Jose Mourinho reportedly wants £50m Issa Diop at Spurs but have Premier League rivals West Ham United found a replacement at Athletic Bilbao?
If you were going to build a central defender tailor-made for Jose Mourinho, he’d look a little something like Issa Diop.
Quick and powerful, aggressive in the air yet composed and confident with the ball at his feet, this Rolls Royce of a centre-half is cut from the same cloth as some of the finest defenders to have ever worked with the man currently barking orders from the Tottenham Hotspur touchline, from Sergio Ramos to John Terry, Raphael Varane to Ricardo Carvalho.
And, as you might expect, West Ham United would be loathe to lose their prized asset to their bitter rivals from down the road. But even an eye-watering £50 million price-tag, as reported by Sky Sports, is unlikely to stop the sharks from circling.
And, in Unai Nunez, West Ham might just be drawing up the blueprint to prepare for the worst case scenario. AS reported on Monday that Manuel Pellegrini’s perennial underachievers would be willing to splash out £25 million on a man who has soared through the ranks at Athletic Bilbao.
Like Diop, Nunez is a right-footed centre-half whose blend of physical and technical gifts have seen him stand out from the crowd at a very early age. The 22-year-old is one of the rising stars of Spanish football with outstanding performances against Real Madrid and Barcelona, who both failed to breach the Bilbao back line, painting the picture of a defender with superb reading of the game and expert positional sense.
The in-form Karim Benzema is probably still having flashbacks to Nunez’s remarkable goal-line clearance during Sunday’s goalless draw at the Santiago Bernabau.
Frank Lampard, Michael Carrick, Rio Ferdinand, Joe Cole and Jermain Defoe all went onto bigger and better things after making their name at West Ham and, while Premier League clubs can no longer be bullied into selling star players due to their own financial freedom these days, holding onto Diop already looks like it will be easier said than done.
In Nunez, however, West Ham can prove that no one, not even the club’s best centre-back in years, is irreplaceable.
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