Picture the scene...At 23.59:59s on August 31, 2010. Harry Redknapp pulls off one of the biggest shocks of any transfer window and immediately it looks a match made in heaven.
Rafa Van Der Vaart arrives at Tottenham for a ridiculously cheap £8million and hits the ground running. He's banging 'em in all over the shop, links up with Peter Crouch, fights for every ball and plays the Tottenham way. An instant hit.
Fade out.
Fade in; it's Saturday and Rafa's trudging moodily down the tunnel and towards the dressing room with about 70 minutes on the clock - it's getting to be a familiar sight, only this time it sparks waves of concern and debate in the papers and around the forums.
The difference being that Harry Redknapp publicly criticised the Dutchman in the press and there are maybe the first murmurings of discontent between the man in charge and our too-good-to-be-true deadline-day coup.
Opinion seems to be divided among Spurs fans. One fan on Planetspurs.com says, "If I was subbed every game like Vdv, I'd be getting pissed off. He has hardly completed 90 minutes since we signed him."
Whereas on BBC606, someone else says, "The more I know about the guy the more i'm convinced he's just not a team player."
Personally, I think that if you want to play the last 20 minutes, then first you need to impress in the first 70 minutes and Rafa has gone off the boil a bit lately. Maybe he's a victim of his own success in that he's set our expectations high but he can't argue that his impact on games isn't what it was, be it due to injury or lack of fitness etc.
Van Der Vaart has a history of reacting to substitutions and depending on your views you can take it one of two ways; either that he's acting spoilt and is a danger to team morale, or that being so desperate to play indicates a hunger and drive that should excite us.
Rafa himself said after the West Ham game, "Often I like to play 90 minutes, but at Spurs that hardly ever happens. I read that Harry Redknapp wanted to talk with me, but I did not see him before I left for Holland."
Redknapp does have a tendency, when he finds a player's weakness, to start poking it with a stick, in some cases until it bleeds. He famously upset Darren Bent by claiming his missus could have done better than an open goal he missed. Admittedly, Bent's weakness was that he couldn't hit a cow's arse in a cattle farm, which is a pretty big problem.
Pavlyuchenko complains about not starting, so Redknapp leaves him on the bench, and now Rafa starts storming off and spitting his dummy out, so Redknapp keeps taking him off. Maybe it's to test their reactions, or just show 'em who's boss. Who knows?
Different players need treating differently and a club is always going to have a few egos, it can be the price of having players who are explosive on the pitch, they tend to be live wires off it.
The one thing that does royally irk me about the situation is that Van Der Vaart said he did not see Redknapp before he left for Holland. Sorry, but why the **** not? That means not only did he not watch the rest of the West Ham game, but he left the stadium.
There is no situation in which that can be seen as acceptable and it should put us firmly in the picture of who's in the right here. If your manager wants a word after the game, you have a word after the game. End of story.
Rafa has said it will "all have blown over" by the time he returns from international duty. At the end of the day, Redknapp is the boss and he hasn't got us this far by pandering to the players' demands.
Hopefully, the Dutchman wants a long and successful run at Spurs but if that's the case, it's him who will have to fit into Redknapp's ideals. Not the other way round.
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