Speculation it's Bazoer

Nobody actually knows who Paul Mitchell and Mauricio Pochettino have been scouting or who ws being watched at the Ireland versus Holland game.

Bazoer is the next guess


The fact that an agent sat with Pochettino is irrelevant, they sit with other people involved in football all the time, it doesn't mean they are discussing a deal, however much the Daily Express would like it to be the case.

I don't have the inside scoop on who they were watching either, common sense says it wasn't Shane Long and we seem to have lurched from there to 21-year-old (22 in June) Dutch striker Vincent Janssen.

I listed a few we could have been watching from the Dutch side in the game and speculation has also been made that it was Riechedly Bazoer who was our primary scouting target. The reality ios that we were probably looking at more than one player., that it was a chance to see several players we have been following this season.

Riechedly Bazoer is a Dutch footballer of Curaçaoan descent, who plays as a central midfielder for second placed finishers Ajax in the Eredivisie from whom Frank de Boer has left. He is a 19-year-old (20 in December) dubbed a 'sensation' in our over-excited press and linked with a move to Arsenal, Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea. In other words, journalists have just thrown names of clubs at the story in an effort to repeat the same story from an 'exclusive' point of view. If paper A links him with Arsenal then paper B can claim an exclusive linking him with Chelsea and so on. It's all a media game.

The game had a lot of Dutch youth players as they have not made it to the 2016 European Championships and this need to rebuild, a far cry from the third placed finish at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil under Louis van Gaal. It was an ideal chance to see a lot of promising youngsters in action at international level.