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Alasdair Gold, Football.London’s Tottenham Hotspur correspondent took the time to sit down with Football FanCast on Saturday, ahead of the Spurs Legends clash with their Inter Milan counterparts.
He gave us the rundown on the new stadium, Spurs’ transfer plans and his prediction for the Champions League quarter-final clash with Manchester City.
Take a look below…
After all the delays over the move, you must have been excited to finally get here…
“I’ve been doing video updates around the ground, walking around it, metaphorically banging on windows, trying to get in. They’re very good, they put on a little press tour just before the test event, a couple of days before and we got to see it and it was one of those moments of exhaling and saying ‘it was worth it’ because it is phenomenal. It is phenomenal on the outside but actually, when you’re inside you appreciate the scale of it.”
You can see it from two miles up Seven Sisters…
“That’s such a difference. White Hart Lane was such a tucked away ground and that was part of its appeal, that you’d walk around the corner and see a stadium there. Whereas this place, you come out of Seven Sisters, you can see the top of it. It’s a landmark, really. That’s what they wanted to create and they have.”
The South Stand in particular looks amazing…
“Yeah, when that’s full, the noise is going to be ridiculous. They’ve signed it in such a way, they’re very keen to say that the guy who does U2 concerts has done the acoustics so it’ll be louder than any other football ground. For the last test event, the Under-18 match with 30,000 or so, for every goal, the cheers rolled around the ground. Even a half-full stadium was almost deafening. 62,000 will sound very, very loud, it’ll be fantastic.”
It’s Palace on Wednesday. Andros Townsend first goal?
“That’s what everyone’s dreading, isn’t it? Cutting in on his right foot and banging it in, that would be so horrific, it really would. It’d be the worst way to kick off the new stadium. You’d hope not. Pochettino has made this big deal about how the stadium will give special energy to the team, a bit like White Hart Lane in its final year. Even the Under-18s.
“You could just tell there was a buzz about them, I know they’re young kids playing on a big stage but the crowd kind of carried them along and they never really had that at Wembley. It’s a bigger capacity but it never really felt like home. It was a big cavernous stadium, towards the end, the numbers were dropping and dropping. You’d think, with Spurs back here, it’s going to be packed. It was carnage, people trying to get tickets. It’s going to be so noisy and it’ll be so hyped up, you’d think that would get Spurs there because, yes, an Andros Townsend 1-0 winner would be a horrific way to open the stadium.”
That is the expectation, the Spurs gallows humour…
“Oh, absolutely, you can’t be a Tottenham Hotspur fan and expect the best. It doesn’t work like that, there’s always going to be some spanners in the works. Andros Townsend may be that spanner! He’s certainly not a spanner but he was very good in the FA Cup, he didn’t celebrate, I’m sure there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to be the guy that does that in the first game. It’s up to Spurs to stop him doing it. They’ve got to sort the defence out, which hasn’t been that great the last couple of months.”
If it can’t cope vs Palace, then they might not have much of a chance against Man City…
“That’s putting it lightly. They’ll get absolutely stuffed by City if they’re anything like they have been in recent games. He’s got some decisions to make, Poch. This season, he’s flipped and flapped between a back three and a back four and I don’t think that’s helped the team.
“Last year, he may have been weirdly helped, if that’s such a way of describing Toby Alderweireld’s injury, but Alderweireld’s injury meant he had to play Jan Vertonghen and Davinson Sanchez. They formed a very solid partnership and they knew what each other were doing and when it went to a back three, it was purely Eric Dier coming back into that back three. It was very settled.
“This year, he looks like a man who is thinking ‘I have to play Alderweireld, because he’s class’ but it’s now giving him an issue with Sanchez, who Pochettino absolutely adores, so he’s now got a thing of ‘I really want to play a back three but I can’t do it every match’ and it’s messy. You can see it in the goals conceded tally. I think it’s almost double what it ended up as last season.”
Surely there will be some sort of deal this summer to help out the defence?
“You’d think so. I think right-back has been a bit of a mess. It’s a bit like Trippier hasn’t been able to get down from that peak of that World Cup semi-final free-kick. He’s not creating enough anymore and you don’t want to use the term ‘believing his own hype’ but a lot of fans have been saying that. Serge Aurier hasn’t been the player Spurs thought they were buying. It was always a gamble but he hasn’t been an upgrade. If he could have put his personal issues aside, actually, as a player, he’d be a real upgrade. He just hasn’t done it, he’s too inconsistent in defending.
“Kyle Walker-Peters, everyone wants him to get a chance, but when he has had a chance, apart from Bournemouth, he really hasn’t taken it. It might see him go out on loan, I think right-back is the area for me. Left-back, I think he’s quite happy with. Danny Rose has shown signs of being more like the old Danny Rose but I don’t think enough. He’s still not doing enough in the final third for me and if you’re playing with wing-backs, they have to do that.
“Ben Davies is just mister dependable. He’s not creating as much as he did last year; I think last year he created more than any other defender in the Premier League, I remember that stat at one point last year. He’s just the guy that you bring in if you want to shore things up. It needs something there, it needs a bit of excitement, it’d be nice to have someone who’s been there and done it, too, with a bit of experience in that full-back area.”
Gareth Bale’s available!
“Well, if they’ve got £650,000 a week, I’m sure they can do it! That’s what he’s supposed to earn and I think that’s before tax in Spain. It’s a very romantic notion, Bale and Modric, another one people are wanting, but it’s just not the Tottenham way right now.”
Are we talking more Aaron Wan-Bissaka or Max Aarons?
“Very much so, very much so. That’s the kind of players. British talent (is wanted) because they had a total mess with the foreign player limit last year. Michel Vorm, we’ll probably see leave, because that’s another foreign player signing they could make. I do wonder if it’s going to be a bit of a revamp this summer, I think they have to. There’s a positive to the stability they’ve had because it’s clearly given a foundation but they’ve never really kicked above it.
“I think a bit of a revamp is probably needed, I think Poch needs to freshen things up for himself as well. He’s working with the same players he’s been working with since 2014, pretty much, on the whole. I think he’s got to freshen it up. The stadium will freshen things up but in terms of the squad, we will see. Obviously, Eriksen and Alderweireld could be out the door. It could be forced upon them anyway.”
Does the clause in Alderweireld’s contract now feel like a huge mistake?
“It was very un-Tottenham like, that clause. That was the weird thing about it. It was very un-Levy like. He (Alderweireld) put something on Instagram after the stadium training session saying ‘this place is amazing, it’s exceeded all my expectations’, so I asked Pochettino about that in the press conference. I didn’t name the player but I asked if the stadium could help convince players to sign new contracts and he was just like ‘nope’.
“He said it’s a lovely romantic notion and you and I would probably feel that way but he said there’s so much around the players, so many people who are so involved in the business side of it that it just doesn’t work like that anymore. You kind of have to feel he was talking about Alderweireld.
“There’s been a lot of background noise about deals that were offered and not taken and the fact that no deal has seemingly been offered in the last year or so. I think it’s a player who is coming towards the end of his time at Spurs which is tremendously sad because he’s a terrific player. But I suppose the flipside is £25million for a 30-year-old ends up not being the worst deal in the world. But it is Alderweireld.”
Could he bow out with the last hurrah of winning the Champions League?
“Yeah, I don’t think that’d keep him. It’d be more of an ‘I’ve done that now, let’s tick it off the list’. It would be a massive achievement if Spurs won the Champions League. It wouldn’t quite be Leicester winning the Premier League but it would be an amazing thing. In the players’ minds, they might think it was a one-off and wonder if they could do it again at this club. We’ll see, we’ll see. I think rebuilding is the aim of the summer.”
Is the new stadium going to play a key role against Man City in the Champions League?
“You’d hope so otherwise what was the point of it all. Getting it open before the end of the season is for nights like that. The fans are going to be so hyped up. The opening night is going to be noisy but that, with the Champions League anthem playing, the fans are going to be so on edge, in a good way. And it’s suddenly become a little bit harder for City. They came to Wembley earlier this season, it was just another match for them. This place, they will be coming into enemy territory. It’s got to play a role, it has to. Otherwise, Spurs are in trouble.”
Do they need to win the home leg?
“I think so, they have to go to the Etihad with something to hold onto instead of something to build on because we know, you know, I know it’s not the same level but we saw City against Fulham and it was just wave after wave of attacks and Spurs currently, I don’t feel they’re mentally strong enough to deal with that. We’ve seen a lot of examples where they would’ve drawn matches in the past but they’ve conceded another straight away, they’re not there mentally this season. I worry about going to the Etihad with something like a 1-1, I don’t think that’s enough.”