A couple of minor updates for the front page... Modric (£33m) Corluka (£5.5m) Kranjcar (£5.5m) Dos Santos (Mallorca, £1.7m) David Button (Charlton, £500k) As for the released list, Saha to Sunderland, Nelsen to QPR, Jansson to Shamrock and Oyenuga to Hayes & Yeading. based on our ins and outs, I'd say we have £15m profit to spend in January - Leandro and Moutinho would be nice...
I make it about £8mill, if you take the Lloris fee including his add ons but Soccer Saturday somehow calculated it as a £2mill net spend this morning, in the middle of their now regular "rant about Spurs, AVB and Levy" segment. They said our sales added up to £50mill which is strange considering they themselves reported that Modric was £33mill, VDV £10.5mill which must mean they think Kranjcar, Bassong, Corluka, Pienaar, GDS and Button were sold for a combined total of £6.5mill. Someone got a bargain there... To be fair to Le Tiss, atleast he had a grip on reality and felt we'd had a good window.
AVB's âI believe the window was a good one for us. I am satisfied that we have the flair, creativity and strength in depth across all areas to make significant strides this season. The most important thing now is to get on with playing football and winning games.â amazes me, what flair and creativity????? we lost both those by letting great players go and replacing them with good players! And strength in depth? is that the same strength in depth that led you to bringing on Jenas last game, or to putting Hudd on the bench when you were hawking him around other teams untill 10:59:59? winning games? yeah because you've shown you know how to do that already at Spurs haven't you!
I guess I'm off on my own island about seeing this as a more or less total disaster. To me, Levy failed to get either the key player his new coach needed or any suitable alternative because he ran out of time. This is clear because there's money left which he clearly had to spend. While there may be other explanations, the only one I can see is incompetence, for which Levy should be fired if we don't finish fourth. If we'd gotten Moutinho, I feel pretty confident we'd have gotten fourth and the 50 million or so that goes with it, since our fourth place rivals just don't look that impressive. To complete the cycle, simply not firing Harry and getting a suitable replacement for Modric would have been a better idea to begin with. As it is, thanks to Levy's bad decision and sheer incompetence, we'll be lucky to get fifth, I think, and sixth or lower is a possibility. Don't get me wrong. I really like Dembele and Lloris. And I've been a fan of Dempsey. But quite frankly giving dos Santos a good runout would have had a better chance of success, not to mention having some future to it. Dempsey's a good player, but he's old and even at his best not more than a sub level player for Spurs. He scored a ton last year because Dembele is very good and had no better target. Now that Dembele's got about four or five better ones, I'd be very surprised if Dempsey scores as much as VDV does. And he's three years (or so) older--wrong!--see below. We've lost our two most creative players and gotten a significant downgrade for both, good as Dembele is. We threw away a brilliant chance for fourth, not thanks to some last second piece of bad luck from outside, but from one we managed to manufacture for ourselves. I am really angry, in case that isn't clear. Having said all that, I'll continue to support the team and hope for the best. We should have CL last year and didn't. We shouldn't this year, so who knows, maybe we can.
I don't think the main problem is Mouthinho, the problem is Defoe and failing to get in someone like Carroll. Thankfully wegot Dempsey in, otherwise things would look bleak. I still think this has been a very good window, but I may well be proved wrong. I'm already thinking I over-rated Siggy, and JV is not doing as wll as I hoped, but I partly blame that on playing with Gallas and stay on the line Friedel. To me AVB has now got a quality squad, but maybe we'd better find a 'freebie striker' out there if Ade isn't going to deliver this time, because Defoe can't do the job that's for sure, unless we change the system.
I think Mouthinho or creative quality of his like is the main problem. Without this link of flair we will be a mid table side. Defoe no matter what system we play will not cut it for a top 4 place. I agree Siggy looks awful at this stage and Gallas should not be playing only at last resort. The team is weaker because we have sold top quality in Modric. VDV, and replaced with mainly decent players but not in the class of these two. What do we deserve when we only net spend at best and other teams move forward. AVB is already looking pig headed with any lack of ideas. It looks a cold dark bitter winter coming up. Well done Levy .
Modric HAD to go (eventually) and VdV clearly preferred to go for family reasons - and although he was great for us in many ways, he seldom lasted 90 mins and was injury-prone. We have moved these guys on and brought in Verts, Sig, Dembele and Dempsey + Ade at various stages through the window. It is also starting to look like Porto caused the Moutinho deal to founder, with Spurs upping their offer from 325m to £30m at the last minute to meet the increased demands of the Portuguese club and player. On that basis I am not sure that DL is entirely the problem.......
I think that AVB's beef, and something I would echo, is that if Levy hadn't have faffed around with the Modric saga for so long, then the Moutinho deal would not have been left until the very last minute, as usual! He would have been done, dusted, and already assimilated into the squad.
Levy needs to set his own transfer window next summer. If people want to poach our best players, then they need to do it early on in the window, so that we have time to replace them and bed in the new players. Tell any prospective bidders that we simply won't entertain bids that come in after our own deadline and refuse to sell anyone after about two weeks before the season starts. We can't keep going into seasons with an unprepared, unsettled, disrupted side, inevitably starting each campaign away from home and losing momentum and confidence from the get go. It costs us valuable points every season and it's as predictable as the setting sun.
That's a good idea PNP but we may well not have signed Adebayor or VDV or Dembele if he had taken that line. Other clubs will not play by these rules. The deadline causes major problems but it also protects us from constant intervention from other clubs throughout the season.
From everything we've read, and heard. It seems that Levy just loves all this last minute brinkmanship crap. It may be great for his ego, but it's doing **** all to help AVB or Spurs.
Fulham had to sell Dembele because of his release clause I think, Spurf. I meant that the Chairman should set a deadline that we won't sell anyone after, though. If Levy sticks to his guns, then it doesn't matter what other clubs do. If he makes it clear that we're not going to enter into negotiations past a certain date, then any bids are irrelevant. Allowing the Modric deal to drag on prevented us from making virtually any moves until very late in the window. It needed to be sorted out very quickly and if Madrid weren't prepared to do that, then we should've told them to do one. They were happy to play the waiting game, so Levy needed to remove that option.
Hi SF, I agree with a lot of what you say, but I still don't think Mouthinho is the main problem, I think it's Defoe and his inability to lead the line. Chelsea won the CL and FA Cup last year without any great creativity. There are many wins to win matches and titles. In Lennon Bale Siggy Dempsey Ade we have creative attacking players, getting them to gel will be hard for sure, and maybe Siggy not's good as I thought he was. We also have a big problem at the back, failing to keep clean sheets. Just one clean sheet in three games would make the table look very different.
From someone credible on twitter: "Even though FCP and Spurs managed to find a deal, the paperwork wasn't taken care of correctly. apparently there was no time to amend mistakes and file paperwork again. Another story I am hearing is that Moutinho thinks he can get a better deal in Russia. Zenit still pushing for his transfer. He thought he could still get more cash at zenit. And he still can."
