Any Spurs fan watching Belgium in this World Cup would be forgiven for assuming that our own Jan Vertonghen has a twin brother with the same name. They are identical in every way expect for when it comes to playing football.
After an excellent opening season in 2012-13, Jan had a disappointing campaign last year and at times it looked as if he just didn’t want to be at the Lane. Terrible body language, allied to equally terrible performances sparked a host of rumours linking him with a move away from the club.
For Belgium however, he is transformed and seemingly happy enough to maraud up the wing from a left back position that he supposedly detests. In fact, apart from a lack of shooting ability, he’s been almost Bale-like!
On Saturday, Belgium face their toughest test as they take on Argentina in the quarter finals and Vertonghen has identified the obvious threat.
“We will stop Messi as a team. We won’t put one player on him, that’s not our style and he is too good to do that,” he said.
“He is not the only danger but obviously he is one of the best players in the world, maybe the best, but we are strong enough to keep him quiet.”
Jan will be part of the defence assigned to stop Messi but he will be equally important coming forward. The question for Spurs fans is, which Jan Vertonghen will show up?
Well Jan didn’t look terribly interested during the first Belgium match of the WC, so not sure its purely a Spurs thing.
I noticed a lot of our players at the WC have performed poorly or looked out of sorts. The only common denominator is they were coached and managed by Tim Sherwood, a man inadequately qualified or experienced to be the manager of top class talent.
It was obvious last season that Vert didn’t get on with TS and that affected his attitude badly – we don’t know what was going on behind the scenes but it didn’t just affect Vert’s game did it? Now that Poch is in charge we’re going to see the old Jan back IMO, and he’s as good a defender as any in the PL and I think would benefit from being made captain. Welcome back Super-Jan!
We must do all we can to keep Lloris, verts and sandro as they will formna strong core to our team. Verts is top class and deserves captain puttingbup with tim nice but dim last season would piss anyone off. Pochs high work tempo and attacking ethos to the game will make defending easier and with left back cover instead of rose!!! Will fill all of them with confidence given time x coys
Verts happy playing for Belgium, miserable playing for Spurs. Oh well ..let’s see what happens this season, with the miserable Belgian sod.
Also, after 3 seasons of speculation, can we finally nail closure on linking us with Damiao and Moutinho and the other rotting irrelevant chestnuts, in this transfer window?
Another point; years after non-action and/or failure with Spurs, incredible isn’t it that the likes of Dos Santos and Postiga are still turning out for their countries and playing well (countries too that are capable of beating England at any time). Just goes to show that most players in this World Cup, if they were English, wouldn’t get near being chosen for even this poor England squad, yet still put our country to shame in their enthusiastic displays for their own countries. Most of the World Cup players seem to play better for their country than they do for their club (ie they look like ‘teams’) while with England players it is the opposite.
Finally, having done a great impression of how Spurs played last season, England faced a barrage of praise for their narrow defeat to Italy! How ridiculous. Anyone with a brain could see that we were playing a poor Italian side, who were there for the taking ..and yet we still blew it (because we were even worse ..and then compounded it all against Uruguay). And oh the shock when Italy got beaten by Costa Rica! NO ..it wasn’t a shock you stupid ‘experts’! The only decent side in the whole group were the ‘whipping boys’ ..Costa Rica. We just happened to be the poorest out of the other three poor sides. And no ..the future DOESN’T look bright!
If you were a top class player wouldn’t you be miserable playing with Kyle Naughton on one side and Danny Rose on the other. You’d be wondering what the hell you were doing there.