Rafatastic

There continues to be much debate about the Rafa van der Vaart conundrum. He brings in-balance to the side. He can't last the full distance. He's a selfish egotist that places himself above others including the club. His lack of conforming to formational positioning can lead to goals conceded. He scores goals, but what else does he do? One trick pony they say.

Okay, so, I'm highlighting various arguments in isolation and if you wanted to be pedantic about it people who are overly pro-Rafa completely ignore his weaknesses and the strengths of others. Welcome to the headaches of football management. But get this...all players have weaknesses, imperfections.

Not everyone is complete in what they have to offer. Modric is good on the left wing, very good when he cuts in from the left wing. But place him in the middle and let him recycle possession with ample doses of Barcelonaesque push and run touches and he's great. But he doesn't get into goal scoring opportunities often enough and his shooting boots are not always polished. Yet he has been known to score a corker or two. Then again, why should he be expected to score a bundle when he's primary responsibility is to play make from deep? Still, get enough Spurs lads in a room and they will still argue and shout about the negatives rather than simply embrace the positives.

I'm not suggesting that Rafa doesn't have any negatives, just that perhaps all the hype around his role in the team tends to be lopsided towards the fact that we are supposedly better with two up front.

Jermain Defoe is in form, in that when he's played recently he looks zesty and has that burst of pace and shot that usually results with a goal. He blows hot and cold and there's a solid argument that when he
blows hot we should make sure we use him effectively before the icicles return and leave him frozen in a permanent state of offside.

Hindsight is the usual tool dusted off post-game to argue the merits of either players. Now you might want to perhaps look towards Harry Redknapp and question if he is strong enough to handle the personalities we have at the club and controlling tactics to the teams best interests rather than accommodating players for the sake of it. Harry might not be the most tactically astute. He might wing it from time to time. But his track record would either suggest he does know what he's doing or that the sheer abundance of quality we posses means we rarely get unstuck. More fine tuning and we might elevate ourselves further.

But removing the managerial element and simply looking at van der Vaart as a player - he is pretty much
undroppable. In my opinion, you cant drop a player in form (more so in form than Defoe) who can't stop scoring.

In fact, he's practically a forward with his ratio of goals scored. He's a born winner that wants to play, always wanting to play and always wanting to lead. Something we have lacked many times in the past. I've used the word 'galvanise' one thousand times before and I'll use it again because that's what he does.

Dropping Rafa to make room for Defoe doesn't equate to logic. Perhaps sometimes he goes missing and he might not defend as brightly (if at all) compared to other players. But check this out: He's a flipping attacking midfielder, he attacks. He attacks the penalty area, he attacks space, he looks for assists and looks to get on the end of assists. He's a forward focused machine, be it one that runs out of gas and needs to be parked up but then having to make a substitution late on in a game is not a strong enough reason to leave him on the bench to start with.

He does cover a fair bit of ground too. Drops deep. This is where you might question how much influence Harry has over Rafa and if he is instructed to go on a wander or if he does so because that's what Rafa likes to do. If played out on the wing, much like Modric, he probably doesn't fit in as effectively. Imperfections. Maybe Rafa does defend more and work harder than we give him credit for. A forward focused attacking midfielder who drops back into deeper positions. If he didn't drop back so often he might not be as effective.

There is valid reason for us to sometimes start with two forwards up top. Long season, plenty of games,
players need to be rotated to retain freshness. With Rafa, at the minute, I'd sacrifice that to allow him to continue to puncture games with his brilliance because when we're not performing all that well, to have such a player in the team that is capable of winning it for us can not be ignored. There's never any guarantee that two players up top will make a bigger impact. Strikers have been known to offer nothing but a goal from time to time. It's about getting the job done, and he does just that.

Having a free-scoring midfielder that turns up no matter the opposition, home or away, big or small - it's something that should be celebrated. You have to love Spurs. We have problems scoring one season and then have problems making room for goal scorers the next.

So just stick a smile on your face.

Cole conundrum

Joe Cole. Let's be logical with this. Aside from the fact he's had a knock or too and has not figured too much (for club and country) if signed - where would he play and at the cost of what current Spurs midfielder? If Harry decides to mix it up and say, play one upfront, we'll left with another conundrum - what the heck do we do with the remaining strikers - taking into consideration that we are meant to be looking at another forward?

The obvious answer/solution would be simply this: squad rotation. No matter the formation, we're going to have injuries we're going to have priorities, so having a strong midfield would only benefit us - on all four fronts. But would that keep all our players happy and more importantly, would tinkering mess with form of both individuals and the team? Chop change isn't exactly the building block of consistency.

I'm not a manager, Harry is, and I'm sure we wouldn't want to spend a shed load on wages for a player who will not be key. I'm uncertain. Cole is without doubt quality on his day. But considering the midfield players who have, I'd hate to see the likes of Huddlestone stagnate. So, if signed how does it effect the dynamics of our midfield.

IMO, let it change if it benefits evolution. Otherwise, like for like, tinker with minimal effect depending on opposition/injuries. In other words, if Cole wants to be a team player rather than a constant first teamer - then I'm happy to see him sign. Of course, there might be a clue in what Harry stated about Bale in his interview with TalkSport, regarding Bales best/future position being left-back. That would mean Cole on the left-wing and the rest of the mid remaining as is (Wilson/Hudd, Modric, Lennon) leaving us with the likes of Niko as an alternative option.

Obviously, balance is vital - so there's need for some experimentation if this signing does occur. Although we do know Cole can track back (although I doubt Harry would have him doing so to the degree Jose did at Chelsea).

There's a fair bit of debating on the matter going on at the moment. Even Arsenal fans (who are heavily linked with Cole) are questioning how and where he would fit into their side.

So - if it happens and we do sign him; happy days?

Update on Monday, July 5, 2010 at 10:48PM by spooky

Sandro. Add him to the pack. Suddenly looks a bit congested in there. Forgot about him. As for JJ, reckon we're about to call time on his WHL career.

The Huddlestone Proxy

He is perhaps the player that has elicited the ‘ahh I get it now’ response from the crowd (as the season itself unfolded) and from fans alike, and over the course of the season has grown in stature. But there are still question marks for some.

Spooky has previously mentioned the conundrum, in that whilst he appears to some to be immobile, lacks pace, is a luxury player, goes missing in big games, needs to play alongside a strong defensive player (basically Sergeant Wilson) to play to his own strengths or indeed lay off the Tommy K, he is not without his merits. And all of these have been common consensus opinions, since joining the club and a lot are, to be frank, not without merit (although the Daily Snail clearly haven’t heard of Photoshop).

      Huddburger anyone?

As some of you here will know, for the last couple of years I have been banging the drum (to the extent that I have been accused of acting as his PR agent) that Huddlestone is the closest we have had to replacing Carrick, to the point where those that have not been converted to my way of thinking have been silently assassinated and I carry on in my crusade. And as much as I’d like to now sit back and say ‘I told you so’, that wouldn’t tell the whole story.

But taking a step back it is easy to see that Huddlestone is also an anomaly in the bigger picture. It would seem the media has consistently pushed for an altered view on the game in England and with so many opinions out there by ex-professionals it is easy to see how it happens.

We are told time and time again about how great the English Premier league is, how tough it is and how the pace of the game is so much more intense than our European counterparts. And so in this frenetically paced environment we see an increasing number of waif like players, athletes who can ‘kick a ball a bit’, as opposed to the more skilful ‘guile and craft’ type players whose numbers appear to dwindle year on year, a perfect example of which is the increasingly frustrated Berbatov (who’s love for squirrels may see him moving to the continent).

And yet I can still (just) remember my Saturday morning’s as a nipper being told to pass the ball because ‘the ball can move quicker than I ever could’, this was relentlessly drummed into me (not in a Roman Catholic priests way) and yet amongst the myriad of opinion from ex-players it never gets commented on. Instead we are simply told that it is ‘pace’ that is so dangerous to teams and that these days they are all highly toned ‘athletes’.

Well Hudd doesn’t really have pace, I’ll grant you that, but he does put in some good leg work (often not noted or indeed commented on). So does that make him a ‘luxury player’? What exactly is he? Is he an attacking central midfielder? As he’s not your ‘box to box’ engine that get’s tagged onto so many other central midfield players (notably Lump-o-lard, Gerrard and more recently Fletcher for United). So maybe he’s not the player you want at ‘the top of the diamond’ or pushing forward. However he does have one hell of a strike on him when he connects. Conversely, he seems not to score very many from the positions he gets in, he doesn’t drive into the box to get onto crosses, in fact if anything he sits off waiting for the counter attack (good in my opinion, others find it frustrating).

So is he a defensive midfielder? Well there are some who say he can’t tackle, that stats from the last season alone will contradict that one, but actually this is where one of the subtlety’s of his game comes in. If you position yourself correctly and make it difficult for an opponent to get round you, you can stop them advancing without actually making a tackle. Helps If there’s a lot of you to get round of course, but it slows the attack and will force the opponent to rethink his attack. Does this appear on the ‘stats’ that get poured over each week? After all clearly there someone somewhere sat at every game with an abacus marking down every half-tackle, half-chance, along with the incomplete passes? Again you only have to look towards the media for their views on all manner of stats and indeed opinions. 

Well I have yet to see a specific column for ‘defending well without making a tackle’, but I have noted that Hudd has done this to great effect in some games (not all, and this is where the criticism is valid), most obviously in games where he shepherds the player into the brick wall that is Wilson.

But this whole ‘quarter back role’ that he’s been saddled with, does that make the best use of the fact that he can score a cracker right out of the top draw? And it relies on Wilson doing the tackling and passing to him to make the pass. Surely if you had the one player who could do both it would be more effective, wouldn’t it? And a quarterback dictates play, Hudd even at his best never really seems to ‘dominate’ oppositions, he just gets about his job without the shouting and ref surrounding that the aforementioned ‘box to box’ players all seem to have in common. He’s not a vindictive or terrier type player whose attitude commands the middle of the park like a (Roy) Keane or a Dennis Wise.

So he can’t beat his man for pace, he can’t really tackle (allegedly), he doesn’t have a ‘big lung bursting engine’ on him, and he doesn’t appear to outwardly have the big game attitude, so what is he? This ephemeral ‘luxury player’?

Or maybe he’s just a straight forward central midfielder, no ‘makalele’ or ‘quarterback’ tags. Just a simple player, where all he has to do in the middle is receives the ball and makes a pass. Well yes, but then anyone can do that, right? Wrong!!!! I refer back to one of the most frustrating and loveable players to have watched in recent times, Didier Zokora, who would run 30 yards to make a 5 yard pass, rather than simple make the 35 yard pass in first place. Was it because he couldn’t complete a pass over 5 yards, or that he was simply a headless chicken? I don’t know, I loved his heart and attitude, but it was never really matched by his play as it slowed down our attacks and allowed the organised teams to get back into their ‘two blocks of four’ an expression Messrs Hanson and Dixon seem to have patented.

So Hudd can make a pass, course he can. But that’s not the simplistic beauty of his play, no it’s always been far more subtle than that. He has two of the ‘gifts’ that others are not graced with, the ability to place the ball on a silver platter in any position on the pitch and more importantly the vision to see the movement by his team mates. Combined these give speed of thought and execution of a pass that turns defence into attack, and can split the most resilient of defences, or catch out players who have pushed out of position. For me, if the ability to create a goal from a single pass is a luxury, then in my humble opinion it’s a luxury every team could do with.

So I will now say that Huddlestone is the best midfield player we have had since Carrick, for me even better than Wilson (a sacrilege for some for me to even suggest that) and has the potential to be greater still. Sure with age and experience comes the ‘dominating’ aspect of the game, but he can tackle, and does, he puts in some of the hard yards and he ‘sees’ the game when he is on song.

He is versatile as well, he can sit back and make his passes allowing a more ‘craft and guile’ (Modders) or even our own ‘pace merchants’ (Lennon and Bale) to benefit from his ability. Or he can push on and dictate play higher up the pitch (alongside Wilson), as he seldom loses possession and so he allows a higher line of attack and defence. He brings the Balance to both our attacking and defensive play the likes of which we have not seen for some time.

For me he was my player of the season, admittedly this is mostly because I am biased towards wanting him to do well, but also because he has come on so much that we really missed him when he was out more than any other single player (I’m discounting the King as he was always likely to be out regularly).

Sure he’s not the exciting Welsh winger or goal poaching Russian that we love to love, and he’s not the ‘headline grabber’, nor will he get the crowd out of their seats. But, in terms of his overall ability, the effect he has on the game and just as importantly our balance and style of play, it looks like we’ve finally got a young English central midfielder around whom we can base a free flowing game of passing and movement – well passing anyway.

Hey, he might yet make the cut for the final 23 this summer. And I for one am hoping so for England’s sake, Rooney thrives on service and is often acknowledge for his ‘off the ball’ movement, just imagine what he could do with the sort of service that Hudd could give him from deep positions (now’s there a quote for some of you). Lennon (and Tottenham) has already benefitted this season, maybe England can too.

And to all those that wanted him sold 18 months ago I can only say ‘ner, ner, na, ner, ner’! Childish I know, but hey.......... 

.......Go forth and consider the above.

How do you solve the conundrum of David Bentley?

Where do we even start on this one? Let's go back to the beginning.

There is no shadow of a doubt that at the time David Bentley fitted into the Tottenham criteria as a big-money summer signing.

Player of the moment
Much hyped
England International
Poster boy

With Robbie Keane leaving for Liverpool, we knee-jerked (as we've always done) and spunked £15M on a player that arguably was signed to fill a gap. Just not the one out on the left side. The reason we are perpetual pretenders and usually perpetual perpetual pretenders is because we have a track record of signing superfluous (I love that word) players who are more style than substance. They look the part but don't offer enough strength or intent and in this particular case did not complement what we already had. He simply wasn't needed from the perspective of logic. But then when have we ever done logic? We did once upon a time, but thanks to our revenue, we have always been able to sign the player people expect us to sign rather than the player we desperately need. Although things have changed post-Director of Football.

So, in he came. To his boyhood club. Ex-gooner? We can forgive and forget for that minor indiscretion. But it's here the conundrum begins. He's signed for 15 big ones when he's probably only really worth half of that. He's all smiles, star-jumping, loving it at Spurs, well up for the season. We thrash Roma (I told everyone at the time to keep their panties on, but most wouldn't listen) and he stars. Pre-season is a blast and as far as he's concerned he's the new Beckham in the making. Which is where the conundrum begins to eat away at him.

Bentley, for all the glam and show-boating off the field is a fragile almost glass structure of a man in reality. Easily broken. And it didn’t take long for him to smash into thousands of pieces. Mainly thanks to two points from eight games. Ramos out. Harry in. His form was all over the shop. And Lennon's re-birth was under way. That's Lennon - signed for £1M. That's Lennon, yoof investment that plays on the right-wing. See that Spurs logic? Two right-wingers, neither can truly play on the opposite wing or anywhere else effectively (although Lennon through the middle has worked on occasions) so if one plays, the other won't ever get a look in. There's no scope for mixing it up.

We had that goal in the 4-4 but it failed to disguise the obvious. Bentley was a man playing football from memory of how football should be played if you wanted to be seen as the new Becks. Everything was a show-boat or flick or attempted bullet-turning-corners-in-the-air pass. Nothing was basic. Nothing was simple. His form continued to degrade. With Azza tearing it up, there was no reason to even consider Bentley for the right wing. Yet he still found time to kick balls off roofs into skips.

At this point, possibly, not sure - it might have always been there but only manifested because of the pressure of football…David cited 'personal problems' for his lack of form. Are these problems because of his form or is there something outside of football bringing him down? Not our business tbh, I'm not going to speculate. Either way, the club and people around him should support him. As for the fans, well, we are fickle lot. In some ways, we see footballers as commodities, representatives of our club and demand 100% because they're millionaires thanks to people like us and blah blah blah. But the moaning and groaning and the internet-slating was completely in full effect. As ever, because of the weight of expectation - everyone was losing patience. And David continued to lose all hope.

In the summer, we had an alleged interview which was apparently conducted without the player knowing he was being interviewed (nice under-hand tactics there by the reporter) which IMO would deem it completely void of importance as anyone can be mis-quoted in this cheap shot way. The suggestion was Bentley was looking for a move to Villa. And yet, he's still with us. Even after his car crash. A wake-up call apparently, that doesn't appear to have made a difference with his quality of football. And why should it? We don't even have a reserve team for him to play in. His quality remains distinctly average. Which is what you expect from a player who appears lost and without direction.

Not  playing games will do little to increase interest in him and his value will be nowhere near the £15M mark this time round if we are looking to sell him in Jan. He wasn't that bad against Utd the other night. Average yes, but not terrible. Just a disappointing, not helped by the fact that he had little to aim for when he crossed the ball in.

I'm not sure there's a way to solve this conundrum.  At the moment there are plenty of fans who still want him to succeed. Why would you not? He obviously has the talent to do so. But he's sadly the right player for the wrong team. If Lennon didn't exist, he might well be dominating the right-wing for us. There is no room for him at Spurs. He's a Lego brick sitting in amongst a jigsaw puzzle.

A move away would reignite him, for sure. It's the way football tends to work. He'll go somewhere and the pressure wont be as harsh and relentless and he'll re-discover his spark.

It's time for goodbye. Just a quick hug. How do you solve this conundrum? You don't. You just hand it over to someone else and admit defeat.