Alderweireld fit for Sunderland


Alderweireld-fit-for-Sunderland
Toby Alderweireld expected to be fit for Sunderland game

The news from Tottenham on Belgian centre-back Toby Alderweireld is that he is expected to be fit to face Sunderland, the same goes for Danny Rose.

As I wrote yesterday, anyone who has played sport and suffered from muscle strains knows how slowly they can heal, or if you catch them before they go, how quickly the problem disappears.

He hadn't torn his muscle so there was nothing to repair, his body just needed a rest so the FA Cup tie has come at an ideal time.

Alderweireld has committed only 13 fouls in 4625 mins of league football playing for Spurs. That is a foul every 355.77 minutes or one foul every 3.95 matches. That just demonstrates his great reading of the game and positional play, even though he was caught out a couple of times against Manchester City.

With Jan Vertonghen out we need his leadership in central defence to help Kevin Wimmer. We now have two centre-backs thrown together who do not normally play together so that causes a problem when one isn't reading the play of the other. Vertonghen and Alderweireld know what each other is going to do, they have played together that often. 

A new partnership means more gaps will appear and we shouldn't be looking at a game and suggesting Wimmer had a bad game, we should be looking to see how the pair operated together and then looking at training to adjust their play for the next game. We now need to build the combination. If we simply threw in Ben Davies for the Sunderland game and he has a bad game, what then? Change again?

The Alderweireld, Wimmer partnership must be given time, especially give how Wimmer performed when a regular last season, clearly he is up to the task.


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