There is some real disinformation flying about at the moment.
Is Erik Lamela going to Juventus on loan or as a purchase? Well, depending upon which half cocked report you read, will influence just how confused or indeed, disinterested you’ve become.
Jeremy Wilson in The Telegraph is convinced that the Argentinian is staying at least until the end of the season. It’s the only strategy that makes a scrap of sense.
We paid £30m for him and he has yet to play an entire 90 minutes. We are told that he’s had issues with the move, namely he arrived with no English and no immediate family.
The suggestion from various ITK types is that Lamela was in fact a spreadsheet buy of Levy & Co.’s, but whoever’s idea it was, the logic in taking a financial hit on the player at this stage is insane. One report claimed a deal for £25m was on the cards.
This is Levy we’re talking about here, not Liverpool and Andy Carroll.
What I find genuinely confusing though, is how little pitch time Erik’s had under Sherwood. This isn’t an attack on Sherwood, rather I got the distinct impression from AVB that there was a certain degree of quite deliberate theatrics to his management of players. He wanted them to know who called the tune.
But under Tim, who wants to play attacking football Lamela has been no more in the frame than he was André.
If Lamela was a house, you wouldn’t describe him as a doer upper. At Roma, he was fully fledged player with rising stock.
Defoe’s move is supposedly to be confirmed next Monday. Speculation is rife that he’ll be loaned back until mid March, when the MLS season starts. That leaves us Defoe-less for the last 2½ months of the Premier League season.
The obvious solution for Tim is to play Lamela on the right of a front 2, with Soldado, with Eriksen behind.
Alternatively, it’s a World Cup year and we could theoretically keep out fingers crossed a hope we break even after the tournament.
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