Just a few days shy of his twentieth birthday in 2007, Ben Alnwick joined Spurs from Sunderland for a fee of £900,000 in a deal that could have risen to £1.3 million and which saw Marton Fulop going the other way. Alnwick had already played 22 games for the Black Cats, had represented England at every level from under-16 through to under-21 and was generally considered to be a promising goalkeeping prospect. However, the five and a half years he spent in North London were nothing short of disastrous. He played three times for Spurs - once in the Premier League, once in the F.A. Cup and once in the League Cup - and never showed any signs of cementing a place in the Spurs first team. In fact, most of his time at the club was spent as third or fourth choice goalkeeper and he had no less than seven loan spells away from White Hart Lane - at Luton Town, Leicester City, Carlisle United, Norwich City, Leeds United, Doncaster Rovers and Leyton Orient - but he only managed 30 competitive appearances in all of those spells added together. He finally permanently left the club to join Barnsley in July 2012, but he couldn't even make the number one spot his own at Oakwell. He has since played at Charlton Athletic, Leyton Orient and now Peterborough United.
