Cole set to end Anfield misery as Tottenham transfer nears completion
By Joe Bernstein
Last updated at 11:38 PM on 4th June 2011
Liverpool outcast Joe Cole is heading to Tottenham in a £3m deal after a year of disappointment at Anfield.
Spurs will give him a full medical assessment this week before finalising the move after a season wrecked by injury and lack of form.
Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp, who helped bring Cole through at West Ham, believes he can resurrect the career of the 29-year-old, once regarded as the finest young talent of his generation.
But the move follows a huge fall from grace for the one-time England playmaker, who was widely accepted as the free transfer of the summer last year when he made his switch from Chelsea.
Cole failed to make an immediate impact at Anfield and his chances of success were badly damaged when Liverpool’s managing director Christian Purslow, integral in the signing, left his job following the sale of the club to John W Henry last October.
Privately, Henry was fuming that an ageing player had been handed a lucrative four-year contract worth £90,000 a week when he aimed to invest in youngsters.
Since then, Cole has become a weighty burden on the Liverpool wage bill. He has cost them a total of £4.1m in wages so far, which is £2,470 for each of the 1,662 minutes he has played in the Premier League and Europa League for the club.
He made 32 appearances in total last season but 13 of them came from the bench and there were only nine league starts among them. Cole was also sent off on his league debut and scored just three goals in total all year.
Manager Kenny Dalglish has been impressed with Cole’s attitude since taking charge in January but has not picked him regularly and, with Liverpool out of Europa League action next season, his chances would be further reduced.
Cole can point to a troublesome hamstring injury as an explanation for his disappointments at Anfield but it cannot have helped that Purslow rather than Dalglish’s predecessor, Roy Hodgson, was the driving force behind him being signed.
His fall from grace is highlighted by the fact that he went to the World Cup with England last year and won the last of his 56 caps in the World Cup defeat against Germany.
Cole was the youngest member of England’s World Cup squad in 2002 and regarded as the country’s best player in the tournament four years later.
He could still have been involved with the national team if his Liverpool move had worked out better. But instead of making a contribution to England’s Euro 2012 qualifier against Switzerland, he waspreparing himself for another change of clubs and a move back to London.
Cole’s move could pave the way for Luka Modric to make a £28million switch to Manchester United.
Sir Alex Ferguson’s first-choice playmaker as a replacement for Paul Scholes is Wesley Sneijder
but his Inter Milan wages of £170,000 a week after tax is a serious obstacle.
Modric earns just a fraction of that and Spurs could be tempted to sell and bring in transfer funds after landing a like-for-like replacement in Cole. The player has also indicated that he would like to move to Old Trafford to play Champions League football again.
Spurs want to offload several big earners who will not feature in the first team next season. Alan Hutton, Robbie Keane, David Bentley, Wilson Palacios, Sebastien Bassong and Giovani Dos Santos are all surplus to requirements.
Sunderland were told when they inquired about Peter Crouch that Spurs would only sell if they also took a couple of those players.
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