Dele's talents are rare I just hope they will come to fruition but again football often leaves you frustrated and Spurs of course are the big chiefs of it. I felt the same when George Best's career ended early, no Dele is no Best, we have Bryan for that. Special talents are rare in football and when they occur you just want to see them over again. Lo Celso and Ndombele's two seasons have been abnormal and also presided over by IMO by a completely unsuitable manager in Jose. A big mistake by Levy. So I think it's only fair to reserve my judgement on them both.
Think you're looking at a lost cause with Dele. Somethings happened to him and he just doesn't have the hunger for the game anymore. (whens his contract up, that usually pushes a footballer harder). I think you are right to reserve judgement on lo celso and ndombele who both looked really talented although lo celso seems a perrenial crock and ndombele doesn't seem to like the defensive side of things too much, a new manager could get the best out of ndombele and lo celso needs to stay fit. Have to disagree with sissoko, he was good for 1 year and being good meant working hard and winning the ball. Massive waste of money.
I’m starting to believe that Dele’s talent isn’t that special though. More a case of he burst onto the scene but then got found out - which happens to many players - coupled with the fact he believed in his own hype and lost sight of what was important. Bale, Eriksen, van der Vaart, Modric were all special talents in my opinion, Kane too, I just can’t put Dele in that sentence with those guys. I agree Jose wasn’t the right appointment for us with hindsight but I don’t think he’s solely to blame for Lo Celso or Ndombele’s failings. Ndombele’s fitness is embarrassingly bad for a professional footballer whilst Lo Celso, barring the final run of games in his first season, has shown next to nothing and that’s excluding his injury record so far. He’s just looked very average and quite basic.
I think your position is way too extreme. You quote opinions as facts, for example how do you know that his changes on the stadium took months and months and cost millions and millions? The changes I heard about were all to make the stadium more user friendly and atmospheric. Surely on such a project you want someone with an almost freakish attention to detail rather than the misfit that is Wembley because it lacked the man with vision. It's not be chance that Spurs have one of the best stadiums in the world and that's not something to complain about. Unless you were in on these player I don't see how you can know in such detail who did what unless you base your opinions on media reports. Good luck with that.
You’re post doesn’t touch on anything football related which kind of sums up how the Levystas view Tottenham Hotspur…you’re not bothered about the team, your concern is prattling on about financial successes off the field like it means anything to a football fan…personally I think most Spurs fans do this because it’s the only thing they can ‘boast’ about to make them feel elite like the teams that win things. Your making things up with your ‘want want want’ blinkered vision of anyone who thinks Levy is an idiot when it comes to spending money for the team. Are you one of them football fans who has a stinking attitude to wanting current success because you can still remember us winning a few trophies in the 80’s when the bad old men were running football clubs?
I think Dele is such a strange one. At MK he was a box to box midfielder after all, but then he burst onto the scene with us playing as a second striker pretty much, and he was very much a ‘systems player’ in that role - looked great in a certain team setup but not so good for example with England. I think there’s a fine player in there still, one who can take the best of his game from his breakout days with us - the goalscoring, late runs into the box, aggressive pressing - and combine it with the box to box dynamism and one-touch football that got him noticed at MK. From how he’s being deployed in pre-season it looks like that’s what Nuno wants from him. But it won’t be the Dele we first knew at Spurs and I worry that even if he starts to make a success in a different role, people will still get on his back for not matching his old goalscoring numbers, even if he’s having a really positive effect on the team. On the Eriksen debate, I know people questioned his mentality in some big games but he was consistently one of the furthest runners, and one who recovered the ball very often when we pressed, which I think goes some way to defuse any myths that he didn’t work hard or fight for the badge. What made him good was that he ran hard, pressed well and could also do the nice no.10 stuff.
I think you're giving him far too much credit. I don't think it's financially astute to lowball to the point of insulting the prospective player and their club, effectively inviting them to tell you to bugger off. Equally, not putting a realistic value on your own players (that you're actively trying to sell) meaning, more often than not, we're left with deadwood drawing high salaries and therefore can't bring in potentially better acquisitions.
isn't a pertinent example because a.) We did not get a windfall of £60m that summer, so there's no direct comparison b.) Making direct comparisons with transfer windfalls while ignoring how Liverpool frittered away the Suarez money is a gaping hole in your argument c.) The fact is that Saltypool didn't need to directly replace Coutinho so could spent it on van Dijk, yet if we received £100m for Kane or Son we would need to spend that £100m on replacing Kane or Son, so there is simply no comparison to be made between the two d.) The fact that more than half of that quoted figure was spent on Sissoko, since the way you phrased it inferred it was £20m each rather than £30m for SIssoko, £16m for Janssen and £11m for Nkoudou di.) ...which was not spent on receiving a windfall. The windfall came next summer, when Kyle Walker kept changing his story for why he wanted to move to a club which would double his already generous wages, which is when we received £50m while spending £42m on Sanchez, £25m on Aurier, £10m on Foyth and Llorente, and had £25m in reserve to spend on Lucas the following January More than anything else, this summer effectively boils down to saying we need to spend big on a CB, while also hoping to get a decent fee for Sanchez and/or using Sanchez to get the fee down so we can spend big on a CB...while ignoring how Sanchez was the last example of us spending big on a CB. You get the feeling that might undermine the argument just a tad... And that's the point a certain fringe is conveniently forgetting (they do that, repeatedly...), namely how the £42m we paid for Sanchez has him in the conversation for the most expensive CBs of all time, as even if we ignore inflation that means we paid more for him than The Sheikh Mansour Team paid for Ake and Mangala (although Football Leaks states that they paid way above what the quoted figure for Mangala was...) while also making him one of the ten most expensive CBs in Premier League history with some room to spare
It's not opinion. A member of my family won a significant contract on the build. Levy ****ed around like mad, changing his mind at the very last minute, requesting things that weren't possible and were a direct contributor to the delays. Ask #Alfie Conn, his son worked on the build. Putting an obsessive compulsive accountant, who has no construction experience, in charge of any build is NOT a good idea. Employing someone who knows what they're doing is! Sending all the screens in the concourses and bars back because the frames are 1 cm too wide is just ****ing nuts...but he did it...and boasted about it afterwards!
The screens for the concourses would have cost comparative peanuts, though The pertinent question is whether or not there was any attempt to cut costs on the important stuff, for example are the girders holding the stadium together made of aluminium or steel, or whether the mechanism to replace on pitch with another is powered by 10,000 hamsters It's one thing to scrip a few grand here and there on the detailing, quite another to say the entire stadium is built out of porridge oats rather than concrete
I’ve said similar about the systems stuff and that’s why I think Dele excelled when he had a prime Dembele and Eriksen playing with him. I think those two allowed him to excel and once Dembele declined so did Dele and then when Eriksen went downhill Dele got even worse. And similar to as you say, he didn’t have a Dembele or Eriksen with England, hence why he’s never really delivered for the country. Now I just don’t think he’s all that because he doesn’t have others to elevate him, whereas players like Son and Kane just do the business regardless of who they’re with and that to me is the sign of top players/ talents. As for now, I just don’t know what to expect from Dele anymore. He doesn’t need to match his goals/ assists numbers from 2015-2017 for me but he just needs to “be good”, something I don’t think he’s been for years now other than a few flashes. It’s a last chance saloon for him I’d say, though it feels like he’s been on his last chance for quite some time. Agree on the Eriksen stuff. He often covered the most distance in the side, which even I was surprised with considering I thought Walker and Rose would’ve covered the most seeing as they bombed it up and down for a couple years under Poch.
The screens are just an example,, used because Levy put it out there and it can be verified. Plus, you're not factoring in the labour in taking them all down and putting up their imperceptibly different replacements...and this happened over and over again on other fixtures and fittings. I'm not willing to identify which part of the build that my family member was responsible for, for obvious reasons, but it suffered numerous Levy interferences. He was telling qualified people what he wanted them to do and didn't want to listen when they told him that things weren't efficient, possible or occasionally safe. Systems were changed on a whim leading to things not matching up and again they took time and lots of money to correct. The stadium looks beautiful...but **** me, did we overpay for it!
Sounds like Hart’s talks with Celtic are progressing well. Expect he’ll be next out the door from a permanent side of things. Tanganga is supposedly unsure of a loan to Gala and would prefer to remain in the Prem. I imagine we’ll also hear confirmation of Parrott’s loan at some point today.
With Dele I think it’s just understanding that he’s potentially got a different role in the team. He’s played deeper before in the cups, often against Football League opposition, and looked good, so it’s no surprise he’s looking good again in preseason. He needs to translate that into producing as an 8 in the PL. He has all the physical and technical attributes to succeed if he can get on top of the mentality and re-learning the position at the highest level. Nuno has coached a few young midfielders (notably Neves) successfully so hopefully he can help. I think Poch struggled with him as he declined (and like you say, some of the players who helped his original successes in his old role declined too) and Jose, for all the hype he built about Dele before joining, never really understood how to use him.
Again, trying to save money and/or being weirdly obsessive over detailing isn't an issue if the remainder of the stadium itself is kosher. The fact is the stadium could've opened with or without the concourse screens and nobody would have noticed, so trying to pin the stadium delays on that simply doesn't make sense - especially since the source of delays was the sprinkler system over the south stand (aka the off brand Boxpark) being at fault, which was demonstrable on the stadium cams at the time as you could see seats being torn up in specific parts of the stands to get at the guts of the sprinkler system The fact that the concourse screens were going up months after the sprinkler system snafu simply reeks of overcompensating, and nothing more. Anyone who has ever played The SIms knows full well about spending 95% of their budget on building the house itself and then getting anally retentive about the feng shui of the few twigs of furniture they can afford with what's left
