FEB 11 — The January transfer window has slammed shut and it’s been a really quiet one for English Premier League (EPL) clubs this year, especially when it comes to high profile or big name signings. There’s nothing even remotely close to last year’s double whammy that involved the transfers of Fernando Torres (from Liverpool to Chelsea for £50 million, or RM243 million) and Andy Carroll (from Newcastle to Liverpool for £35 million).
Judging from how unsuccessful those two transfers have been so far, maybe the teams this year finally got some sense knocked into them. They seem to tread with more caution during the January transfer window as prices at this time of the year tend to be quite exorbitant when it comes to marquee signings as naturally any club would not want to part with their star player in the middle of the season.
Even moneybags Manchester City surprisingly didn’t splash out and only had the David Pizarro loan deal as the only incoming transfer to their squad. The biggest spender was probably Queens Park Rangers, who not only got themselves quite a few new players (especially the potentially delicious new strike force of Djibril Cisse and Bobby Zamora), but also acquired a new manager in Mark Hughes, so let’s hope these new recruits will help them avoid the relegation dogfight that many were predicting before this. Malaysia boleh!
But I think the biggest surprise of this transfer window is the way my beloved Tottenham Hotspur (Spurs) conducted their January transfer business. It’s a well-known fact that our manager Harry Redknapp is quite the wheeler-dealer in the transfer business, with people speculating that sometimes he may have bought players just because they were available and cheap, like the baffling decision to sign Steven Pienaar in January last year (whom we’ve now loaned back to Everton in this January transfer window as he’s not been getting much game time since he joined our squad).
Since we’re still third in the EPL table, and challenging for the title is still not impossible, many fans and observers (including me) have thought and predicted that Spurs might take the ambitious route and splash out on one or two world class signings to inject even more life into our highly unlikely title challenge this year. Combine that with a wheeler-dealer of a manager, and I was honestly expecting that we’ll get rid of as many of the rarely used players in the squad as possible (like Roman Pavlyuchenko, Sebastian Bassong, Vedran Corluka and Steven Pienaar) and hopefully at least sign a fit central defender and maybe a top striker.
While we did manage to get rid of the aforementioned rarely used players, the players we did bring in though were more than baffling, to say the least. If signing Steven Pienaar (who was a player we didn’t need, in a position that’s already overcrowded in our squad) last year was strange, then I can’t even begin to explain the mysterious decision of bringing in not just one, but two players past the age of 32 with quite frightening recent injury records, even if only on loan and on a short term basis.
Louis Saha, a fearsome striker in his prime with Fulham (which led to Manchester United signing him) is now 33, and even though he’s less plagued with injury in the last year or so, he hasn’t really been scoring lots of goals for quite some time now. And when even a club with striker problems like Everton is willing to let Saha go, one must wonder about the wisdom of bringing him in.
Our other signing, Ryan Nelsen, is also quite a mystery. While age doesn’t necessarily prevent one from being a solid defender, which he’s always been throughout his long career, he’s been out injured for quite some time now, and we already have two old and injury-prone defenders in our ranks. But then I’m also sure that our medical department would have standards high enough to not approve of signing a player if he’s not fit to play, so in their judgment I have to trust.
But what’s really frustrating is that these two signings more or less imply that the EPL title is not really on our mind at all and that all we want is to finish third or fourth and get into the Champions League next year, as they’re more or less solid backup players for our current team, not the kind of players who’ll take us to the next level.
Then again, maybe our very prudent chairman Daniel Levy knows something about the future of Harry Redknapp that we fans don’t, which is that his time as a Spurs manager is almost near the end, as loads of people have been predicting that he’s the top candidate to replace Fabio Capello as England manager once the European Championships end this summer, and that he’d rather give the spending money to the manager who’ll be at the club for next season’s campaign.
And what do you know, as I turned on my laptop this morning to finish this article, a shocking piece of news just broke in — Fabio Capello has resigned as England manager, and Harry Redknapp has also just been acquitted after his trial for tax evasion. Inevitable appointment, only six months earlier then?
And how’s this for a shocker, earlier this season football pundits have been saying that Jose Mourinho is itching to go back to managing in the EPL (and the way things are looking now, it really does look like he’ll leave Real Madrid at the end of this season), and of all the “big” teams, probably only Spurs will be available because of the Redknapp-Capello saga.
If we can maintain our third position, maybe that’s not such a long shot at all. Although I’d love to see how Swansea’s Brendan Rodgers might do with a chance to take over as Spurs manager (imagine the kind of champagne football we’ll be playing!), having Jose “Special One” Mourinho is not bad too. Are we saving our ambitions for next season? Let’s hope so!
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.
