How a coach would assess Pritchard, Chadli and Trippier/Yedlin situations

TRANSFER TALK

How a coach would assess Pritchard

Swansea City are pondering an £8-million move for Alex Pritchard, who currently has over a dozen clubs to choose from.
Swansea City are also interested in Belgian international Nacer Chadli, as we hear are Stoke City under Mark Hughes.
Southampton are said to be preparing a £5-million move for right-back Kieran Trippier.

Plenty of interest in our players, but only one of that trio has a realistic chance of actually happening.

Alex Pritchard has been a victim of circumstance. While he had an injury and then chose to go on loan to WBA, Tottenham moved forward while he went backwards.

He isn't totally guaranteed to leave, we are listening to offers and if one meets our valuation it will be accepted. Then it will be up to Pritchard with the full knowledge that his game time will be limited. He does really want to make it at Tottenham and has the Australian tour and training to impress Pochettino enough. The pair will have a chat at the end of the tour and decide his future.

Nacer Chadli provides  proven Premier League ability and his sale would leave us with just Lamela, Eriksen and Son plus a bunch of unproven kids. That isn't a situation any coach wants to leave themselves in. Yes, Dele Alli could move out there but then you lose something from the middle so it's not an ideal scenario.

The Chadli stuff is just reporters guessing he must be surplus to requirements and while you could say I'm guessing, I'm doing so with logic, common sense and the experience of coaching myself (I have taken two levels of coaching qualifications). Thinking like a coach, you want to develop players, but you want to do so with minimum risk.

Leaving yourself exposed to failure in the wide areas (important in our system) is not a logical move, you would have to be supremely confident that a youngster could take over full-time in the event of an injury. Then you have another youngster as their understudy who you have to play to give the first youngster a rest. Thus you need two youngsters you think will be guaranteed successes to sell Chadli.

Logically, if Chadli were to be sold, from a coaches point of view, January at the earliest, but more probably next summer would be the time to look at it, if the youngsters have developed over the season.

A similar situation applies to Kieran Trippier. His immediate future will be determined by how much DeAndre Yedlin has improved at Sunderland under Sam Allardyce. He has improved considerably I understand, but has he improved enough for him to be the Tottenham Hotspur right-back. That is the question you have to answer, if not, then Kieran Trippier is required to rotate with Kyle Walker, who will surely play the Champions League games and be rested for the Premier League games, unless Pochettino decides to operate his rotation policy for full-backs the other way around.

You can see that Yedlin has to be good enough to play regularly in the Premier League at the top of the table rather than the bottom to oust Trippier. It is unlikely Trippier will be going anywhere, again I would expect another year of development for Yedlin, presumably with another loan spell, then reassess next summer.

With my coaching head on that's how I would assess the situation of all three.