Tottenham Hotspur striker Jermain Defoe can’t buy a goal right now. How the Spurs star didn’t score in Tottenham’s defeat against Blackpool at Bloomfield Road (their last outing in the Premier League), I’ll never know. Tottenham’s lack of goals from their strikers – Defoe in particular, but also Peter Crouch who has only really found goalscoring form in the Champions League, and Roman Pavlyuchenko who has also struggled to find the back of the net regularly – has become Spurs’ most pressing problem. Harry Redknapp needs plenty of goals from his strikers from now until the end of the season, and it appears that Defoe may have found a solution by turning to one of Tottenham’s greatest ever goalscorers.
In the ten day break that Tottenham have had since that frustrating night in Blackpool, Defoe has been working hard to make sure he does everything he can to rediscover his form; well, he’s been watching TV! But it’s not Boardwalk Empire or Come Dine With Me he’s been watching, no Jermain’s been watching footage of the Spurs legend that is Jimmy Greaves. Greavesie scored an incredible 221 times for Tottenham in the decade that he spent at White Hart Lane in the 1960s and what he didn’t know about putting the ball in the back of the net isn’t worth knowing.
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Talking to the Evening Standard, Jermain Defoe said “The reserve team coach, Clive Allen, who obviously knows what it’s like as a striker, gave me a DVD of Jimmy Greaves the other week and told me to go home and watch it. It was brilliant to see. I saw his finishing, a lot of his goals seemed to come when he just passed the ball into the corners. He never seemed to hit it that hard. He was just really clever.” So while Greavesie hasn’t pulled on a Tottenham shirt for over 40 years, it appears he could still be helping out Spurs now.
Redknapp and Tottenham fans will be hoping it does the trick, as Defoe is coming towards his one-year anniversary since he last scored a Premier League goal from open play. That came against Blackburn, and this season he’s only managed to score against Twente in the Champions League, and Charlton in the FA Cup. Defoe is far too good a striker not to have found the back of the net for such a long period of time, but maybe at Molineux tomorrow against Wolves we will see a change in fortune for Jermain.
Tottenham can’t keep relying on their midfielders to do the job for them, and while Crouch and Rafael van der Vaart have struck up a good partnership in the Champions League, Spurs need Defoe to come good in the Premier League. With just 11 domestic games left, Tottenham could really do with Defoe netting half a dozen times between now and the end of the season, which could well be the difference between securing Champions League qualification and not.
Is Defoe’s luck about to turn? He’s 13/8 to score against Wolves!
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