I learned a few things this morning since finding out Guglielmo Vicario had ankle surgery after Tottenham Hotspur’s 4-0 win over Manchester City on Saturday. The first is that Vicario apparently played 60 gol-danged minutes on a broken ankle, making five saves which is INSANE and I’m still wondering how he did it.
The other thing I learned is that he is not expected to return to the Tottenham squad until February, which both feels like not that long and also is a REALLY REALLY LONG TIME when you consider the number of matches he’ll miss. And for that reason, according to Standard journalist Dan Kilpatrick, Spurs are now considering moving up their timeline for a new keeper to this coming January’s transfer window.
Kilpatrick writes that Spurs had planned on bringing in “younger competition for Vicario” this past summer, but for whatever reason that never happened, and Tottenham went into the season with 36-year-old reserve Fraser Forster and 25-year-old academy product Brandon Austin to round out the keeper corps. (Alfie Whiteman is there too, ostensibly to help with homegrown/club-trained numbers). The club was hoping to wait until this summer to find a younger backup for Vicario to replace Forster, but that timeline might now have to be moved up until January.
It’s a little hard to overstate how significant it is to miss Vicario at this present point in time. Forster is a nice guy, a veteran Premier League keeper, and someone who has the proven ability to make good stops as he’s shown already in the Europa League this season. But he’s not mobile, he’s pretty bad with the ball at his feet, he’s downright awful in penalty kick situations, and he’s definitely NOT a good fit with the kind of tactics Ange Postecoglou wants to play with this Spurs side. Taking out Vicario and replacing him with Forster is… well, it’s not great. And whatever we as fans think about Brandon Austin, it’s become clear the club doesn’t feel the same way we do about his potential considering he hasn’t seen any match action since the preseason tour to Asia.
Spurs do have other options. They could sign a free agent keeper as they have the squad room, though the pickings are slim with only 37-year-old Costa Rican star Keylor Navas a notable option. There are other keepers (including, lol, Hugo Lloris) whose contracts expire on December 31 that Spurs could look at as a stop-gap measure. Or Spurs could look to see who’s available on the market in January, possibly an English, homegrown player.
But for now, we are in the large, Ent-like hands of Fraser Forster for this Thursday’s Europa League match against Claudio Ranieri’s AS Roma, and likely for the home match against Fulham at the weekend. Swallow hard and make the best of it, I suppose.
