Cartilage Free Captain

Good news if you’re like me and are averse to awkward encounters with old friends and/or exes! According to Bayern Munich manager, Harry Kane will not be in the Bayern Munich squad when they play Tottenham Hotspur in the upcoming preseason match in Seoul, South Korea.

The report is in ESPN, and Kompany says Kane is amongst the players who went deep into the EUROs and will not return in time to feature in the match in South Korea.

“Harry Kane, Alphonso Davies, Dayot Upamecano and Kingsley Coman won’t be there, but then hopefully for the first cup game,” Kompany said. (And yes, “Bayern Munich manager Vincent Kompany” is still a weird thing to type, especially now that Kane’s there)

So that forestalls one awkward encounter, but we might not fully avoid the more awkward encounter, which is Spurs vs. Bayern II: Electric Kaneabaloo, otherwise known as the Visit Malta Cup, which will take place at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on August 10. Maybe if we just hang out on the outskirts of the stadium we can avoid him? Anyway, this is OUR house, Harry, you were the one who decided to shack up with that German hussy down the road, don’t come crying back to me just because she didn’t deliver any trophies like she promised.

Good news if you’re like me and are averse to awkward encounters with old friends and/or exes! According to Bayern Munich manager, Harry Kane will not be in the Bayern Munich squad when they play Tottenham Hotspur in the upcoming preseason match in Seoul, South Korea.

The report is in ESPN, and Kompany says Kane is amongst the players who went deep into the EUROs and will not return in time to feature in the match in South Korea.

“Harry Kane, Alphonso Davies, Dayot Upamecano and Kingsley Coman won’t be there, but then hopefully for the first cup game,” Kompany said. (And yes, “Bayern Munich manager Vincent Kompany” is still a weird thing to type, especially now that Kane’s there)

So that forestalls one awkward encounter, but we might not fully avoid the more awkward encounter, which is Spurs vs. Bayern II: Electric Kaneabaloo, otherwise known as the Visit Malta Cup, which will take place at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on August 10. Maybe if we just hang out on the outskirts of the stadium we can avoid him? Anyway, this is OUR house, Harry, you were the one who decided to shack up with that German hussy down the road, don’t come crying back to me just because she didn’t deliver any trophies like she promised.

Last January Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Matthew Craig headed out on his first ever loan to League 2 Doncaster United where he had 18 appearances. Now he’s heading out again, but with a step up in competition.

The club announced today that Craig, a Spurs academy graduate, is heading to Barnsley in League One for the entirety of the season.

And not just that, Barnsley is a GOOD League One team — they finished sixth in the table last season, making the promotion playoffs but losing to Bolton Wanderers. So that speaks well of Craig’s ability, and his improvement. Craig is one of those players who seems to fly just a little under the radar compared to his more hyped classmates. But he’s a solid player, even if he may not necessarily be the player who breaks into Spurs’ first team. (Then again, I said the same thing about Ryan Mason!) That said, Craig will likely have a solid professional football career somewhere just below the Premier League level, even if he doesn’t hit the big time.

You might recall that Matthew is a twin — his brother Michael also came up through the Spurs academy but was sold to Reading last summer.

This is the first of what will likely be a number of young Spurs players heading out on loan before the end of the window. Good luck in League One, Matthew!

Kit numbers for Tottenham Hotspur’s 2023-24 season haven’t been finalized yet and likely won’t be until closer to the start of the Premier League season, but as of today we now know two Spurs players who will have new shirts.

First, the most obvious of obvious chances — Guglielmo Vicario is Tottenham’s No. 1 keeper and now has the kit number to prove it. He will sport the #1 shirt last worn by Hugo Lloris.

When Googly Elmo arrived, Lloris was still at the club even though he didn’t play for Spurs. I’m not sure why Hugo didn’t release his number for Vic at the time; maybe it was just a respect thing for a long-standing servant of the club for more than a decade, that’s fine. But Vic wore #13 last season, and now that Hugo’s gone it makes all the sense in the world for him to switch.

And what about the now-vacant #13? Well, that’s where Destiny Udogie comes in.

Destiny wore #38 last season, which was a weird choice — a kit formerly worn by such Spurs luminaries as Ryan Mason, Cameron Cater-Vickers, and David Bentley. But that’s probably only because he wasn’t able to wear #13, his number at Udinese, because that was the number Vicario chose.

So what I’m getting from this is that everybody’s happy now — Hugo gets his chosen number, Destiny gets his chosen number, and at least for these two players Spurs fans can now order their numbered kits from the club shop with confidence.

Hooray!

OK, bear with me a bit on this one. I typically have standards about what kind of news or rumors generate enough actual info to write a speculative article — I don’t base reports on so-called “ITK” (in the know) and am pretty careful to qualify the crap of of things that are even mostly reliable.

But there’s been a LOT of smoke in the air about 18-year-old South Korean winger Yang Min-Hyuk, one of the exciting young Korean players in the post-Son Heung-Min generation. Current reports are that Yang is in talks to move to “a big Premier League club” and there is a LOT of online chatter that this yet-unnamed club just might be Tottenham Hotspur.

Now, do I KNOW this to be true? No. Not even close. It’s all speculation and ITK reports, and further details are likely going to come out in due course which should hopefully clarify the situation. But consider this — Yang, as stated in the above tweet, is set to be included in the K-League All-Star squad that will face Tottenham in a friendly in Seoul next week, his current club Gangwon FC and there are numerous (and right now, informed but unconfirmed) suggestions that Yang could be unveiled as a future Tottenham player ahead of the match on July 31. Imagine announcing the agreement at halftime of that match, and Yang swapping shirts to play for Spurs in the 2nd half? That’s not going to happen, but it’d be incredible television.

So who is Yang? The short and lazy answer is “the next Son Heung-Min,” but we don’t do that here even if the comparison is easy. But he is a 18-year old dribbly right-sided winger, and while the K-League is the K-League, he had 12 G+A in 1900 minutes as a 17-year old and looks pretty dope. He’s also a Korea U17 international though hasn’t cracked the senior squad yet. Check out his video.

There aren’t advanced stats available for the K-League so you won’t get the sexy green bars if you look him up on FBRef, but if you dig into his surface level stats they’re pretty dang impressive for a kid his age. He’s averaging nearly 0.5 npG+A/90, which is overall 22nd in the K-League, as a 17-year old. Everyone above him on that list is at least four years older.

The plan is, if the murmurs prove to be correct, that Yang would sign with whatever club is signing him and then immediately get loaned back to Gangwon for the upcoming season, which runs February through July. It makes you wonder what he’ll do during the break, but I’m sure those are details which will be worked out. There are also details about work permits and future homegrown club status that will also need to be figured out, but I’m not going to go into those questions right now.

Now, let me reiterate — we do not know that Yang’s new club is Tottenham Hotspur, but we’ll likely find out one way or the other pretty soon. If he does end up coming to Spurs, he’s another young international wunderkind that Spurs will hope can develop into a future star with some additional development time. He’ll be on the Pape Sarr Plan™ — young promising player, loaned back to his original club, then slowly worked into the side. That’s worked pretty well in the past, and continues Tottenham’s recent emphasis on signing exciting young talent before they get snaffled up by bigger clubs or become too expensive to sign.

Yang would likely be transitioning into the club at the same time Sonny would be transitioning out of it. But wouldn’t it be sweet if we lose our superstar Korean king only to welcome in the next generation of Korean attacking talent? I could certainly live with that!

Tottenham Hotspur announced its pre-season tour list of players who will be on the plane, as the club prepares for games against Vissel Kobe in Tokyo (Saturday) before traveling to Seoul, South Korea to take on the K League All Stars (July 31) and a matchup with FC Bayern (August 3). Bayern Munich coach Vincent Kompany announced today that Harry Kane will not be making the trip to face his old side in South Korea.

Seeing many of the first team players coming back for training the last few weeks and playing two pre-season games thus far with victories against Hearts (5-1) and QPR (2-0), the team now makes flight to Japan and South Korea.

The official list has been named in alphabetical:

George Abbott

Brandon Austin

Lucas Bergvall

Yves Bissouma

Ben Davies

Alfie Devine

Jamie Donley

Radu Dragusin (Korea only)

Archie Gray

Luca Gunter

Tyrese Hall

Brennan Johnson

Dejan Kulusevski

Will Lankshear

James Maddison

Mikey Moore

Ashley Phillips

Pedro Porro

Richarlison

Emerson Royal

Pape Matar Sarr

Dane Scarlett

Oliver Skipp

Manor Solomon

Heung-Min Son

Djed Spence

Destiny Udogie

Guglielmo Vicario

Alejo Veliz

Timo Werner

Alfie Whiteman

A few omissions from making the tour are Fraser Forster — as the club says he is still rehabbing at Hotspur Way from a fractured foot. The likes of Micky van de Ven and Copa America winners of Cristian Romero and Giovani Lo Celso are expected to join the squad closer to the start of the season as they’ve earned a rest for making it far in international competitions.

Other notes from the press release: Spanish players Bryan Gil and Sergio Reguilion were granted permission to stay back as they look for possible transfer moves.

Tottenham Hotspur announced its pre-season tour list of players who will be on the plane, as the club prepares for games against Vissel Kobe in Tokyo (Saturday) before traveling to Seoul, South Korea to take on the K League All Stars (July 31) and a matchup with FC Bayern (August 3). Bayern Munich coach Vincent Kompany announced today that Harry Kane will not be making the trip to face his old side in South Korea.

Seeing many of the first team players coming back for training the last few weeks and playing two pre-season games thus far with victories against Hearts (5-1) and QPR (2-0), the team now makes flight to Japan and South Korea.

The official list has been named in alphabetical:

George Abbott

Brandon Austin

Lucas Bergvall

Yves Bissouma

Ben Davies

Alfie Devine

Jamie Donley

Radu Dragusin (Korea only)

Archie Gray

Luca Gunter

Tyrese Hall

Brennan Johnson

Dejan Kulusevski

Will Lankshear

James Maddison

Mikey Moore

Ashley Phillips

Pedro Porro

Richarlison

Emerson Royal

Pape Matar Sarr

Dane Scarlett

Oliver Skipp

Manor Solomon

Heung-Min Son

Djed Spence

Destiny Udogie

Guglielmo Vicario

Alejo Veliz

Timo Werner

Alfie Whiteman

A few omissions from making the tour are Fraser Forster — as the club says he is still rehabbing at Hotspur Way from a fractured foot. The likes of Micky van de Ven and Copa America winners of Cristian Romero and Giovani Lo Celso are expected to join the squad closer to the start of the season as they’ve earned a rest for making it far in international competitions.

Other notes from the press release: Spanish players Bryan Gil and Sergio Reguilion were granted permission to stay back as they look for possible transfer moves.

Kia ora.

The big piece of news over the weekend was the CrowdStrike outage, as an update pushed to an offering from the cyber security company crippled businesses around the world.

I work in IT as part of my day job, and there’s a couple of golden rules around deploying any sort of change or patch:

Never deploy on a Friday; you’ll be left with limited support if something goes wrong

Make sure your change is well-tested, with robust testing plans and scripts

Make sure your change has been reviewed by others, including somebody who knows first-hand exactly what the change might impact

Now, it seems pretty likely that at least one (if not all) of these rules were broken, and there’s probably a software developer feeling pretty sheepish somewhere. These are what you call “Resume Generating Events” - someone, somewhere is to blame, and they’re probably getting fired.

I know the feeling.

Large companies often use what is called an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system to run their business - these can do all manner of things from managing finances to generating sales to procurement of inventory to everything in between. The company I work for uses one such system; and in my first six months with them, I crashed it. For a day.

Long story short, I was seeing some unusual behavior in our data, so went to test a possible cause to see if I could replicate the issue - and accidentally did my test in our Production environment, basically taking the business offline for the better part of a day. Goody.

Thankfully, the issue was resolved without too much gnashing of teeth, and I immediately admitted to my mistake - I’m not the type to try and just cover my butt, and there was no point anyway, as telemetry data would identify me as the user who set the whole thing in motion. Thankfully, outside of a stern talking-to there were no further repercussions, but I did learn a very valuable lesson and was MUCH more careful from then on.

So, what’s the dumbest thing you’ve done at work? Or what’s your biggest screw-up? Funnily enough, the two don’t always overlap...

Matty’s track of the day: Buggin’ Out, by A Tribe Called Quest

And now for your links:

The Athletic ($$$) on Djed Spence’s chances of getting back into Ange Postecoglou’s good books

Alasdair Gold shares his talking points from Tottenham’s win over QPR on the weekend

Kia ora.

The big piece of news over the weekend was the CrowdStrike outage, as an update pushed to an offering from the cyber security company crippled businesses around the world.

I work in IT as part of my day job, and there’s a couple of golden rules around deploying any sort of change or patch:

Never deploy on a Friday; you’ll be left with limited support if something goes wrong

Make sure your change is well-tested, with robust testing plans and scripts

Make sure your change has been reviewed by others, including somebody who knows first-hand exactly what the change might impact

Now, it seems pretty likely that at least one (if not all) of these rules were broken, and there’s probably a software developer feeling pretty sheepish somewhere. These are what you call “Resume Generating Events” - someone, somewhere is to blame, and they’re probably getting fired.

I know the feeling.

Large companies often use what is called an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system to run their business - these can do all manner of things from managing finances to generating sales to procurement of inventory to everything in between. The company I work for uses one such system; and in my first six months with them, I crashed it. For a day.

Long story short, I was seeing some unusual behavior in our data, so went to test a possible cause to see if I could replicate the issue - and accidentally did my test in our Production environment, basically taking the business offline for the better part of a day. Goody.

Thankfully, the issue was resolved without too much gnashing of teeth, and I immediately admitted to my mistake - I’m not the type to try and just cover my butt, and there was no point anyway, as telemetry data would identify me as the user who set the whole thing in motion. Thankfully, outside of a stern talking-to there were no further repercussions, but I did learn a very valuable lesson and was MUCH more careful from then on.

So, what’s the dumbest thing you’ve done at work? Or what’s your biggest screw-up? Funnily enough, the two don’t always overlap...

Matty’s track of the day: Buggin’ Out, by A Tribe Called Quest

And now for your links:

The Athletic ($$$) on Djed Spence’s chances of getting back into Ange Postecoglou’s good books

Alasdair Gold shares his talking points from Tottenham’s win over QPR on the weekend

Not two weeks ago, Djed Spence was seemingly close to a low-money permanent move to Genoa, where he spent last season on loan. Now, on the backs of two strong performances in preseason, he looks like he’s on the plane to Asia next week.

According to Alasdair Gold, Spence is very likely to be included as part of Tottenham Hotspur’s touring squad as they head to Japan and South Korea for three preseason matches against Vissel Kobe, Bayern Munich, and the K-League All-Stars.

Spence has been working hard behind the scenes and that application as well as a lack of available defenders means the 23-year-old is currently expected to head on the tour to Asia, barring a late change in his circumstances.

— Alasdair Gold, Football.London

Djed broke through in Spurs’ opening preseason match against Heart of Midlothian in Edinburgh last week, contributing a goal and an assist, and excelling as an Ange-Ball inverted right fullback. Yesterday, against stiffer Championship competition at QPR, Spence’s second half performance wasn’t as impactful, but he didn’t look at all out of place.

Now, getting included in the touring squad doesn’t necessarily mean much. Gold qualifies the hell out of the decision to include him by using the phrase “as well as a lack of available defenders” and that’s fair. Could be this is as much about improving Djed’s stock and creating a market for him after the Genoa deal collapsed.

But what if it isn’t? Spence is still only 23, and the knock on him has always been his attitude and not his ability. And it’s not like he hasn’t been treated poorly at Spurs — Antonio Conte clearly never wanted him and he’s been tarred with the “club signing” label ever since. I’d be a bit salty about that too. I have seen reports that he had a meeting with Ange Postecoglou to “clear the air” over his situation and no matter what ends up happening, his best chance to get a positive outcome this season is to take his chances in preseason and play some good football to get noticed, whether that comes from Big Ange or another club.

I love a good redemption arc and there’s part of me that would love it if the exciting young backup to Pedro Porro that Spurs need in the wake of Emerson Royal’s (eventual) departure could be a guy we already have on our books. But even it Djed Spence isn’t the guy, he’s already managed to improve his standing within the club after two preseason matches. That can only help lead to a good outcome for him and for Spurs.

Tottenham leave for their trip to Asia on Monday, and the club will likely release the full traveling roster soon. We’ll post it as soon as we hear it.