Ding Dong Modric Gone! Here’s Who We Should Buy With The Money

Guest post by Darren Perry:

……and exhale! It appears we have FINALLY sold the magic Modric maestro to mighty Madrid. However, it’s nowhere near the £40m that Chelsea offered last year, or what Levy wanted this time round.

According to the Independent we have settled for £23.6m now, and a further £3.9m in bonuses. Initially this seems quite surprising knowing how much Levy likes to drive a bargain, after all he is the man who Alan Sugar called ‘the toughest negotiator his ever faced”. However, Levy isn’t as cold hearted as people like to make out, indeed its well known within the medical industry that the NHS send Levy a bag of stones each week just so he can squeeze the blood from them. But the Real (Madrid) question here is not did we get the right price but simply… ‘Is it enough?’

So what do we need, at a glance it seems 2 strikers, a goalkeeper, and a straight up replacement for Modric himself. Now £23.6m will be lucky to stretch across those areas, but let’s delve a little further…. We already have holding midfield players in Sandro, Parker and new England boy Livermore, plus the return of one who likes to spray some passes around in Thudd.

On the attaching central midfield side we also have VdV plus Sigurdsson who has done very well pre season. Moutinho often gets a mention at this point, but do we really need to? We can only play 2/3 central midfielders and there’s 6 players just mentioned there. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love Moutinho to be playing out the balls like Louie Spence at a disco, but let’s look at the money we have to work with here (as I’m not subscribing to the recent ‘new money’ theory, de-listing from the stock exchange and having Joe pump some in, let’s just stick with what we ‘know’ for the time being).

With the keeper situation appears we have failed with a bid to land Lloris (source: Sun), but we CAN get Cesar on a free from Inter Milan and the Brazilian national goalkeeper has been in fine form over recent years and is also still only 32.

The biggest problem is upfront, Defoe once again showed what a class striker he is for England on Wednesday, once again coming off the bench, but we need more options. I’d love to see our highly rated youngster Souleymane Coulibaly get some appearances from the subs bench this year (as well as a strong run in the league cup) and he has the skills to be knocking on the first team door like an irate Johovas witness.

Realistically though we need some more experienced firepower up front, and Adebayor appears to be nearing closer once more after Mancini said he has no future at City, and it seems they will even agree to pay him some of the transfer fee which is what previously stalled the move, it would be a great deal around £5m, so that still leaves around £18m for Llorente or Damiao.

Damiao has dancing close and far with us for the last 3 years. 3 years, that’s quite an unbelievable time to be ‘linked’ with a striker and if our ‘special relationship’ with Internacional meant that much then surely he’d be with his old team mate Sandro right now?

So, I’m not too sure he will end up with us in truth, but Llorente on the other hand seems like a good bet. He’s 6.5ft, scored 30 goals last year, and is at his peak being 27 years of age. The Daily Mail report that Atletico are holding out for his £28m buy-out clause but I’m confident we could nab him for a little less, or even pay the money bang on buy offloading Jenas, Dos Santos, Bentley and some other fringe players, regardless of AvB saying he wants to give them a chance. Give Spurs a better chance and get Llorente!

Arsenal may have sold RVP (brilliant news for us by the way!!) but Wenger has said he won’t be in the market again as he has already replaced him with Podolski and Giroud which leaves us clear to go for Fernando, which would be a great partnership with either Defoe (works well with a big man as seen with Crouch) or Adebayor (2 monsters up front with Bale, Lennon, Gylfi, and VdV supplying the bullets).

Read more Spurs transfer news

Modric is reportedly flying to Madrid as I write this and should sail through the medical (don’t ask me why he bought a boat to a medical, but that’s not the point) giving us the funds to launch the transfers, but be quick about it Levy, put down the bag of stones and get us Llorente, I don’t even mind if that’s the only other signing we make as we have cover for Modric in the middle, and we can wheel Friedel out for another year, but Llorente (or a top notch striker) is clearly an absolute must by this weekend!

You can follow Darren on Twitter: @mrdarrenperry

Who do you think Tottenham should buy with the Modric cash? Get involved in the comments section.

Fancy a flutter on the game? Claim your £10 welcome bonus at Sky Bet and enjoy some of the best match odds in the business.