3. Jucilei To Spurs?
Anybody who watched this match in its entirety will have noticed a curious conversation going on at half time between Spurs manager Andre Villas-Boas and Anzhi defensive midfielder Jucilei da Silva. The Brazilian international was one of those super-signings made by the club when they were first taken over by billionaire Suleyman Kerimov. In his time at the club, he has been joined by the likes of Samuel Eto'o, Roberto Carlos, Mbark Boussoufa, Yuri Zhirkov, Willian, João Carlos Pinto Chaves, Igor Denisov, Aleksandr Kokorin and Lassana Diarra. However, Kerimov has since had a drastic fire sale and all of those players have left, leaving Jucilei as one of the small number of proverbial roses amongst what is now a team of thorns. He must be desperate to escape the club, who are now languishing in joint bottom of their domestic league table and any public conversation with the likes of Villas-Boas (who has no prior connection to Jucilei, so it wasn't a friendly chat between friends or former colleagues) is going to generate rumours. Was Jucilei offering his services to AVB? Was AVB asking Jucilei if he'd be interested in a move to Spurs? Defensive midfield is one position that Spurs are already stacked in (Sandro, Capoue, Paulinho and Dembele etc), so it seems unlikely, but rumours are bound to surface after this little interaction.