As an old cunt, I'm going to go back to the 80s, when I used to go to Spurs quite a bit. I lived in Hackney, I was piss poor for a lot of the time (and a fair bit of my meagre disposable income went on on wine, women and Class B, so I'm not going to claim to be a regular, although it was always the Park Lane end of the Shelf for me back in the day).
These were the days of a Perryman-Ardiles central midfield. Magnificent, we've never seen two legends like that together since (and probably hadn't since Blanchflower and Mackay). The point of this post is that no one wondered why they didn't score more goals, or moan when they passed the ball backwards. There in the ground you could see what they did and the whole ground loved them. If they were missing (be that through injury, suspension or just a poor game) you noticed it.
I saw tons of games where either one or the other didn't have a noticeable "TV style" impact on the game but you still knew they were a key part in everything else that was happening. Just see how Glenn talks about them, and they about him.
(As a quick aside, I'd like to mention that not everybody was fully aboard the Hoddle-As-Genius bus. There used to be a lot of moaning about him in the early 80s on the terraces, "Glenda", "Doesn't get stuck in" and so forth. Perhaps other old schoolers can confirm this.)
I'm not suggesting for a second that Winks is the new Stevie or Ossie, god forbid, just that it strikes me that tidy central midfielders who kept the ball moving, who generally found better placed team mates, who did their best to cover their defence, who passed back when they wanted to stretch the opposition and all that were more recognised back then.
Younguns - watch a full game or extended highlights from those days. See how often these players trapped the ball, looked around and played a simple pass sideways or even - GOD NO, backwards - to a team mate.
See also: David Howells (who got a fair bit of grief too, often unjustifiably so). Maybe it's to do with greater TV coverage and the balance between the opinions of those at the ground and those watching on the box having shifted.
Like Howells, Harry Winks is Tottenham in ways we can only dream about. Is he the new Osvaldo Ardiles? Of course not, he'd be the first to admit that. Is he a versatile, dependable midfielder who managers love because he does what they tell him to, to the best of his abilities? Certainly.
Is he currently better than Højbjerg, Lo Celso, Ndombele in his current form? No. Can he play a hugely valuable part in covering those players? Yes of course. Will he fuck up massively in doing so? Unlikely.
The worst he'll be is steady, unspectacular, pim-pam, keeping the ball moving, making pretty intelligent decisions based on how he sees the game in front of him. That's more than fine with me.
Rant over
