TOTTENHAM ARE STILL A BIG CLUB!

can a moderator please fix the title

blanchflower decent iirc

JONNY’S DELIGHT AS SPURS AND COLDPLAY HIT NEW YORK!

Jonny Buckland would love to spend a few more afternoons at White Hart Lane.

His problem is that work tends to get in the way – one of the no doubt few downsides of being guitarist in the biggest pop band in the world.

Jonny plays lead guitar for Coldplay, who have now sold more than 50 million albums worldwide.

The band really needs no further introduction and it was a happy coincidence for Jonny that they are playing sold-out gigs in New York as part of their worldwide tour just as his beloved Spurs rolled into the Big Apple.

“I’ve been a Spurs fan all my life,” he said ahead of the Barclays New York Cup win against New York Red Bulls.

“I was born in London and the first match I ever watched on TV was the FA Cup Final (against QPR) in 1982. It all started there, and never stopped.

“I don’t get to White Hart Lane as often as I’d like.

“We tend to be away quite a lot, so I haven’t been for about a year.

“This is the second time I’ve seen the team in the USA, I actually came to this stadium (Red Bull Arena) two years ago.

“The season before last I got to a few Champions League matches, managed to get to see the game against Inter, and that was probably the best game I’ve ever seen.”

Exciting news from White Hart Lane there. Glad they emailed me about it.

Looks like Spurs might only be getting one new striker before the end of the transfer window. Kane's being promoted to the first team. Haven't seen a great deal of him but he hasn't been enormously impressive on the occasions i've watched him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/aug/17/tottenham-hotspur-harry-kane?newsfeed=true

like that from AVB and I like Kane, good first touch and always knows where the goal is. problem with Kane, like so many Spurs players is his best position doesn't seem to fit in to a 4-3-3. he's better playing off a striker in the hole. i hope Andros Townsend gets minutes this year too, he could be great on the left of a front 3, pacy direct with a good right footed shot.

Modric deal has been formally agreed. Spurs will now have some kind of cooperative partnership with Real although the details are vague.

Might be able to start buying people now.

Willen looks more likely to go ahead than Damiao I think? In that Willen is being left out of the Shaktar squad and they appear willing to sell whereas I'm seeing no evidence that either Internacional or Damiao have much interest in Spurs right now.

I think that's true but i can't imagine Levy has endeared himself to them by offering £11.8m for a player they value at north of £20m. Will be interesting to see how his negotiating skills fare with Rinat Akhmetov.

There's talk of a keeper, another midfielder (possibly Moutinho) and a striker (possibly Remy) being brought in but i'm not sure how realistic it is to expect £60m - £70m worth of players to be signed in the next four days.

Rennes have confirmed a bid for M'Vila.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/19367435

can't see moutinho being possible if the price quoted is anywhere near accurate. willian isn't what spurs need the most. dembele seems the best option to me, if he likes playing in central midfield as he did last season.

some stats on dembele
http://news.5minstokickoff.com/index.php/moussa-dembele-still-totes-awesome/

dembele would be great at spurs yes.

modric deal includes a partnership with real, which will probably be even more useless than the partnership with internacional, considering it couldn't even lead to getting sahin on loan.

Sahin's loan fees were pretty high, i think. Liverpool are meant to be paying something like £5m for the season, plus 100% of his salary. Might have made sense to just get someone in permanently.

yeah but if a partnership with the club can't get us a better deal in that case, what is it gonna do in the future?

£13m bid for Lloris supposedly accepted. Not sure if he wants to come. I find it impossible to get excited about signing a goalkeeper, and that seems like a lot of money.

more keepers than strikers at spurs these days

mean old avb is going to ruin friedel's consecutive appearances run.

Friedel's been great but you get the feeling his form could suddenly go at any moment and never come back, and Lloris has years in him.

Did Fulham start off basically playing Dembele upfront? This was possibly pre-Jol.

yeah he was more of a second striker attacking mid until January or so when he started playing in the central midfield

bit of talk about esteban granero now. could be good...

what the fuck are you cunts going to do with dempsey

this is just another bit of spousal abuse between alpha levy and beta boas

He can play on the right of a 4231. Better scoring threat than Lennon.

Midfield from sandro parker livermore bale lennon sigurdsson dempsey dembele huddlestone bentley jenas

tends to play off the left ie bale's position

not got the speed or game stretching capacity of lil aaron

Demsey will be useful cf cover tbfh

xp Two true statements, neither really contradict my two though.

i like dempsey but he just doesn't look like an avb player

deems otm but even though he seems to be potentially a useful cover cf, has he ever actually played there

Idk has he but ito getting onto aerial ball i'd have fewer concerns than adebayor tbh

long nightmare over: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story/_/id/1153053/spurs-midfielder-bentley-joins-rostov-on-loan?cc=5901

Rostov have Pletikosa as well, and Florent Sinama Pongolle.

Ha! Levy must have been hitting all the +007 numbers in his phone book.

bond, kevin bond

Dempsey wouldn't get into our first XI (I dunno unless he displaces Sigurdsson) but I can see him playing virtually every game for us. Better to have one effective guy who can play in four different positions than sign two or three mediocre squad players.

Areas where he's especially necessary - cover/competition on the right. Lennon is usually injured for about a quarter of a season.

Wouldn't want him as CF on his own. But when Adebayor is injured, Demspey should allow Defoe to function better in the team because he can provide some more height, presence and link play further up the pitch.

in a 4-3-3 i think dempsey offers more than lennon on the right, basically what jonathan wilson says here what he doesn't say and what i am interested in is whether defoe could be effective playing wide in that system.
also i probably missed it on the pl thread cause i was away, but dembele's goal v norwich was class.

LIVERMORE FOR ENGLAND

Perhaps the best insight into how Levy operates as the clock ticks down can be found in the recently released autobiography of former Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan – although admittedly the stories within are probably to be taken with lashings of salt.

Back in 2004 Palace had just won promotion to the Premier League under the management of Iain Dowie and academy product Wayne Routledge had been one of the team’s stars on the right hand side of midfield. He’d caught the eye of Spurs and at lunchtime on deadline day Levy contacted Jordan with an offer for the player in the region of £1m. Jordan laughed that off but says he was then contacted at regular intervals for the rest of the afternoon by Levy and people acting on his behalf increasing the offer in increments so small they barely covered the cost of the fax paper they were sent on.

Eventually, at 11pm that night, the bidding had increased to £1.2m and Jordan lost his temper, saying the whole thing was going nowhere fast and in any case even if Spurs did make a serious offer for the player there was now only one hour to go until the deadline and it would be impossible to get Routledge to White Hart Lane, have a deal agreed and complete a medical in time. It was at this point that Levy admitted that Routledge – a contracted Palace player who hadn’t been given permission to speak to Spurs or had a bid accepted for his services – was sitting in a hotel round the corner from Tottenham’s ground with his agent Paul Stretford with everything in place ready to sign.

a heartwarming anecdote from the ever-brill loft for words' match preview which i recommend to anyone

Couldn't care less about Routledge but any opportunity to punk Simon Jordan should be enthusiastically taken.

Reckon this happens quite a lot tbh. When Man United signed Berbatov, Fergie basically picked him up at the airport and handcuffed himself to him.

yeah it's more the troll bidding than anything

250k for phil neville probably being the high point of the artform iirc

like think about it with that routledge story, that is 12 whole hours to go up by 200k

Nothing impresses me more about the Swansea project than apparently making Wayne Routledge resemble a competent Premiership-quality player.

This was the same summer we got Aaron Lennon for £1m. Good times.

routledge has always been a decent mid epl level player tbh, just an old fashioned winger that went out of fashion

Nah he never really established himself even at PL clubs who still played wingers. I think dropping back down to the Championship for a few years probably helped him.

too old fashioned as wingers go but technique good enough to excel as nippy inside forward guy, perfect for swansea in other words

hard chap to love but really impressed for qpr in championship and would have done so again in the prem imo, ending up with swp instead was p much a tragedy in the end

lennon's still only 25, fucking hell

Bar that brief few months under Ramos he's been a fixture in the first team since he was 18. It's only injury that keeps him out.

think it's fair to say a large part of my surprise there is down to feeling like he still hasnt matured as a player yet

but then again i've been lennon-sceptic for years