Jermain Defoe this week hit back at Terence Brown after being criticised by the West Ham chairperson.
The England Under-21 striker had been irritated by the Hammers board, whose resignation to losing him resulted in his £7-million move to Tottenham on Monday.
Yet Defoe’s relationship with West Ham had broken down long before that and Brown, frustrated at the lack of success in contract talks with one of the club’s last remaining big-name players, had claimed at the annual general meeting in December that Defoe’s ‘head’s not right”.
‘It was a shock to hear that from the chairman and it hurt me,” Defoe said this week. ‘I’m still young; I’m 21 and to hear something like that, it’s not nice. But I had my family around me and they supported me and said to get on with it.
‘There were talks about me extending my contract at West Ham but I was just thinking about playing my football. Definitely it hurts to be accused of disloyalty, when you pick up a paper and you think what someone has said about you is not true. You just get on with it and try to prove people wrong.”
Spurs’ caretaker-manager David Pleat was more placatory, even offering an explanation as to why he has not been entirely truthful of late. ‘We have not made a bid and there is nothing happening,” he had said last week.
Yet he made no apology for that misleading comment, insisting that what he terms cloak and dagger is necessary to reconstruct a Spurs team who have suffered years of underachievement.
‘Terry Brown had to say things that the [West Ham] supporters probably wished to hear at that time,” said Pleat. ‘It is very difficult for chairmen and managers to be absolutely above board 100%, all the time.”
Indeed, against such a backdrop it is difficult to take at face value Pleat’s insistence that the club had ‘never had any intention” of selling Robbie Keane, who was linked with Birmingham and Fulham during the transfer window.
Moving Bobby Zamora on and replacing him with the sharp-looking Defoe is a positive move, but Keane’s future is still unclear. And although the former Hammer Frédéric Kanouté will have the chance to link up once again with Defoe, it is understood that the French-born striker is upset at the effect his decision to play for Mali in the African Nations Cup has had on his relationship with Pleat.
Spurs’ director of football is not yet ready to forgive, either.
His comment this week — ‘we have five internationals and only four strikers because Freddie’s got two countries, so he’s unique” — will not help heal the rift and a transfer during the next window is likely unless Kanouté is happy with the new manager.
That new man has approved of the latest transfer dealings, with Pleat making light of his veiled identity by saying: ‘I’m consulting all the new managers. And my wife.”
The deals might also have included Spurs taking on Paul Robinson and loaning him back to Leeds. The Premier League stood in the way of that transaction, but Pleat is confident the goalkeeper will join during the next round of transfers.
Then, though, Stephen Carr, the Spurs captain with 16 months left on his contract, may be heading out of White Hart Lane.
‘We’ve all suffered, not just Fulham with [Louis] Saha and [Scott] Parker at Charlton,” Pleat added. ‘We suffered as bad as anyone ever in the country to lose Sol Campbell on a free transfer. The contribution he has made at Arsenal is a testament to the coaching and the work that was put into him at this club.”
As for Defoe, Pleat added a Churchillian note to his assessment. ‘I can’t think of a British striker of his age who’s done so much in such a short period of time at such a high level,” he said. —