Reports in the media suggest Tottenham are preparing to offload Etienne Capoue barely five months after signing him. He arrived as part of a raft of new signings triggered by the sale of Gareth Bale. At the time these signings were hailed as a coup, turning the potential negative of losing our best player into a positive.

Last season Spurs missed out on the Champions’ league by the smallest of margins and one of the more obvious reasons for this was the loss of Sandro halfway through the season. We had Bale to score the goals but no-one to get the ball off the opposition in order to feed it to him. Signing Capoue seemed to have addressed this need, providing cover and possibly even competition for the big Brazilian.

As it turns out Sandro has been injured for much of the season and yet Capoue hasn’t played, despite some brief yet promising appearances early on. The change of manager hasn’t helped. Sherwood favours two up front and a more a forward thinking midfield leaving less room for a player like Capoue. When there has been a space, Sherwood’s previous position developing our youth prospects has led him to bring Bentaleb into the team. There have also been reports of attitude problems.

Add to this the sacking of our manager, the lack of game time for top signing Lamela and the lack of goals for our second most expensive player, Soldado, and our much heralded summer transfer spree is beginning to look like another Spurs’ farce.

The arrival of Baldini as Director of Football was supposed to help improve our transfer dealings and provide continuity in the event of a change of manager. In practice it has lead to more discord. There are reports that AVB wasn’t happy with many of the players provided to him. Now Sherwood wants to change the way we play and does not seem enamoured of several fairly high profile members of the squad: Capoue, Chadli and Holtby.

Daniel Levy has to take some of the blame for this mess.