Hyderabad: Emmanuel Adebayor, the saviour. That sounds odd and for that matter, summarises modern day football. In the days of hire-and-fire and quick-fix solutions that football is going through, even a once-bitter enemy could become a bedfellow next weekend.
Until recently, Adebayor represented everything to be loathed about in modern day football. Rich, as in filthy £190,000-per-week rich, brash and totally unreliable. But four weeks can change one’s fortune. The Togolese is now the darling of North London. North London as in the side occupied by Tottenham Hotspur, not the more celebrated part that houses Arsenal.
Spurs manager, or to be realistic the ‘interim manager’, Tim Sherwood, after taking over the reins from Andre Villas-Boas, has turned to the former Arsenal striker to rescue the club’s fortune.
Sherwood, perhaps inspired by the success of Sergio Aguero-Alvaro Negredo combination at Manchester City — incidentally the last place Adebayor was outcast from, decided to pair the Togolese with Roberto Soldado.
The gamble has paid off, at least for now. Spurs have scored nine goals in the four league matches under the Englishman, with Adebayor scoring three, including the opener against Manchester United at Old Trafford.
Adebayor’s purple patch has all of a sudden instilled the confidence that was hitherto sorely missed at Spurs. “A lot of it is down to Ade coming back into the team,” Tottenham wing-back Danny Rose was quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph. “He has been like a new signing in both boxes — winning [defensive] headers at corners and stuff.”
Television commentators too are singing praises, many hailing Sherwood’s 4-4-2 system and claiming it would help Spurs outscore their opponents, just like City have been doing since the start of the season.
But City’s 4-4-2 is not akin to Spurs’. There is a huge difference in playing the technically adept Samir Nasri and David Silva as the ‘wide men’ from a similar system with Aaron Lennon and Christian Eriksen in the same roles.
And more crucially, there is a huge difference from having a striker like Aguero, who during his days at Atletico Madrid squarely ruled out a move to Real, lest hurting the sentiments of Atleti fans, from, no disrespect, someone like Adebayor.
After all it is for no reason that the Togolese striker has become something like football’s hippy, failing to settle down anywhere, including Real. It seems inevitable that like the success of Sherwood’s 4-4-2, Adebayor’s honeymoon would remain just that, a honeymoon.
