Fictional forwards but no room for Rivaldo in Spurs’ transfer legends XI

A fun game with simple rules: it’s a team of players who were famously and repeatedly linked with Spurs but never actually signed for them. We say fun, which it was right up until we remembered that football teams will traditionally include a goalkeeper…

GK: Sam Johnstone
We can’t immediately think of a goalkeeper Spurs were linked with a lot but didn’t sign. Hugo Lloris would have been ideal here, but for the tiny little inconvenient detail that his summer-long saga ended with him signing for Spurs and then, to make matters worse, staying at the club for a decade of largely unchallenged No. 1 status that scuppered the chance for any further goalkeeper-based saga.

We’re pretty sure that goalkeeper would be a weak spot in this sort of XI for most clubs because they just don’t get the transfer clicks like strikers, do they? Sam Johnstone has been linked with Spurs a fair bit over the last couple of years but we can’t lie, this one is a placeholder. If it’s still there when you get to read this then we have struggled. But things will improve from here, almost certainly. Hopefully.

CB: Gary Cahill
Okay, that’s not much of an improvement but defenders are the hardest part of these features apart from goalkeepers. Potential here for someone to do one of those ‘deep dives’ on transfer rumours and sagas and such and what percentage of them are attackers. It’s pretty high, would be our starting hypothesis.

Anyway, we still think this one is vaguely interesting because it’s a reminder of a time when you never really needed to work that hard doing transfer stories about Spurs because they were managed by one Henry James Redknapp who was ready and willing to do the work for you.

One of his favourite refrains during his time at Spurs was to repeatedly rue the narrow failure to land Gary Cahill from Bolton before the villainous Chelsea nipped in and snaffled him. Usually after Redknapp’s Spurs had lost thanks to some defensive silliness or other – which, being Spurs, was relatively frequent – he would be heard uttering some variation of “Cahill was one we came close to but The Chairman couldn’t quite get the deal done.” It was a lovely little bit of drive-by buck-passing but it always made us laugh because, with no disrespect intended to a fine footballer who had an excellent career, Cahill is a vaguely underwhelming player to spend so much time and effort rueing.

Still, at least it actually was a transfer saga – albeit…