White hart Lane.
One thing is probably for sure is that whatever shuffle Juande Ramos is thinking about with his £50 million that he could pick up by selling Dimitar Berbatov to Manchester United and Robbie Keane to Liverpool, one name not on his team sheet for next season will be the £800,000 teenager John Bostock that Spurs bought from Crystal Palace.
Suddenly Ramos finds himself in the thick of football’s increasingly vapid moral debate. At one end selling Berbatov to Manchester United is tantamount to saying that Tottenham cannot keep up with the big four.
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Berbatov like Gianfranco Zola was at Chelsea and Dennis Bergkamp at Arsenal is a talismanic player. You cannot sell him to the opposition without ripping the heart out of the club whatever the price. Fans pay to see great players and Totenham are the losers whoever they bring in. To sell the loyal Keane too is a double wound. The big money boys at Sky and the BBC of course don’t care where they play. The cameras can move. But a fan is not going to swap shirts. He may abandon the game first.
Another argument of course is that Alex Ferguson is probably right in his judgement that Berbatov can make United that much stronger which is to every other team’s disadvantage. And while it is fashionable to point the money bags finger at Chelsea, Ferguson himself is not exactly frugal in his purchases with a team that was bought for more than £100 million and some. Nor has Rafa Benitez been a skinflint in the trabnsafer market but giving him Keane to partner Fernando Torres is also a bit like saying that Ramos is not interested in fourth place either.
At the other end of the conveyor belt, the disaffected Palace chairman Simon Jordan points out that £800,000 is not a lot for a teenage England Under 17 prodigy, not enough at least to justify and encourage smaller clubs to run feeder training academies for youngsters on the basis that every once in a while one of them will be good enough to cammand the kind of fee that could make talent spotting, training and community effort more than an exercise in charity.
Fabio Capello has inherited an English team in disarray – we won’t discuss the merits of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – and which can hardly be helped when big clubs follow the movement of labour and prefer to buy, like Arsenal, from Marseille than from Mansfield.
Bostock, the Blackfriars schoolboy who made his debut as a second-half substitute against Watford, added his name to a list of 34 players, including Matthew Etherington, Peter Lorimer and Neil McNab, who have made their competitive debuts for a professional team under the age of 16. He is quick and could have been a hurdler but also academic and might have gone to university. There have been professional footbalers who have done both. Teenage tennis players manage it by distance learning.
“Bostock will not just be a good player? He can be a great player. He has a good left foot and that makes him easy on the eye, he is a good size, can run all day, pass short and pass long,” said former Palace manager Peter Taylor.
“When he first started training with the first team he would take three touches of the ball, but I encouraged him to watch Gareth Barry and Cesc Fabregas; they take one and still they never lose it.”
Bostock probably should have stayed at Palace for another season where at least under Neil Warnock he could have expected first team football and a bit of a clattering from Championship halfbacks. But football’s problem is that it will inevitably blame the boy, not itself. England’s problem is that Ramos is a Spaniard and will probably compound the malaise. Spurs are 64/1 against winning the league. As they don’t even know their team at the moment, that looks short odds, indeed. The moneymen of course though know the balance in the bank. An A side ticket on the Upper West Stand is £75. That’s a lot of money to pay not watching a teenage prodigy or one of the most elegant centre forwards in Europe.
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There will be no love lost when Spurs face Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea had the hoodoo on Spures for many seasons until the spell was broken at Wembley in the Carling Cup Final and the arrival of Juande Ramos and the svengali and ex Chelsea maestro Gus Poyet. The league game at Spurs last March ended 4-4 and paid out a beautiful 125/1. A repeat perfromance is currently 149/1. Spurs have no points and look blunt in attack. Chelsea under Big Luiz Felipe Scolari look fluent and sharp. But three games and zero points is not quite what Ramos or Spurs were expecting to start the season and there will grit to stop it happening. Ramos may park el autobus across the park and trust to a David Bentley flyer.
