Realistic targets: Spurs fans, who do you want to sign?

All we need is delph,cabaye,Hernandez and ashley young, all realistic targets . These players all have something that we're missing from our team. A playmaker,poacher, a winger who can go both ways and a player who can pass forwards that's how we get the balancein our team. At the moment we have bentalab,mason who do the same job, lamela and Chadli can only really come inside our balance is wrong.

 

The squad is slowly getting there and it's refreshing to see acquisitions prior to pre-season training commencing.

Hernandez is a good shout, but currently injured; bottom line is a striker is needed! As for Cabaye and Young, I would swerve both. Winger/s are needed and it doesn't look like Lamela is going to deliver IMO - although I would love him to prove me wrong. Mirallas and/or Bolasie prob safer and more suitable options.

Hopefully there will be some further outgoings i.e. Chiriches, Stambouli, Fazio, Kaboul, Soldado etc. This will enable us to rationalise the squad and bring in some much needed PL experience. I just hope we keep Hugo.

On a separate note, I'm no longer a guest!

 

Just read you post Felon and I have to disagree with your assessment of Bentelab.

I think the lad is DEVELOPING into an EXCEPTIONAL young talent, who has come on leaps and bounds since making that impressive debut at St Marys last year.

You just have to see the calibre of club that he was linked with during his contract negotiations to realize this is a kid who is making a considerable impact.

Personally, I think he is the best signing Spurs have made this summer.

He was immense last season and at 20 years old, entering what will be ONLY his 2nd season in the EPL, I think he is a VERY exciting prospect!

Mason also had a very good season. Before he tired towards the end of the campaign he was a MASSIVE influence on the side, with results improving after he was 1st giving his debut.

Lets have it right, the kid is DEFINITELY a player. But how far he can go will ultimately be decided by the margin by which he improves over the next few years.

What he has shown this year is that:

• He is tenacious.
• He has fantastic energy levels.
• He can see a pass.
• He has good range to his passing.
• He is technically sound.
• He has a good appreciation for the timing of his runs into the box.
• He won't shirk a challenge
• And he LOVES a NL derby!

I am NOT saying he doesn't he doesn't have PLENTY to work on, but the qualites/ characteristics I mention above are a pretty good foundation from which to build on!

Ofcourse the jury is still out. But the same could be said about most of, if not all of our young players, in regards to how good they can actually become.

For what it's worth, I think we have only seen 60-70% of what Ryan is capable of and I expect him to really kick on over the next couple of years!

Lets remember that the kid is playing his 1st FULL season at this or any senior level.

He has been severely hampered through injury throughout his career so to get through playing the amount of games he did last season was a feat in itself.

He was ALWAYS going to get tired, and dips in form are bound to occur. but he pick his back game up in the last 3/4 games of the campaign and that bodes well.



Nabil Bentelab vs Benfica last year, as a 19 year old, put in an EXCEPTIONAL performance in what was his debut season. Huge game with big implications, and away from home. He looks like he's been playing at that level for years!

I could pull a whole host of impressive games this kid has had in a Spurs shirt, but given the circumstances this is one of my favourites...

 

Ramos you Disagree with me? Im not having that for a second! Lol

Ramos my old friend i admire your ability to find every chink of light in the dullest of situations but i will have to point out a few things here.

When the 'magnificent 7' were bought you couldnt stop crowing about what an amazing squad we had.

You pulled me up numerous times saying how good these signings were and that they just needed time and patience.

You tried to say that last summers window was extremely 'clever'. That Fazio was a leader 'on and off' the field and that Stambouli was better than Schniederlin.

Pochettino was the second coming (AVB mk II), who would enforce a high pressing attacking style.

And according to yourself Spurs have been a mega force on the tip/verge of conquering the world for the last what ?

You also have repeatedly shouted me down when i was calling for players like Benteke etc to be signed but recently (2/3years too late) are now saying the same thing.

Bentaleb is bang average the Algerian Jake Livermoore, lamela, soldado, paulinho, chiriches, capoue never came good as I said they wouldnt, same with Holtby, Naughton, Fazio, Stambouli etc just a conveyour belt of poorly thought out dross and cheap alternatives.

Think youl find ive been right about most of this and you have argued against it all telling me and everyone else that im wrong yet on the grand scale of things whos been right most of the time?

So forgive me if i take your assessment and youtube clips of the average jos in our squad with a pinch of salt, unfortunately theres a thing called the real world where just because someone wears the team shirt doesnt automatically make them a superstar in the making.

Didnt you whole heartedly back Pochs decision to make Kaboul captain aswell saying he was the obvious choice?

How did that 1 work out again?

 

I noticed that you failed to respond to my post about the significant advantages that the top four have over us. So I will ask once again, do you not think that the fact that we frequently come up short, has anything to do with the fact that these four teams can leave us in their wake when it comes to spending?

What would reaonably satisfy you? CL Football? I have pointed out elsewhere that had Mansour not arrived, we would have had CL football for five of the last six seasons as a minimum. That would have generated another £100 mill or so, which might have enabled us to keep Bale and Modric. Is it Levy's fault that Mansour turned up? Is it Levy's fault that Blair lobbied UEFA to change the rules so that Liverpool were allowed to defend the CL when they failed to make 4th place?

Levy certainly has his faults. I have a great deal of sympathy with those who point out that if it's the managerial failings, then clearly blame must also attach to the person who is persistently choosing the wrong manager, but to say he is a charlatan when you look at the way the club was taken from the bottom half doldrums? I recall a time when we used to have to wait until nearly May, to be sure that we had avoided relegation. Now if my memory is correct, in four out of the last six seasons, we were fighting until the last day of the season for a CL spot.

Levy certainly has his failings, but when you call him a charlatan, you do your credibility no good.

 

Not been a big fan of neither bentaleb nor mason.. However the former has grown on me over the season but I don't think spurs will progress to the next level with the two. Nabil is only 20 and still a baby but alongside a proper player can progress onto a good quality mid.
Mason. Forget about! He's 24 yrs already and this is as good as he gets. 5m I would definitely cash in.

 

well lets have a look, utd with their superior stadium and cash flow finished 6 points above us, the scum have managed to pip us by 1 or 2 points respectively etc so considering the margins have been down to 2/3 results call me crazy but maybe just maybe spending on a bit more quality in certain areas and not stock piling average inconsistent players with mistakes and point drops in them then we could not only make the grade but kick on as we would be a more globally attractive propisition to all re managers, players, sponsors.

 

You are being disingenuous. Of the top 4, the average wage bill is 95% higher than ours as is their turnover. Effectively they have twice the resources we do. So when we finish six points ahead of United, the second richest club in the world, who do you think should get the credit? I know you are not going to concede the point, and as I said, you do your credibility no good.

I think that anybody who effectively denies that you need massive amounts of money to build a PL team is not living in the real world. If you need further proof, look at Mancs. This is the team that has contributed more points to Spurs than any other team since the start of the PL, and rarely ever finished above us, and Mansour comes along, and they finish ahead of us in five straight years. You would have to be pretty foolish to deny that the most obvious reason for their success is Mansour's money.

How far ahead of us do you think the top four would be if the all had to play in 36k stadiums and they were no sugar daddies? Do you think that Manure would have four players on £250k per week. Do you think that Cheatski would be paying Asbo Terry £10 mill per year. Do you think Arse would ne spending £40 mill plus on one player.

 

Your mixing your points up big time, i am 1 of the few on here who does realise you need to spend to compete, especially with regards to who we are chasing.

Yes there is a gulf in wealth, but this does not mean we are a poor club that cant afford better quality than we currently prop not our sauad but our 1st team with.

The fact we have a wage cap means we dont attract the biggest players which is not difficult to understand as much as your contemptuous view of my credibility is.

What is ridiculous from my point of view is that we will pay players like Siggurdson and Holtby 70k a week each then bit part play them instead of buying a quality command a place 1st team player and pay them the 140k the 2 average players cost. And an even better example is Ade & Soldado earning 170k a week between them just to have personal issues and sit on the bench. Would it not be better to pay a top Quality Striker their wage and get an almost garanteed return etc?

Theres so many deals we do where we try the cheap version it doesnt work we waste time on them only to finally shift at a waste, when we could have done a lot better with the resources at hand if we didnt have a Charlatan in charge.

You seem to be obsessed with others and their buisness, we need to look in house and field the best quality we can afford, this doesnt mean tinkering and patch up jobbies we may not have the same spending power as those above us but we certainly have bigger funds than what we currently put in. A couple of results here and there and we would have pipped these super powers. A couple of results where a solid defence without the weak links would have helped, a commanding midfielder/leader could have bossed it when needed, a striker other than Kane who could of knicked us a few points over the season etc.

This is my gripe, and the reason we keep falling short.

 

I have not displayed contempt towards you at any time.

But lets look at some of your arguments. Do you think that when we signed Ade and Soldado, we knew they would fail to click. In fairness, Ade might have been predictable, but Soldado was regularly scoring 20+ per season in La liga, and Ade joined us on the back of 14 goals for RM followed by 17 goals in his first season for us. And as regards buying the wrong players, are we the only to do it. Compare our purchase of Ade to Chelsea spending £50 mill on Torres? Alongside that master-stroke, and £5 mill paid for Ade actually looks to be value for money. Spurs are not the only club to buy players who failed to make the grade. They have all done. Manure paid £6 mill to borrow a player that was valued at £40 mill plus and he was as big a flop as Ade. The only difference between the two, was that Ade wilfully did so.

Turning to the argument that Spurs would be successful if the spent more money, that's what the managers used to tell Sugar. And when he gave them more money, what happened? But lets look at the wallet. Before last season, and since ENIC cane along, Spurs regularly made between + or - £5 mill per year. I don't know who you had in mind, but if say a likely prospect is in the region of £15 mill (and there are no guarantees that he will be successful) and immediately we are £10-20 mill in debt. We spend £15 mill on a player, and we are taking a relatively huge risk. The same cannot be said for the top four. We are financial middleweights playing against four of the richest teams on the planet. I don't know if you are old enough to remember Irving Scholar, but he brought us to the edge of bankruptcy and we were nearly sold to Maxwell. I for one am delighted that we have a chairman who never causes us such worries.

But it rarely is just one more player that is needed, and frequently it is two or three. So we are not looking at a potential loss of at least £10 mill, but more like £40 mill. And so we qualify for the CL, and with a decent run, we get an extra £25 mill but we need to get to the last eight to get that sort of money. Anything less, and the deficit increases. And the reason for that is quite simple: There is only so much money that can be earned with a 36k stadium. And that is exactly where Leeds went wrong. The business was dependent on making the CL semis every year. Leeds went bust, but now we have points deductions for going bust. Leeds didn't but were still relegated. They ended up having to fire sale their best players. And as well as points deductions, there is also FFP to deal with. Put simply, for the past few years, the top four could afford the odd £50 mill mistake. Until this season, we couldn't.

As for the wage cap, supposing that we were able to sign Ronaldo tomorrow and pay him £250k per week. How long do you think it will be before other players start demanding an extra million or two a year?

I don't know what you do for a living, but I very much doubt that you run a business. Finishing fifth to teams that have an average of twice our resources is not the work of a charlatan in mine or most other peoples book.

 

As ive said many times you buy a player on how that quality/skill set fits your team. Soldado was an awful option to buy at the price and age to play the lone striker role, he is not a bad player as his record shows in la liga but he does not have the atributes to play lone striker in the most physical league in the world. Benteke does/is and at the time was available at same price, proven in the prem and also is younger. Absolute no Brainer!

Adebayor a great stop gap loan but we all knew everyone in football knows that long term hes more trouble than hes worth, we were crying out for a long term succesor a top powerful hungry striker but we instead took on Ade and the baggage.

30 mil on lamela nothing more than a prospect who was playing in a polar opposite league, with our financial constraints we need to ensure when we break a club record that player is ready to walk in produce and make a difference, what we got was a headless chicken a scared boy who although applies effort is light weight and basically a flop.

This is not good buisness at all. You seem to be obssessed with other clubs and i havent knocked Levy over the spread sheets but he is definately a Charlatan when it comes to the football team, hiring, firing, posturing, penny pinching, tinkering, then finally kamakazi spending. There really are times when even the biggest Levy fan shakes their head at his latest howler.

There are so many howlers that far out weigh the good things he does (which he can suprise from time to time).

 

I think there is a total intellectual dishonesty on your part. If we were getting top 4 most years, would you be complaining? As I asked earlier, was it Levy's fault that Mansour decided to throw money around like it was used toilet paper. I am sure you know the link, but to make sure, it was Mansour's entrance which has kept us out the CL for 5 of the last six seasons, and you might not appreciate this, buy he did it by spending like there was no tomorrow. Compared to Mansour, Abramovich looks decidedly parsimonious.

Levy has decided that we are not going to spend money we haven't got but notwithstanding that mistakes have been made (by us and all our competitors), you would run the club like it was a subsidiary of the Bank of England Printing Works. Look at your post about Bentaleb. Yiu say he is not the finished Article so get rid of. So we might replace him with Schneiderlin for £25 mill, and in about four years from now when we need to replace him, we might spend another £25 mill buying Bentaleb or similar back.

I am sure you have seen these fantasy football leagues and you will see that they all have equal budgets to begin with. I dont know if you ever indulged in them, but if you have, you will see that you have enough money for a few very expensive players but the more you spend on big names, the less you will have to pad out the rest of the team. It might surprise you to learn that this is similar to the way that most clubs operate, except that some of the teams are allowed to spend a lot more than some of the others, and guess what? Those who are allowed to spend a lot more are invariably the winners.

 

And you are not contemptuous?

As i have explained better to pay a top striker that will suit the team and will deliver 170k a week than 2 players the same to warm the bench. Then god knows how many others that contribute next to nothing.
This is not printing money do a leeds nonsense as every levy lover likes to revert to/hide behind its simple buisness. Why pay for a load of dross at the same price of a few quality additions?
Of course you need squad players but our 1st team has more squad standard players in it than quality, how difficult is this for you to understand?
Bentaleb is not a superstar in the making, him n mason only got games because of the tragic miss spend of the Bale money thats a fact, and all those getting giddy over the pair need to realise that these 2 are not going to get us anywhere!

 

What would you rather Dublin-

If you were given 100mil to buy players who would you buy 3/4 solid consistant proven Game changers?

Or

8/9 prospects/average jos that might have the chance to grow and get better some day probably maybe?

 

We appear to be learning from our mistakes i.e. Option 2.

The club should always aim to target players with PL experience; these aid the development of our academy players. So Levy must be brave and invest in a proportionate manner. Therefore, if someone like Benteke is going to cost north of £25m, has the experience and improves the team - you buy (not look for a cheaper alternative). What you don't do is weigh out £30m on a Lamela who wasn't/isn't proven and relatively inexperienced.

IMO, it is always risky bringing in 7 or 8 players at once. It makes the job of moulding a consistent starting 11 incredibly difficult and invariably lengthens the "transition" process.

 

LOL...You, Felon, are worth a laugh, if nothing else...

CLEARLY you have NOT lost your talent for talking cobblers (or twisting peoples words)!

However, your points don't stack up, unfortunately, Laddy.

For example, although Fazio hasn't set the world alight with his performances for Spurs thus far, what part of that means he isn't the 'leader on and of the pitch' that I proclaimed he is, eh?

Can leaders not struggle for form/confidence? Especially whilst trying to adapt to a new league/ environment/ colleagues...

I thought you would've known better than to take me on AGAIN, Felon...
I mean, don't you get tired of me making you look a little silly?

And Stambouli was a player who I said performs a similar role to Schneiderlin, but with 'better feet'!

I have NEVER said we have an amazing squad to you, but a VERY talented squad!

And as far as I am concerned, we have for the last 5/6/7 years. But the truth of the matter is 'talent' will ONLY take you so far in whatever field you decide to run in!

What Pochettino has found is that some of our more talented players simply do not fit into the vision that he has for the team. That does NOT make them bad/ average players, it just means that the manager might want to go in a different direction in terms of personnel.

Take Stambouli for example, the guy has probably less than 15 games for Spurs, has NEVER had a proper run in the side and now he looks like he is on his way out.

Does that mean he is a bad player? Or perhaps Poch, being the little ruthless so and so I have frequently said he is, ALWAYS saw Stambouli as a stop gap signing he could use before getting the player he really wanted in the next window?

Listen, the possibilities are endless, and I am still doing my badges on Mind Reading. But does the fact things appear to have not worked out for Stambouli change my view on him as a player, judging from what I know about him? NO!

Listen, this is all getting a little silly now... Me trying to explain your fabrications, as if I haven't got better things to do with my time!

My point was about Nabil being someone who has played a MASSIVE part in Spurs' season last year, and my belief that he will play a even bigger part in our future if he can keep developing the way he is!

I am GENUINELY excited by his potential, and development under Poch.

I am also excited about Mason, albeit to a lesser extent. Ryan has proved for me that he is an EPL player, even earning International recognition.

The question he has to answer is the same one, most, if not, all of our young players need to answer, and that is how far can he/they can take his/ their talent.

Plenty of players have been late developers in the game and have gone on to have excellent careers.

Does Mase have what it takes to do the same? Time will tell - but he certainly has ability.

 

Hahaha we all know the truth here my old china.

The word Potential is way over used like transition when it comes to Spurs.

 

No answer then Dublin?

 

Should have signed Massimo Luongo (22) a creative attacking midfielder with plenty of upside, we need anther forward Charlie Austin would complement Kane. (hopefully) Hope more of the young guys come through, this policy has worked well the last couple of seasons.

 

Cabaye signed for Palace, Schniderlin signs for Utd. 2 players that would of transformed our midfield area.