The spaghetti lover, the Paranormal Activity hater, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers lover, the dead leg hater. Victor Wanyama has finally left Tottenham Hotspur.
He departs north London aged 28 - yep, he's that young - for Thierry Henry's Montreal Impact in MLS and, while he hasn't been at his best for a couple of years, it wasn't until the announcement of his transfer late on Tuesday night did it truly hit home that Wanyama was gone, even if he left in spirit some time ago.
He played 47 games in his first year in north London, including 45 starts - he would play just 50 more times over the next two and a half years (just 23 starts), with more bad or average games than good ones. Eesh.
Morning tweeps yesterday i watched the paranormal activity 3 and today am going to put it in the bin. too scary to watch
— Victor Wanyama (@VictorWanyama) April 26, 2012
One performance in lilywhite stands out more than any other. When Chelsea rocked up to White Hart Lane in January 2017 aiming to extend their winning run to a then-record 14 Premier League games, Mauricio Pochettino went man-for-man, playing his own 3-4-3 to combat Antonio Conte's. This saw Wanyama duelling future PFA Player of the Year N'Golo Kante.
A year and a half of almost exclusively top displays in England made Kante one of the world's finest players in any position, let alone 'just' the best defensive midfielder in the world.
Wanyama squashed him, bullied him, chewed him up and spat him up - if it were a legal manoeuvre, he would have walked out on the pitch with Motörhead blaring and attacked Kante with a sledgehammer. The humblest of players had been humbled.
Dele Alli's double grabbed the headlines, Pochettino's tactics dominated the columns, and Wanyama's James Bond job on the best player in the league that season was overlooked, making it even more of a shame that the Kenyan spent much of the rest of his time in north London playing more like Johnny English.
But there's only so many ways you can say that a player is crap, and the hyper-critical age of football would make it easier to remember Wanyama for being bad, a harsh and totally unfair assessment of someone who embodied the Pochettino era, who Pochettino himself was desperate to bring to the club after he himself joined from Southampton - the Saints blocked approaches in the two seasons prior to Wanyama's eventual move.
Best team in the world pic.twitter.com/jnNIsy9euy
— Sean Walsh (@SeanDZWalsh) January 14, 2020
Nobody was fitter, nobody ran harder, nobody embraced the team-first mentality more than a fit Wanyama. He water-carried so Dembele could dribble, so Kyle Walker and Danny Rose could bomb on, so Eric Dier could slot in at centre-back, so Alli and Christian Eriksen didn't have to do as much tracking back. On the odd occasion when Wanyama did go for a wander, you knew the ball was safe with him, defenders bouncing off him like Bruce Lee taking on Cliff Booth (in his own mind, anyway).
Tottenham's struggles to find a suitable number six have only now had fans longing for the days of a fit Wanyama marshalling the midfield - Harry Winks can't do it, Tanguy Ndombele can't do it, Giovani Lo Celso can't do it, this iteration of Dier certainly can't do it.
What's now left of Wanyama at Spurs are the memories that eclipse some of his prime contemporaries; the winner at home to Crystal Palace, the screamer against Gent, the opener on the last day at White Hart Lane, the thunderpunt at Anfield, the hoof out of play in the 92nd minute at Manchester City in the Champions League because he didn't even want to attempt to keep the ball.
The writing was on the wall for Wanyama - a similar fate to that of Sandro a few years earlier - but now that he's finally off the books and the pressure on the club's wage budget has been alleviated a little, he can be remembered as a fundamental, fond and fun figure during Tottenham's best stretch in the modern era.
Source : 90min