Cartilage Free Captain

Kit numbers for Tottenham Hotspur’s 2023-24 season haven’t been finalized yet and likely won’t be until closer to the start of the Premier League season, but as of today we now know two Spurs players who will have new shirts.

First, the most obvious of obvious chances — Guglielmo Vicario is Tottenham’s No. 1 keeper and now has the kit number to prove it. He will sport the #1 shirt last worn by Hugo Lloris.

When Googly Elmo arrived, Lloris was still at the club even though he didn’t play for Spurs. I’m not sure why Hugo didn’t release his number for Vic at the time; maybe it was just a respect thing for a long-standing servant of the club for more than a decade, that’s fine. But Vic wore #13 last season, and now that Hugo’s gone it makes all the sense in the world for him to switch.

And what about the now-vacant #13? Well, that’s where Destiny Udogie comes in.

Destiny wore #38 last season, which was a weird choice — a kit formerly worn by such Spurs luminaries as Ryan Mason, Cameron Cater-Vickers, and David Bentley. But that’s probably only because he wasn’t able to wear #13, his number at Udinese, because that was the number Vicario chose.

So what I’m getting from this is that everybody’s happy now — Hugo gets his chosen number, Destiny gets his chosen number, and at least for these two players Spurs fans can now order their numbered kits from the club shop with confidence.

Hooray!

OK, bear with me a bit on this one. I typically have standards about what kind of news or rumors generate enough actual info to write a speculative article — I don’t base reports on so-called “ITK” (in the know) and am pretty careful to qualify the crap of of things that are even mostly reliable.

But there’s been a LOT of smoke in the air about 18-year-old South Korean winger Yang Min-Hyuk, one of the exciting young Korean players in the post-Son Heung-Min generation. Current reports are that Yang is in talks to move to “a big Premier League club” and there is a LOT of online chatter that this yet-unnamed club just might be Tottenham Hotspur.

Now, do I KNOW this to be true? No. Not even close. It’s all speculation and ITK reports, and further details are likely going to come out in due course which should hopefully clarify the situation. But consider this — Yang, as stated in the above tweet, is set to be included in the K-League All-Star squad that will face Tottenham in a friendly in Seoul next week, his current club Gangwon FC and there are numerous (and right now, informed but unconfirmed) suggestions that Yang could be unveiled as a future Tottenham player ahead of the match on July 31. Imagine announcing the agreement at halftime of that match, and Yang swapping shirts to play for Spurs in the 2nd half? That’s not going to happen, but it’d be incredible television.

So who is Yang? The short and lazy answer is “the next Son Heung-Min,” but we don’t do that here even if the comparison is easy. But he is a 18-year old dribbly right-sided winger, and while the K-League is the K-League, he had 12 G+A in 1900 minutes as a 17-year old and looks pretty dope. He’s also a Korea U17 international though hasn’t cracked the senior squad yet. Check out his video.

There aren’t advanced stats available for the K-League so you won’t get the sexy green bars if you look him up on FBRef, but if you dig into his surface level stats they’re pretty dang impressive for a kid his age. He’s averaging nearly 0.5 npG+A/90, which is overall 22nd in the K-League, as a 17-year old. Everyone above him on that list is at least four years older.

The plan is, if the murmurs prove to be correct, that Yang would sign with whatever club is signing him and then immediately get loaned back to Gangwon for the upcoming season, which runs February through July. It makes you wonder what he’ll do during the break, but I’m sure those are details which will be worked out. There are also details about work permits and future homegrown club status that will also need to be figured out, but I’m not going to go into those questions right now.

Now, let me reiterate — we do not know that Yang’s new club is Tottenham Hotspur, but we’ll likely find out one way or the other pretty soon. If he does end up coming to Spurs, he’s another young international wunderkind that Spurs will hope can develop into a future star with some additional development time. He’ll be on the Pape Sarr Plan™ — young promising player, loaned back to his original club, then slowly worked into the side. That’s worked pretty well in the past, and continues Tottenham’s recent emphasis on signing exciting young talent before they get snaffled up by bigger clubs or become too expensive to sign.

Yang would likely be transitioning into the club at the same time Sonny would be transitioning out of it. But wouldn’t it be sweet if we lose our superstar Korean king only to welcome in the next generation of Korean attacking talent? I could certainly live with that!

Tottenham Hotspur announced its pre-season tour list of players who will be on the plane, as the club prepares for games against Vissel Kobe in Tokyo (Saturday) before traveling to Seoul, South Korea to take on the K League All Stars (July 31) and a matchup with FC Bayern (August 3). Bayern Munich coach Vincent Kompany announced today that Harry Kane will not be making the trip to face his old side in South Korea.

Seeing many of the first team players coming back for training the last few weeks and playing two pre-season games thus far with victories against Hearts (5-1) and QPR (2-0), the team now makes flight to Japan and South Korea.

The official list has been named in alphabetical:

George Abbott

Brandon Austin

Lucas Bergvall

Yves Bissouma

Ben Davies

Alfie Devine

Jamie Donley

Radu Dragusin (Korea only)

Archie Gray

Luca Gunter

Tyrese Hall

Brennan Johnson

Dejan Kulusevski

Will Lankshear

James Maddison

Mikey Moore

Ashley Phillips

Pedro Porro

Richarlison

Emerson Royal

Pape Matar Sarr

Dane Scarlett

Oliver Skipp

Manor Solomon

Heung-Min Son

Djed Spence

Destiny Udogie

Guglielmo Vicario

Alejo Veliz

Timo Werner

Alfie Whiteman

A few omissions from making the tour are Fraser Forster — as the club says he is still rehabbing at Hotspur Way from a fractured foot. The likes of Micky van de Ven and Copa America winners of Cristian Romero and Giovani Lo Celso are expected to join the squad closer to the start of the season as they’ve earned a rest for making it far in international competitions.

Other notes from the press release: Spanish players Bryan Gil and Sergio Reguilion were granted permission to stay back as they look for possible transfer moves.

Tottenham Hotspur announced its pre-season tour list of players who will be on the plane, as the club prepares for games against Vissel Kobe in Tokyo (Saturday) before traveling to Seoul, South Korea to take on the K League All Stars (July 31) and a matchup with FC Bayern (August 3). Bayern Munich coach Vincent Kompany announced today that Harry Kane will not be making the trip to face his old side in South Korea.

Seeing many of the first team players coming back for training the last few weeks and playing two pre-season games thus far with victories against Hearts (5-1) and QPR (2-0), the team now makes flight to Japan and South Korea.

The official list has been named in alphabetical:

George Abbott

Brandon Austin

Lucas Bergvall

Yves Bissouma

Ben Davies

Alfie Devine

Jamie Donley

Radu Dragusin (Korea only)

Archie Gray

Luca Gunter

Tyrese Hall

Brennan Johnson

Dejan Kulusevski

Will Lankshear

James Maddison

Mikey Moore

Ashley Phillips

Pedro Porro

Richarlison

Emerson Royal

Pape Matar Sarr

Dane Scarlett

Oliver Skipp

Manor Solomon

Heung-Min Son

Djed Spence

Destiny Udogie

Guglielmo Vicario

Alejo Veliz

Timo Werner

Alfie Whiteman

A few omissions from making the tour are Fraser Forster — as the club says he is still rehabbing at Hotspur Way from a fractured foot. The likes of Micky van de Ven and Copa America winners of Cristian Romero and Giovani Lo Celso are expected to join the squad closer to the start of the season as they’ve earned a rest for making it far in international competitions.

Other notes from the press release: Spanish players Bryan Gil and Sergio Reguilion were granted permission to stay back as they look for possible transfer moves.

Kia ora.

The big piece of news over the weekend was the CrowdStrike outage, as an update pushed to an offering from the cyber security company crippled businesses around the world.

I work in IT as part of my day job, and there’s a couple of golden rules around deploying any sort of change or patch:

Never deploy on a Friday; you’ll be left with limited support if something goes wrong

Make sure your change is well-tested, with robust testing plans and scripts

Make sure your change has been reviewed by others, including somebody who knows first-hand exactly what the change might impact

Now, it seems pretty likely that at least one (if not all) of these rules were broken, and there’s probably a software developer feeling pretty sheepish somewhere. These are what you call “Resume Generating Events” - someone, somewhere is to blame, and they’re probably getting fired.

I know the feeling.

Large companies often use what is called an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system to run their business - these can do all manner of things from managing finances to generating sales to procurement of inventory to everything in between. The company I work for uses one such system; and in my first six months with them, I crashed it. For a day.

Long story short, I was seeing some unusual behavior in our data, so went to test a possible cause to see if I could replicate the issue - and accidentally did my test in our Production environment, basically taking the business offline for the better part of a day. Goody.

Thankfully, the issue was resolved without too much gnashing of teeth, and I immediately admitted to my mistake - I’m not the type to try and just cover my butt, and there was no point anyway, as telemetry data would identify me as the user who set the whole thing in motion. Thankfully, outside of a stern talking-to there were no further repercussions, but I did learn a very valuable lesson and was MUCH more careful from then on.

So, what’s the dumbest thing you’ve done at work? Or what’s your biggest screw-up? Funnily enough, the two don’t always overlap...

Matty’s track of the day: Buggin’ Out, by A Tribe Called Quest

And now for your links:

The Athletic ($$$) on Djed Spence’s chances of getting back into Ange Postecoglou’s good books

Alasdair Gold shares his talking points from Tottenham’s win over QPR on the weekend

Kia ora.

The big piece of news over the weekend was the CrowdStrike outage, as an update pushed to an offering from the cyber security company crippled businesses around the world.

I work in IT as part of my day job, and there’s a couple of golden rules around deploying any sort of change or patch:

Never deploy on a Friday; you’ll be left with limited support if something goes wrong

Make sure your change is well-tested, with robust testing plans and scripts

Make sure your change has been reviewed by others, including somebody who knows first-hand exactly what the change might impact

Now, it seems pretty likely that at least one (if not all) of these rules were broken, and there’s probably a software developer feeling pretty sheepish somewhere. These are what you call “Resume Generating Events” - someone, somewhere is to blame, and they’re probably getting fired.

I know the feeling.

Large companies often use what is called an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system to run their business - these can do all manner of things from managing finances to generating sales to procurement of inventory to everything in between. The company I work for uses one such system; and in my first six months with them, I crashed it. For a day.

Long story short, I was seeing some unusual behavior in our data, so went to test a possible cause to see if I could replicate the issue - and accidentally did my test in our Production environment, basically taking the business offline for the better part of a day. Goody.

Thankfully, the issue was resolved without too much gnashing of teeth, and I immediately admitted to my mistake - I’m not the type to try and just cover my butt, and there was no point anyway, as telemetry data would identify me as the user who set the whole thing in motion. Thankfully, outside of a stern talking-to there were no further repercussions, but I did learn a very valuable lesson and was MUCH more careful from then on.

So, what’s the dumbest thing you’ve done at work? Or what’s your biggest screw-up? Funnily enough, the two don’t always overlap...

Matty’s track of the day: Buggin’ Out, by A Tribe Called Quest

And now for your links:

The Athletic ($$$) on Djed Spence’s chances of getting back into Ange Postecoglou’s good books

Alasdair Gold shares his talking points from Tottenham’s win over QPR on the weekend

Not two weeks ago, Djed Spence was seemingly close to a low-money permanent move to Genoa, where he spent last season on loan. Now, on the backs of two strong performances in preseason, he looks like he’s on the plane to Asia next week.

According to Alasdair Gold, Spence is very likely to be included as part of Tottenham Hotspur’s touring squad as they head to Japan and South Korea for three preseason matches against Vissel Kobe, Bayern Munich, and the K-League All-Stars.

Spence has been working hard behind the scenes and that application as well as a lack of available defenders means the 23-year-old is currently expected to head on the tour to Asia, barring a late change in his circumstances.

— Alasdair Gold, Football.London

Djed broke through in Spurs’ opening preseason match against Heart of Midlothian in Edinburgh last week, contributing a goal and an assist, and excelling as an Ange-Ball inverted right fullback. Yesterday, against stiffer Championship competition at QPR, Spence’s second half performance wasn’t as impactful, but he didn’t look at all out of place.

Now, getting included in the touring squad doesn’t necessarily mean much. Gold qualifies the hell out of the decision to include him by using the phrase “as well as a lack of available defenders” and that’s fair. Could be this is as much about improving Djed’s stock and creating a market for him after the Genoa deal collapsed.

But what if it isn’t? Spence is still only 23, and the knock on him has always been his attitude and not his ability. And it’s not like he hasn’t been treated poorly at Spurs — Antonio Conte clearly never wanted him and he’s been tarred with the “club signing” label ever since. I’d be a bit salty about that too. I have seen reports that he had a meeting with Ange Postecoglou to “clear the air” over his situation and no matter what ends up happening, his best chance to get a positive outcome this season is to take his chances in preseason and play some good football to get noticed, whether that comes from Big Ange or another club.

I love a good redemption arc and there’s part of me that would love it if the exciting young backup to Pedro Porro that Spurs need in the wake of Emerson Royal’s (eventual) departure could be a guy we already have on our books. But even it Djed Spence isn’t the guy, he’s already managed to improve his standing within the club after two preseason matches. That can only help lead to a good outcome for him and for Spurs.

Tottenham leave for their trip to Asia on Monday, and the club will likely release the full traveling roster soon. We’ll post it as soon as we hear it.

Not two weeks ago, Djed Spence was seemingly close to a low-money permanent move to Genoa, where he spent last season on loan. Now, on the backs of two strong performances in preseason, he looks like he’s on the plane to Asia next week.

According to Alasdair Gold, Spence is very likely to be included as part of Tottenham Hotspur’s touring squad as they head to Japan and South Korea for three preseason matches against Vissel Kobe, Bayern Munich, and the K-League All-Stars.

Spence has been working hard behind the scenes and that application as well as a lack of available defenders means the 23-year-old is currently expected to head on the tour to Asia, barring a late change in his circumstances.

— Alasdair Gold, Football.London

Djed broke through in Spurs’ opening preseason match against Heart of Midlothian in Edinburgh last week, contributing a goal and an assist, and excelling as an Ange-Ball inverted right fullback. Yesterday, against stiffer Championship competition at QPR, Spence’s second half performance wasn’t as impactful, but he didn’t look at all out of place.

Now, getting included in the touring squad doesn’t necessarily mean much. Gold qualifies the hell out of the decision to include him by using the phrase “as well as a lack of available defenders” and that’s fair. Could be this is as much about improving Djed’s stock and creating a market for him after the Genoa deal collapsed.

But what if it isn’t? Spence is still only 23, and the knock on him has always been his attitude and not his ability. And it’s not like he hasn’t been treated poorly at Spurs — Antonio Conte clearly never wanted him and he’s been tarred with the “club signing” label ever since. I’d be a bit salty about that too. I have seen reports that he had a meeting with Ange Postecoglou to “clear the air” over his situation and no matter what ends up happening, his best chance to get a positive outcome this season is to take his chances in preseason and play some good football to get noticed, whether that comes from Big Ange or another club.

I love a good redemption arc and there’s part of me that would love it if the exciting young backup to Pedro Porro that Spurs need in the wake of Emerson Royal’s (eventual) departure could be a guy we already have on our books. But even it Djed Spence isn’t the guy, he’s already managed to improve his standing within the club after two preseason matches. That can only help lead to a good outcome for him and for Spurs.

Tottenham leave for their trip to Asia on Monday, and the club will likely release the full traveling roster soon. We’ll post it as soon as we hear it.

We haven’t seen Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg in Tottenham Hotspur’s preseason yet as he still has yet to return from duty with Denmark in the European Championships. Now, if this rumor is correct, we might not see him at all. Fabrizio Romano is reporting that Spurs and Olympique Marseille are close to an agreement for the transfer of General Ho, with a full agreement coming “soon.”

Annoyingly, that’s all the details we have. We don’t know the transfer fee, we don’t know anything about wages. I’m sure that’ll all come out soon, I just wish we had a tad more to go on.

So we’ve known for a while that Hojbjerg was likely to leave the club this year after he slowly slid down the pecking order in midfield under Ange Postecoglou, though there haven’t been a ton of concrete rumors linking him away. But I guess his agents have been busy since the Euros. Marseille isn’t exactly the club I would’ve guessed he’d land at — I would’ve pegged somewhere in Italy or Germany — but France? Sure, fine. Whatever.

I just hope, if this does go through, that Hojbjerg is able to two-foot tackle his future teammate Mason Greenwood in training sometime.

There wasn’t much to be concerned about coming out of Tottenham Hotspur’s 2-0 away friendly win over QPR today at Loftus Road. Spurs handled a step up in competition compared to Wednesday’s match against Hearts and looked decent with significant rotation against a Championship side. All in all, a good day’s work before Spurs fly out to Asia next week for their international tour.

But there was one scary moment. Tottenham new boy Lucas Bergvall was subbed off midway through the first half after an incident on a corner kick. It’s not clear exactly what happened but he signaled to the bench to be evaluated and was quickly subbed off for Dejan Kulusevski before heading straight down the tunnel.

Not great! Thankfully, Ange Postecoglou was asked about his status after the match in his post-match interview with the club and said that it’s probably nothing to worry about.

“He’s just a bit sore. I don’t think it’s anything significant. Again, for him, and Archie, this is all new to them, the way we train, we have to look after them. But, as I said, I don’t think it’s anything significant.

Bergvall’s substitution was notable in that he had been playing quite well as a box-to-box 8 in this match, and Spurs immediately looked more pedestrian as soon as he went off. Bergvall looked to be taking more of a passing role compared to against Hearts when he played a little higher up the field, but what has come through in both of his preseason performances thus far is his excellent football IQ and his ability to utilize and take advantage of space. It’s early days and he’s a young player, but based on what I’ve seen so far he might already be one of Tottenham’s best central midfielders.

Spurs didn’t hit the heights against QPR as they did against Hearts in Edinburgh, but Postecoglou said he was pleased with the performance, acknowledging that the players had a grueling week.

“It was ok. They’ve had a hard week training and game travel so I felt for the boys really. We knew we’d bit a little bit leggy today. I still thought we played some good stuff. Probably weren’t as clinical in front of goal as we were in midweek. That’s probably because like I said we’ve had a hard week. We created some good chances, but overall not too bad and again everyone got through it so that’s the main thing.”

Spurs will likely get a day off before preparing for their tour to Japan and South Korea next week. Their next friendly is against Vissel Kobe at the Japan National Stadium in Tokyo next Saturday, July 27.