Retired now apparently. An absolute gem of a player. Best midfielder that I have ever seen.
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Retired now apparently. An absolute gem of a player. Best midfielder that I have ever seen.
He was fantastic. He'd activate God mode and that was it midfield owned. Proper bloke from a period when we had a few. Love to see him at the club in some capacity. Think if we had kept him on dry ice for six months till the ECL final we would have nicked it.
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I enjoyed watching him more than Hoddle, genuinely the best footballer I have ever seen wear the Lilywhite shirt, others may well have more notoriety and fame, but no one has ever been bettered both with and without the ball (I think Modric ran him close).
He was my litmus test of what football journalist to follow, so few even spoke about him as they chased the clicks following the goalscorers hitching up their skirts for exclusives, if they weren't noticing this guy then they knew fuck all about football and weren't worth the follow.
I think that's a romantic view we all wish but we were doing just that in his last season and he only made a handful of appearances in reality and then the year before he struggled so much in the FA Cup semi-final vs Man U kind of puts to bed the whole notion that we should have kept him just for the big games, sadly he was done.
Confirmed by the club. I will speak to my future children about the privilege I had of watching prime Dembele play.
As long as his hips were in one piece he was unstoppable. A marvel of dribbling and possession.
....yet he got regularly bashed and slagged off - for not having enough end product, not scoring enough, not being creative enough, etc. - by a section of the Spurs fans.
If it hadn't been for all his injuries and if he'd settled down as a CM earlier in his career he'd ended up as a legend not just at Spurs...
If it hadn't been for all his injuries and if he'd settled down as a CM earlier in his career he'd ended up as a legend not just at Spurs...
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Are we not allowed romance on the day he announced his retirement. Fantastic player.
For their respective spells at Spurs then I will not hesitate to say he was better than Modric (I loved Modric too & BOTH players were criminally underrated oddly by Spurs fans too who they both got slagged off for "what do they actually do").
With Moussa, even today he's not given enough credit for what he did off the ball, he would shut down so many attacks by slowing down attacks moving a player out wide enabling others to get back in position, or getting his body between ball and man and ultimately holding off that player and sometimes dribbling past them when doing it. This part of his game was immense.
Modric was very good too, but his best came after he left spurs. We got most of dembele's best years.
Admin
after his retirement can we put Dembele back in the Tottenham section of the forum. Many thanks
Dembele was great for us during the Poch era but he can’t be compared to Hoddle one of the all time greats
No one can
Loved Hoddle but I think I enjoyed watching Gascoigne more tbh.
A hard call, Hoddle for passing and spectacular goals.
Gascoigne for dribbling, breaking the press, and scoring.
Hoddle more of a legend, and rightly so.
GOAT.
Had a season ticket, back row central in the Paxton lower for his prime years. Think it was the best seat in the house for watching him. Each and every game he'd win the 50/50s, the 40/60s and even the 30/70s and effortlessly compose himself, steady play and set our midfield and attack on their way. He'll never get the credit he deserves from others simply because his game wasn't about assists or goals, or even really tackles. He was just a brilliant footballer who made the whole team better every time he was on the pitch.
Yeah, this is how I see it too.
It's hard to say it with 100% certainty though as Modric went to a team with a higher calibre level of individual players around him, so maybe this is why the perception of him improving comes from but most certainly he went into a league where competition basically comes in the form of just 3 teams (but since moving there I thought he was consistently their best player, better than plastic face that's for sure).