This is very worrying. Tomkins is one of the few players in our squad with the ability to hold his own in the Prem - and he will get better and better as he matures. The market is terribly depressed at the moment - if you ignore the silly money paid by Man City, Chelsea and Liverpool - and to part with Tomkins would be madness. But that contract extension probably isn't signed. Why would Tomkins put pen to paper without a get out clause should we not be promoted?
If we sell Tomkins it will rate alongside the sale of Rio for crass folly. But I have a horrible feeling it is going to happen!
would be absolute madness.
ReplyDeleteIn the last 2 seasons he was literally the only defender you could count on. He's doing his job on a certain consisten level and I have no doubt he'll become a hell of a CB in the next couple of years.
You've said some pretty stupid things on this blog but to compare Tompkins to Rio tops the lot! Rio was pure class the very first time I saw him in the youth team and remains to this day one of the best ball playing defenders this country has produced.
ReplyDeleteTompkins has Toblerone for feet (have you forgotten Wolves and Bolton?!?) and is adequate at best.
What else can the club do if Tomkins won't sign a new contract? We're a small club compared to most premier clubs and we'd have to sell. Reality.
ReplyDeletekevin in Manchester writes..
ReplyDeleteyes, I fear he'll be off.. the fate of all good players in average clubs I'm afraid.
0826, I'm afraid you show your stupidity here. Where do I compare Rio and Tomkins? Nowhere. I compare the SALE of Tomkins and Rio. That is entirely different. The issue is that were we to sell Tomkins, we would be selling our BEST player, just as when we sold Rio, we sold our BEST player. We refused to part with Moore in his prime and kept hold of Brooking, again the BEST player on the books at the time. Tomkins is not as good as any of them, but then Rio was nowhere near as good as Moore and a comparison of three central defenders with a midfielder would be a complete nonsense. It's about signals and ambition.
ReplyDeleteYou're harking back to a time when wages didn't dominate a player's motivations and agents didn't decide the interests of a player. Sure we were as small a club back in the days of Brooking and Moore but this is also a time when club loyalty had some meaning when a player decided how his career was going to pan out. You can bet that Tomkins' agent is in his ear everyday telling him about the higher wages and bigger bonuses he'll be receiving at Tyneside, flat out ordering him not to give a sh!t about the opportunity West Ham has given him. It's just the way it works nowadays.
ReplyDeleteYou are very cynical and disillusioned for one apparently so young Ryan!
ReplyDeleteAha, you don't need to be older than 24 to realise how much the landscape of football has changed, HF. Danny Potts looks like he has a decent and possibly lucrative future ahead of him, yet his father Steve - a staple of the 90s team - currently drives a black cab and watches West Ham games in the stands. If his career had come a few years later he'd probably be sitting on a nice 'pension' and watching the games from a corporate box!
ReplyDeleteIn truth, father Steve would have plied his trade in the Championship if younger Ryan. Too short to be a centre back in the modern era and not really good enough as a full back. That will upset his fans but it is true.
ReplyDeleteTrue, but on his day (strictly *on his day* here) he was one of the best markers of the opposition around. I remember times when he would hustle the likes of Shearer and Ferdinand out of the game completely. A couple of inches taller and he might have had an England career to look back on.
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