Alan Hutton has suggested that it would be madness to let Danny Rose leave Tottenham without a suitable replacement.
Daniel Levy reportedly tried to sell the £60,000-a-week Spurs full-back [Spotrac] to Watford on deadline day, as per Football Insider, but the 29-year-old refused to leave the Champions League finalists.
And speaking to Football Insider, Hutton suggested that letting him go would have been a bad idea.
He said: “I think it’s madness to allow him to leave without a replacement.
“It’s a strange one, I don’t really understand how it’s all come about. He was there when I was there, we’re going back a long time now, but why would you let such a player go?
“England experience, Champions League, everything. It doesn’t really seem to sit right for both sides – you’ve got Trippier and Rose seemed to go through the same situation.
“I don’t really understand what happened. Great player and now I think the window’s shut, he can just close that door and get on with it because he’s a really good player.”
Is Hutton right about Rose?
Absolutely, yes.
Why Levy would want to let Rose go is anybody’s guess, but allowing him to leave over the summer would surely have been particularly foolish.
You can argue, of course, that Spurs now have both Ben Davies and Ryan Sessegnon to cover at left-back, but Rose has been so impressive over the past couple of years whenever he has been called upon that it is hard to see why the club would want to oust him.
Last season he managed 1.9 tackles and was dribbled past just 0.5 times per match in the Premier League, as per Whoscored, while this year he has started with an average of 1.4 key passes per match, as well as a pass completion rate of 86.2%.
By contrast, Davies, the most obvious immediate successor to Rose given Sessegnon’s youth and current injury issues, only just shaded ahead of the England international in terms of his tackles per game last year, managing 2.1, and was nowhere near as effective on the front foot, only registering 0.6 key passes per game, as per Whoscored.
The fact that Mauricio Pochettino has subsequently elected to start Rose in all five of Spurs’ Premier League matches this term should speak volumes too.
He is clearly his manager’s preferred option in that position, and it only makes it more baffling as to why Levy was keen to push through his exit over the summer.
Whatever the reality of that situation may have been, it can only be a good thing that Rose has stayed in north London, and while he may not be long term option as he approaches 30, he is, at least, a quality option for the time being.