Jose Mourinho’s only fit and recognised number nine is a teenager at Tottenham Hotspur.
Former Tottenham Hotspur boss Mauricio Pochettino is quite a brilliant a football manager and he….well he doesn’t have the medals to prove it yet, but he will.
Pochettino led Spurs to their first-ever Champions League final in June, only to lose to Liverpool in Madrid.
Tottenham had rarely qualified for that competition prior to the Argentine’s arrival in 2014, and five years later they came very close to winning it.
Yep, he’s a fantastic coach, but not when it comes to signing strikers.
Pochettino spent the guts of £30 million on Vincent Janssen and Fernando Llorente and the pair yielded only four Premier League goals between them.
The North Londoners didn’t need a world-class striker because Harry Kane was there, but they did need a very decent back-up option and Pochettino and Daniel Levy’s failure to sign one could now cost Jose Mourinho.
Mourinho is set to be without Kane for the foreseeable future due to a hamstring injury, leaving the Portuguese with 17-year-old Troy Parrott as the club’s only natural number nine, while Son Heung-min and Lucas Moura – two wingers – will probably be forced to play up front in the mean time.
What makes it worse is that Pochettino and Levy had an entire summer last year to sign a reliable alternative for Kane, but instead they signed 18-year-old Jack Clarke, 19-year-old defender Ryan Sessegnon, splashed a club-record £63 million on midfielder Tanguy Ndombele and spent the full window trying to Giovani Lo Celso, a playmaker.
Bear in mind that Kane only made the Champions League final by the skin of his teeth after sitting out the previous two-and-a-half months.
A striker should’ve been one of the priorities for the Lilywhites last summer, and now Mourinho, whose side are six points behind fourth-placed Chelsea, has to pay the penalty for that.
Pochettino is a fantastic manager, but his transfer dealings were often suspect and they’re still handicapping Tottenham even after he’s gone.
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