Transfer Rumours transfer thread fact and fiction

Yeah we need someone to do what Winks is currently trying to do and he is what he is, ultimately.

Grealish would have been a great signing and arguably I’d even rather have him in the squad instead of NDombele right now. At least he’s fit to play!

 

Grealish should've been signed the season before Ndombele and Lo Celso. We went into that season with a broken Dembele, a broken Wanyama, a declining Dier and it meant Winks and Sissoko would become our first choice CM. For as much as both players give their all, it's very undesirable pairing to have. Grealish would've made a world of difference at the time and going forward into this season, he could've been pushed further into Alli's role or even taken up a wide position if need be, not forgetting at CM anyway where Sissoko, Lo Celso and Ndombele have all had injuries.

 

Oh right you mean the summer window where Spurs didn’t sign anyone. Yeah completely agree he should have been signed then. Hopefully they’ve learnt from that and won’t lose anymore key targets over the sake of a few million.

 

Yeah I've said the same, the Grealish deal is something that should be never happening with a club like us, he would've made such a huge difference last season too and even this campaign. I've generally backed Levy a lot of the time but there's going to be a lot more scrutiny on my part now because Jose needs backing in the summer and we need stuff done as quickly as possible, the days of pissing about with transfers needs to be squashed and just pay whatever the selling club is asking for OR move onto a new target immediately. Haggling for weeks does no one any good, especially if at the end of the haggling we don't even get the player.

 

It's a fair statement to make, Tanguy looks phenomenal but his fitness has cost us this season, just as Dembele's did in his latter years and how Lamela's also does. Great players but if they can't get fit then essentially they're not great for the club.

Hopefully whatever the new regime Tanguy has been put on works.

 

A manager's job is to get performances out of players and build relationships and create a team. That can include understanding mental illness, family problems, substance abuse, addictions and yes, overreating.

Not all players are low maintenance. Great managers are able to get into the heads of players and improve their desire or fitness or confidence. Harry Redknapp toughened Luka Modric and Gareth Bale up. Poch really got to Mousa Dembele and Danny Rose and got Harry Kane to transform his physique.

Mourinho and his team need to get Ndombele to want to be fit enough to play top level football, more than anything. The alternative is to lose an incredible talent and tens of millions of pounds.

 

I think crediting Redknapp with Bale's transformation is clutching. He wanted to loan/ sell Bale to the Championship, Bale got his chance through injuries to other players and then never looked back. Equally it's also worth pointing out Dembele wasn't a starter in Pochettino's first season, a Mason-Bentaleb partnership was often favoured.

Mourinho and his team can only do a certain amount to try and get Ndombele up to speed. If the player himself continues to break down or look out of shape then that's solely on him.

Pochettino faced similar issues with Dembele, Wanyama and Lamela. Ultimately if a player keeps picking up injuries it's out of the manager's control.

 

Seems that after losing our quota of one Scandinavian in Eriksen, we’re being linked to fill it with a summer move for Emil Forsberg of our current CL opponents and his agent supposedly said this:
"I can say this: everyone will soon see what will happen to Forsberg. Nothing that surprises me at all. Mourinho is a great legend who has worked with Lindelöf as well."

 

In terms of Parrott, I have a simple question to ask: does anyone else remember the 1996-7 season? As in, have they not yet undertaken hypnotherapy to erase that one from their minds?

That season we were missing Teddy Sheringham and Chris Armstrong for various long spells, with a couple of periods where the two of them were absent at the same time, so to address this the club turned to Rory Allen and Neale Fenn from the academy. Now while I'm not going to say they were any good, because they weren't and looked uncannily like a pair of raw prospects being given starts out of necessity and necessity only, they served a purpose: they maintained a semblance of our team having balance, either giving one of Sheringham or Armstrong the strike partner they were expecting or providing a focal point for our attacks that the rest of the team could work with

And this is what's pissing people off: Allen and Fenn simply wouldn't get into a Premier League side these days, and probably not that many Championship sides either, but that didn't prevent Gerry Francis from knowing they could be an asset in the short-term (with the very small chance that maybe they could be an asset in the medium-term), yet somehow a manager whose Wikipedia page reads a lot better than Francis' ever will does not think that a player who is simply better than Allen or Fenn should even be on the bench, and that's maddening

Also - this is the point where I dump on r/coys again, so you can probably stop reading here as I got my main point across already - I can't help but notice the double standard they're currently using: when Poch wasn't giving minutes to Parrott, Tanganga or Skipp this season that was grounds for all manner of posts claiming he was a charlatan for not using youth team players in spite his reputation for working with youth, as if "youth" solely means academy players when it clearly doesn't - but when Steptonho doesn't use Parrott or Skipp that's because the Spurs fanbase habitually overrates players in our youth team because some bloke whose Wikipedia page reads better than Gerry Francis' isn't picking them, and while a lot of this comes from the large amount of American fans milling around r/coys who can only understand stats and are oblivious to things such as circumstance or context, that blatant "One rule for Poch, one for Steptonho" mindset does not solely exist on the other side of the Atlantic

Most obviously, Poch clearly rated Skipp as he started drip-feeding him into the team last season, and he certainly rated Parrott and Tanganga enough to start them against Colchester in the Season Killer Cup - and given how he'd Unperson someone for not having the right attitude, notably Edwards, that needs to be brought up - while it was also said that he rated Luke Amos, George Marsh and Jamie Bowden enough that he'd regularly have them in the squad on matchdays. Yet six months on and we have a manager who obviously rates Tanganga, appears to rate Cirkin...but Skipp or Parrott, can anyone say he rates either given he's done less with them in three months than Poch did in six weeks of this season?

 

"Transformation" is your term, not mine. Claiming that I'm clutching for something that I didn't even say is a bit off.

I said that he toughened him up. Lots of players react poorly to their first major injury.It happened to Martin Chivers and Bill Nicholson detailed Peter Collins and Mike England to rile him up a bit. Harry told his staff not to indulge Bale in feeling he'd been hurt in training, as it was becoming 'a thing'.

 

I guess Jose is toughening up Parrott then. Making him work harder and become mentally stronger in order to breakthrough.

 

Let's hope that it works and the long term benefits are worth the short term moaning about having no forwards...

 

The thing with "toughening up" players is that there's a point where it's less toughening up a player and more a manager taking as many liberties as they can get away with

Case in point, the way Alex Ferguson treated Lee Sharpe was appalling: not only did he insist Sharpe was a left back and not a winger, even though at no point in his career did he ever look capable of it, but the part that clearly crossed a line is the time Sharpe bought his first house with his girlfriend (with the two getting engaged a few years later, so it was no fling) but because Ferguson decided he was "hungrier" when living in his rundown digs he effectively gaslit Sharpe into moving out of his house and back into his digs

There's a point where you're not challenging a player to improve and start being a complete **** to them because you can, and I'd say that was a clear example of the latter

 

I’d say telling a young player to work harder in order to get a chance in the first team doesn’t make Mourinho a **** though.

 

Seemingly being less aware than Gerry Francis that having somebody capable of playing up front given minutes would make the team more balanced is still baffling, though

Even before Son went down there were games where we needed somebody up top who could hold up the ball, which none of Son, Lucas or Bergwijn can really do, but Parrott does have the ability to do - and that would've made the Middlesbrough games far less stressful if he we had a reasonable outlet up front for a start

 

I see everyone here is in agreement that levy hiring mourinho is a great decision. Long live king levy

 

Do you lot want him back?

 

I'll drive him

 

This was an issue under Pochettino too, as he’d often choose Son up top over other senior strikers like Janssen or Llorente when covering for Kane. It was only really Llorente’s second season that he began getting a decent number of starts in Kane’s absence.

I’m sure Parrott will get his chance but he has to work for it, as Tanganga has for his chances.

 

I can sort of understand Llorente in his first season, as he arrived with a broken arm so wasn't fit for ages, but Janssen was badly handled as he was thrown in at the deep end due to Kane's injury (and, IIRC, wasn't that when Son was at the Asian Games?) and missed a hatful of chances that shattered his confidence in a short amount of time but he never really had the chance to decompress and come back, instead he got dumped to the bench apart from a couple of FA Cup games

Now obviously this can be held up as a reason to not put Parrott in the same position, but that still doesn't justify not picking him for matchday squads