The thread title is clear enough "our defence next season". Stating that we should sell Vertonghen who I agree is "easily our best defender when on song" without putting that into context of the entire defence seems like a very limited view.
I don't think Vertonghen has been as bad as some people are claiming, even though not at his best I still think he's comfortably better than both Dawson and Rose have been in recent months. Trying to replace 3 starters out of a back 4 in a single summer seems very optimistic at best, quite possibly outright naive. We have a now PL experienced centre back that's very good when on form, had the rest of the back 4 been in place and replacing only this one out of form player I would have seen your side of the argument a lot more positive. But looking to replace 3 defenders in one window, knowing full well that we like most teams are hit and miss in the transfer window, with no obvious clear PL proven options to sign up for a reasonable fee in my mind at least. That just looks like creating problems rather than fixing them. Even City and Chelsea with their resources have struggled to find the right solution for those defensive positions, how likely is that we'll succeed looking for 2-3 starters in a single window?
Seems much more likely to me that we can make Vertonghen happy again by signing 1-2 starters that are better than the players he's playing next to now.
Several of our (imo) properly successful defenders in recent years have taken time to adjust after we signed them. Walker, Kaboul and Ekotto. Even superman King needed time, the obvious exceptions are the older signings like Gallas and Woodgate that were available partly because of their injury history and age. Like I said I would really like to see a similar signing being made, but we can't expect to find 3 players like that, and if the age/injury history is an issue with anyone we do find there's a limit to how much we can depend on such players. Most likely most signings we make will take time to get up to the level we want to see. Perhaps we can find one, optimistically perhaps we can even find two, but can we find 3 defenders that will step right in and perform?
People have seen Walker go from "apparently young player of the season", to "dog****" to very valuable. We've seen Ekotto go from "promising" to "get the **** out" to being a very useful player. We've seen Kaboul go from "promising, but not ready yet" to actually being sold and then re-signed and prove himself very useful. Vertonghen has shown how good he can be, a bit of a setback, some frustration being shown at a frustrating time and not consistently living up to his own high standards set last season and the reaction is "get rid"?
I just don't get it at all.
