Tottenham Hotspur boss Andre Villas-Boas has denied rumours linking Togo international striker Emmanuel Adebayor with a move away from White Hart Lane in the January transfer window, Sky Sports understands.
Despite netting 17 goals and 11 assists in 33 league appearances last term, Adebayor has not started an English Premier League match for Spurs this season.
Instead, Villas-Boas has selected Jermain Defoe as his front-man for all eight league matches, with the 30-year-old striker having bagged five goals and two assists.
How long can this go on for before Adebayor finally submits a transfer request? I don’t know, but what I do know is that he should be starting over Jermain Defoe.
To have a player of Adebayor’s quality starting on the bench in each of your club’s first eight league matches is surely a managerial howler, at least in my opinion.
“Obviously, every player wants to play, at the moment we are using the structure of one striker and Defoe has been doing extremely well,” Villas-Boas told Sky Sports News.
“I think Ade has done extremely well in the games where he has come in for the squad, certainly he is in contention for games where we play with two strikers.
“At the moment we haven’t found the comfort in that formation yet, but in the future when we use it, when we rotate the strikers he will be back in contention.”
Villas-Boas plays down Willian talk
In other news, Andre Villas-Boas has played down Spurs’ link to Shakhtar Donetsk forward Willian amid reports that the player is in regular contact with the Portuguese-speaking manager, Sky Sports reports.
Both Chelsea and Spurs had their respective bids for the Brazilian forward rejected by the Ukrainian Premier League giants in the summer transfer window.
But it was Shakhtar who got the last laugh on Tuesday, when the Ukrainian outfit defeated defending-European champions Chelsea by a score of 2-1 in Group E of the UEFA Champions League at the Donbass Arena in Donetsk.
At the moment, Shakhtar Donetsk are top-of-the-group in Group E with 7 points, Chelsea are second with four points, Italian champions Juventus are third, having notched three points, and Nordsjælland are bottom-of-the-group with just one point from three matches.
UEFA Champions League Standings: Group E
| Home | Away | Total | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clubs | P | W | D | L | W | D | L | W | D | L | F | A | +/- | Pts | |
| 1 |  FC Shakhtar Donetsk |
3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 7 |
| 2 |  Chelsea FC |
3 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 7 | 4 | 3 | 4 |
| 3 |  Juventus |
3 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 3 |
| 4 |  FC Nordsjælland |
3 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 7 | -6 | 1 |
Now then, back to Andre Villas-Boas and Willian. In response to Spurs’ link with Willian, AVB told Sky Sports, “He is an extremely good player, but we have to respect what we are doing and the talent we have in our squad and to be fair to you I have not thought about January.
“We have scouts all over the world gathering information but we have not studied January as we have so many players coming back from injury and I think they will be the main players coming in.”
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