Help Emmanuel Adebayor, make poverty history

As legendary wit and Spur Peter Cook once famously opined: “I have learned from my mistakes and I am sure I can repeat them exactly.”

Daniel Levy, take note.

With the season opener at Newcastle less than two weeks away, our beloved Tottenham tread familiar ground, a third consecutive summer transfer window without the purchase of a leading striker and a second with our midfield playmaker agitating for a move.

Luka Modric has ‘joined Real Madrid’ so many times that the merest mention of the Croatian’s name has rendered sleeping pills redundant. Whisper ‘Luka Modric’s advisors have agreed terms on a £28million deal to Real Madrid’ in an insomniac’s ear and watch them black out and fall face first into a pillow.

Meanwhile, ‘The black Bono’ Emmanuel Adebayor has simultaneously been ‘signing for Spurs’ for eight weeks. The deal only being held up by the mad-haired striker’s heartfelt wish that Manchester City pay him to solve world poverty.

Both situations, it now seems, will rumble on inevitably to August 31st or ‘St. Levy’s Day’ as it is known in less salubrious parts of Edmonton (widely known as Edmonton).

New coach Andre Villas-Boas has become a curious co-conspirator at ‘striker light’ Spurs : "In this market it's important to make good, sound bids, not just to do anything for the sake of it,” parroted AVB this week. “We are hopefully moving in the market in the next couple of days or weeks.”

Days? Weeks? We’ve been trying to buy a striker for three-and-a-half f***ing years, Andre. Let’s not rush into anything!

A venerable Spurs fan sent me an email today highlighting the obvious folly of Levy’s transfer brinkmanship. One quote, in particular, deserves a wider audience.

“What Daniel Levy seems oblivious to is that the points lost during a dodgy start to a season may be sufficient to deny Champions League qualification at the end of it; so hanging on to August 31st in an effort to hammer down a fee might save ‘x’ pounds in the short-term, but a much greater sum ‘y’ turns out to be lost later on. I can never see the economic sense in that. And, of course, having new recruits in place well before the opening fixture makes so much more sense in terms of team preparation.”

Small wonder that Spurs often start the season with slug-like urgency and pay so dearly at its conclusion.

The Adebayor transfer, given his ludicrous wages and possible detachment from reality, was always going to be a tough one to seal. The lack of traction in an alternative deal is as disappointing as it is unsurprising.

For all Adebayor’s personal quirks, there is little denying he fits the Spurs system and was a major contributor in Tottenham’s best performances of last season.

His signature could solve the club’s neverending striker crisis and potentially thwart world poverty. But expect neither to happen before the Newcastle game.