Everybody says that you can never judge a player on his first season in the Premier League. However, is this true for the summer seven that made their way to White Hart Lane in the summer of 2013, bought with the money from player sales, predominantly the money made from the Gareth Bale sale.
Last season, these seven summer signings arrived with a total value of over £100m and had huge pressure on them to perform, as did manager Andre Villas-Boas. To put it lightly, things didn’t quite go to plan and AVB was sacked just before Christmas after a 0-5 loss at the hands of high flying Liverpool. Soon, Tim Sherwood was in the hotseat with an eighteen month contract along with assistant Les Ferdinand. Here is where I think it all went wrong for Spurs in the 2013/14 aside from the transfer dealings.
As time grew on, the eventual inevitability of Tim Sherwood’s contract being terminated at the end of the season became more and more obvious. However, the team were playing some nice football, albeit not always coming out with a positive result at the end if the ninety minutes. As the team found out that Sherwood would be heading out of the exit door at the end of the season, they became complacent and they were not playing to the best of their abilities, with a starting place as no incentive as they knew the current manager would be leaving.
This had a big affect on how the team performed with two mangers being sacked in one season, it made the bedding in process a lot more difficult than the players would have anticipated when they joined the football club.
This now leaves Daniel Levy with the task of building stability at the cub and this also leaves Mauricio Pochettino with the tough task of turning the morale of the team around. This hasn’t worked so far, but there is still hope. We all hope that the players will come back from the international break feeling ready to battle for their place at this club as the January transfer window draws ever closer.
