'Spurs legend' and keeper to be discarded by ruthless Thomas Frank?
We’ve already told Thomas Frank five players he should build his Tottenham team around, but our brazen impertinence doesn’t stop there. No, internet law requires us to follow that unrequested advice with its mirror image: five players he should hard-heartedly discard.
So here are they.
Son Heung-min
Look, we don’t have to like reality but sometimes we do all have to face it. And the reality of Son’s waning powers was clear throughout last season despite his lingering powers and sheer force of will delivering some passable final goal-contribution numbers.
Son has lost a yard in the legs, but perhaps more importantly also in the head. How much one has beget the other who can say, but he has gone from being one of the most lethal, reliable finishers in the league to a man racked with uncertainty.
There was a time when there was pretty much no Premier League player you would back more confidently when through on his own and seeing the whites of the keeper’s eyes, but those days appear to be over.
A man who has for years injected pace and menace into Spurs’ attacking play suddenly spent much of last season sapping those very qualities. Too often the decision would take too long, or the first touch would be found wanting.
He has been a wonderful player for a very long time, and one who has shown more loyalty to Spurs than, frankly, they deserved. It lends a certain undeniable brutality to the idea of discarding him now he is no longer what he once was. But that doesn’t make it the wrong choice.
Son got the one thing his Spurs career had lacked on that night in Bilbao – a night when, it must be soberly/callously acknowledged his own performance as a substitute was not particularly helpful – and in every possible way it’s hard to see how it gets any better than that for him at Spurs.
He is now unquestionably a Spurs legend even if he felt unable to call himself that before. But that doesn’t mean he is part of Spurs’ future.
Richarlison
We’re slightly unsure on this one. More so than we thought we’d be.
On the one hand, it hasn’t really happened for Richarlison on any consistent basis at Spurs under multiple managers, but on the other he did put in some gargantuan and largely thankless shifts in the latter stages of that Europa League run as Spurs deployed Anti-Angeball to such hilariously devastating effect.
Those were performances that suggested a player capable of playing in a team now far more likely to place greater emphasis on pressing from the front and less on placing most of its defenders in attacking midfield positions for extended periods of time.
But can Richarlison find the goals that would be needed to go with the unquestioned effort and perspiration, with Frank’s Spurs rather less likely to share the goalscoring burden as widely as Postecoglou’s did? We’re really not so sure he can.
Radu Dragusin
Harsh on a man who has suffered such a serious injury and who may well be a better fit for Frankball – whatever form that may take but which we’re certain will definitely feature less Robbie Williams – than Angeball but the truth is he was struggling before the injury.
Kevin Danso has without doubt overtaken him in the pecking order. Ben Davies is still there – he always will be – and youngsters Luka Vuskovic and Ashley Phillips appear to have greater hopes of staking a claim for a squad place in the long term than Dragusin even without that injury cloud.
The nature of his injury and timeframe for his return means it’s going to be almost impossible for Spurs to actually offload him this summer, but his road back to meaningful first-team contention appears to have more roadblocks than the injury alone.
And it’s to the extent where he appears surplus to requirements even if Cristian Romero were to leave, with Spurs likely in that case to move for another centre-back. The transfer rumour trope that managers exclusively target players from their previous club as if they were all Erik Ten Hag means the current name doing the rounds in the world of ‘2 + 2 = maybe 4 but who really knows/cares’ is Nathan Collins.
Yves Bissouma
Very tentative one, this, but we would expect only one of Bissouma and Bentancur to remain at Spurs beyond this summer. Both are currently set to be out of contract at the end of next season and so this summer represents a final chance to recoup any meaningful fee for either.
A short extension for one and departure for the other seems the likeliest and most sensible course of action, with another midfielder likely to come in and both Lucas Bergvall and Archie Gray appearing well capable of kicking on after impressing so very much in their first whirlwind crazy seasons in the Tottenham madhouse.
Retaining one of the more experienced members of that midfield group to work alongside those two, Pape Sarr and any newcomer doesn’t seem the worst strategy, and we would very slightly favour the more rounded skills of Bentancur over Bissouma, notwithstanding the latter’s lionhearted contributions in the last few games of that Europa League victory.
Guglielmo Vicario
We say this with a heavy heart, because we’re tremendously fond of the ever-entertaining goalkeeper stylings of the Italian, dropping easy catches here, pulling off absurd octopus-like saves there.
He is the most profoundly Spurs goalkeeper to have had the job since Heurelho Gomes and trust us when we say that we mean this as a compliment.
But if we are to assume that Spurs under Frank might be a bit more sensible and a bit less chaotic than Spurs under Postecoglou, is there also therefore a case to be made for having a more sensible, less chaotic keeper than Vicario behind it all?
We’ll be honest, a big part of this is that these features have to be five players and we certainly don’t think Vicario ranks among the likelier Spurs departures or the area in most urgent need of upgrade. But we’re definitely not at all certain he starts next season as an undisputed number one.
