in all of this is that none of us (save for perhaps OS) can really see the full picture in terms of improvement, most of which is likely to be evident to the coaching staff through watching the player every day in training and reserve games. We only catch glimpses of the end result - 20 minutes here, 90 minutes there, which makes it very difficult to make a balanced judgement. I think that the comparison to Naughton actually proves my point to some extent. We're talking about a player who clearly wasn't impressing all too much in training, was given 3 or 4 loan opportunities at decent clubs to prove himself, and still - by the age of 25 and completely familiar with the language and culture here - didn't ever look like holding down a first team place. True, he was improving slowly, but my point was that by the time a player approaches their 'peak', which nowadays tends to be 26-30, there is nothing wrong with saying 'enough is enough this ain't working'. A MUCH fairer comparison in Lamela's case is another player who is the same age as him and even plays the same positions. I know that I'm likely to be pilloried for this but I cannot fathom how much the club has invested into a certain Andros Townsend. Eight loan spells to cut his teeth and numerous opportunities for the first team, yet very very little evidence of improvement. Unlike Lamela, whose work rate, physical game, passing and movement is visibly improving (although his decision making and confidence are still woeful). How on earth Townsend got called up for England I'll never know. But there's the rub: without question, the only reason we have so much patience with Andros is because he came through the academy: thus he didn't cost anything and there is also a huge vested interest in being able to hold up the academy as a success story (which it is anyway, even if he left the club tomorrow). And by comparison, the only reason we're so disillusioned with Lamela is again, as per my original point, because some muppet decided to spend £30m on him,. which simply isn't his fault. If Lamela, like Naughton, hits 25 without showing any real signs of taking us to where we need to be, then for sure sell him. But if not, why take a massive loss on a player who is steadily improving anyway. Naughton was signed for around £5m and was sold for roughly the same price. That's good business. Selling Townsend for £15m is good business. Selling an improving player at a £20m loss is almost as mental as spending £30m on him in the first place. But some great opinions there Lenny, really like seeing things from another angle.
