28 Mar 2017 13:15:05
Darren Anderton to have a Spurs testimonial - No doubt he'll be injured for this game.

1.) 28 Mar 2017
28 Mar 2017 13:53:22
Lol fully agree Dr, the NHS is in crisis and the last thing it needs is a Darren anderton comeback.

2.) 28 Mar 2017
28 Mar 2017 14:20:34
You do make my laugh raver. That must be why my BUPA annual payments have gone through the roof.

3.) 28 Mar 2017
28 Mar 2017 16:39:59
Darren Anderton was one of our most talented players for 12 seasons and deserves our respect today. I would support a testimonial for him.

However, the truth is that he lived up to his nickname and rarely played enough games to make a real difference. When a player is right at the heart of how a team performs, he needs to be playing in at least 75% of the big games. Anderton didn’t manage this.

He joined Spurs as a promising 20-year old in 1992 and quickly established himself as a first-choice player. In his first 3 seasons he made 34, 37 and 37 League appearances in 42-game seasons (86%) and looked to be a very good buy. At that time, our only worry was whether we could hang on to him (United was very interested) .

Then the problems began: only 39 League appearances in his next 3 seasons (34%) . You always hope an injury-prone player has just been unlucky and will soon get over his problems, but they rarely do. In retrospect, this is when we should probably have let Anderton go. While we were waiting for him to come good again, we weren’t actively seeking a replacement of similar quality.

In the end, we kept him for another 6 seasons. Two of them were good: 32 appearances in 88/ 89 and 35 appearances in 01/ 02 (88%) . But he only made just over 20 starts in each of the other 4 seasons (56%) . That wasn’t quite enough.

In the long run, Anderton became part of the problem not the solution. Sad, but true.

4.) 29 Mar 2017
29 Mar 2017 19:37:44
His goal ratio was abysmal.