After surviving the ’90s with barely a central midfielder on the professional books at White Hart Lane (who can forget the mid ’90s Gerry Francis pairing of Darren Anderton and Andy Sinton at centre midfield?) it looks like Daniel Levy and chums are intent on chasing, signing then selling every midfielder in Europe to balance things up.

My rant last week about Manchester United’s blatant attempt to unsettle Michael Carrick seems to have had the desired effect with the much vaunted Geordie preparing to sign for United for a reputed fee of ?15m. So much for loyalty in football (as if I ever believed in it anyway). Saying that ?15m represents a handsome profit on a player who only cost around ?2.75m from West Ham and if we were some homebased business selling antique candlesticks on Ebay we’d consider it a damn fine piece of business.

Sadly Tottenham Hotspur is a football club were the profit should always be a nice by-product of losing a player rather than the main reason for selling them and although Levy and the board are supposedly not too happy at losing Carrick I’m sure the idea of making him sit his contract out in the reserves will be overridden by the thought of 15 very large ones in their pocket and no chance of another Sol-style Bosman mishap.

In some good news Stephen Reid has signed a new four year deal at Blackburn Rovers and the rumours circulating of his impending arrival seem to have been premature. I’m not overly concerned because his signing would have smacked of a David Pleat style move, more Hoddle than Jol and hardly a major step forward as we try to bridge those last elusive few poinst to Champion’s League qualification next season.

Didier Zokora of St. Etienne and the Ivory Coast looks a lot more likely however with Mr. Commolli’s good relations with his old employers at St. Etienne hopefully proving the deciding factor for us rather than the intervention of ‘Appy ‘Arry at Portsmouth with a wallet overflowing with his own Russian gangster’s wedge. Zokora has looked rather good in the couple of World Cup games I’ve seen him in but then so did Ilie Dumitrescu back in 1994 and we all know how that finished up (for Ilie it finished at our usual dumping ground of West Ham which should be warning enough for Zokora).

Knowing Spurs we’ll probably pick up one of those Togo players who were too busy asking for their money to want to play in the World Cup. Sounds just like a few Spurs players over the last ten years that I could (but won’t) name…

This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2006 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Tottenham Hotspur. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.