A couple of days after Emmanuel Adebayor signed a season long loan deal with Tottenham Hotspur, his parent club rolled in to White Hart Lane and demolished the hosts with the sort of display which had all associated with each club immediately re-appraising their aims for the campaign.
With Adebayor watching on, it was Edin Dzeko who inflicted the most damage – scoring four to finally conclude any misguided thoughts the Togolese striker had that there was any future for him within Roberto Mancini’s squad.
As the Citizens glided back north, Harry Redknapp was left to pick up the pieces of a crushing defeat which had far greater resonance than the shedding of three points. Luka Modric was still gazing admiringly towards west London, and Spurs had yet to open the chequebook over the summer in an attempt to re-establish themselves back into the Champions Leagueplaces.
Since edging City out the top four in 2010, Spurs had gone on to spend under £15m in affirming their status whilst City had spent more than that on individual players eight times across a £200m spree. The reality was rammed home that on and off the field City were well out of view and after buying themselves a ticket to European football’s grandest banquet, at least they had the decency to throw Spurs some scraps from the feast.
The philanthropic gesture of loaning out Adebayor mattered little to City who could easily afford to dispose of a player they had parted £25m to procure just two years earlier, but it mattered greatly that player and club were married together in such matrimony.
Truth be told, Spurs were in desperate need of a decent striker. For a side who do play open and expansive footballer under a manager who permits them to do so, their goals return last season was poor. They concluded the season scoring 55 times, which was 23 less than the champions, one less than eleven and twelfth placed West Brom and Newcastle and equal withBlackpool – who went down.
They failed to score in seven of their league games with four 0-0 draws an no goals in four games against Wigan and West Ham showing the paucity of that crucial killer touch. Those failings were largely down to Peter Crouch, Jermain Defoe, Roman Pavlyuchenko and Robbie Keane scoring just eighteen league goals between them despite the enviable midfield resource of Aaron Lennon, Rafael Van der Vaart, Luka Modric and Gareth Bale, and given the comparisons listed throughout so far, it’s worth pondering that even without the likes of Yaya Toure, David Silva and the rest, how would Manchester Cityand Tottenham’s respective league places had fared if Carlos Tevez with 20 league goals in 29 games had been plying his trade in the capital?
It has been a long coined phrase that goals win games and Redknapp needed to acquire a quality striker pronto, but with limited resource at his disposal the potential acquisition of adebayor on loan was always going to be tempting to a man famed for his ability to sniff out a bargain.
A brief look at Adebayor’s goalscoring record shows the boy has undoubted pedigree. He scored a goal every other game at Arsenal and even before being jettisoned at City he scored 19 times in 43 appearances. Yet, wherever he goes he never quite fits in and problems inevitably arise. The fact that nobody fancied taking a punt on Adebayor spoke more about his attitude than his ability.