Timing is an essential part of the goalscorer’s art and, for once, Jermain Defoe’s appears a little awry.
Tottenham Hotspur are embracing their past, returning to their attacking traditions and selecting two strikers again.
This should represent an Indian summer for a specialist predator who is the fifth-highest goalscorer in the club’s history. With an Englishman in charge again, it seems a fine time to be a Londoner at White Hart Lane.
Except that, in a swift role reversal, a local seems certain to become an expensive export. Football’s worst-kept secret has been confirmed: Jermain Defoe is to swap the river Thames for Lake Ontario and, more surprisingly, leave the Premier League for Major League Soccer, and head to Toronto FC.
With the World Cup this summer it appears as though a poacher has made his run too early. He may have strayed about 5,500 kilometres offside as far as England manager Roy Hodgson is concerned.
So Defoe’s departure at the end of next month will represent the end of an era at Tottenham.
“Everybody knows how much this club means to me,” he said as his move was announced. His years have been an age of improvement but, perhaps epitomised by him, Spurs have been nearly men.
He first arrived at White Hart Lane in 2004. Their only trophy since then came in the 2008 League Cup when Defoe was in a gap year at Portsmouth (he was first lured away and then brought back by Harry Redknapp).
The only four men to prove more prolific for Tottenham – Jimmy Greaves, Bobby Smith, Martin Chivers and Cliff Jones – all played under the club’s greatest manager, Bill Nicholson, and at a time when silverware was rather more plentiful.
Nor, indeed, do the statistics paint a perfect picture of Defoe’s career at Spurs. A total of 142 goals in 361 games is more than respectable but distorted by a status as the perennial 12th man.
Reasons why he has begun so many games on the bench include Dimitar Berbatov, Robbie Keane, Rafael van der Vaart, Peter Crouch, Emmanuel Adebayor and Roberto Soldado.
A change in football fashions was as significant.
The specialist goalscorer has become an endangered species and Defoe is the sort of forward who rarely holds the ball up, links play or creates chances for others.
He has fallen out of favour in the age of lone strikers. Perhaps, though, he has tired of life as a super-sub.
Defoe averages almost exactly a goal every other Premier League start and close on one every 90 minutes in the cups.
He has proved the scourge of Europa League defences this season, when his nine goals have all come in knockout competitions. If that suggests he is a flat-track bully, the menace in midweek matches has been denied the opportunities he deserved.
He became a cause celebre with Spurs supporters when Andre Villas-Boas only selected one forward and that man, Soldado, struggled to score.
When the bolder Tim Sherwood took charge, switched system and put an onus on attack, Defoe was usurped by a returning Adebayor in the line-up.
Toronto head coach Ryan Nelsen, a former teammate, said: “If you ask any Premier League club, then they would take Jermain right now. I know Tottenham are getting offers everywhere for him and from top-four clubs in England.”
Yet they presumably regarded him as a potentially deadly bit-part player. Instead, he is a designated player at Toronto.
He won’t be the rescue act, sent on in desperate late attempts to secure a goal. Instead, a team should be built around him in a way Tottenham sides rarely were.
Coupled with the large financial package the Canadian club offered it is, as Sherwood said, “a great opportunity”.
A former Spurs manager, referring to Defoe’s fondness for shooting and reluctance to pass, used to say privately: “All moves end with Defoe.” Now he has reached the end at Tottenham.
At 31, though, Defoe looks a bit young to be heading to the MLS. He has gone too early.
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