Well it’s finally happened. Ten days into the transfer window and thirty days since our last game of the season, we have actually signed somebody. Amidst the usual flurry of rumours and speculation, it has been confirmed this afternoon that Giovanni dos Santos has agreed terms with the club and the rather rushed false start of an announcement last Friday has now been reinforced with the confirmation that he is now a Spurs player. With Luka Modric not joining us until next month and the details of John Bostock’s transfer dependent on a pending tribunal even the news coming from the club has been less than definitive so far.

It has been that kind of summer and it is a long way from being over.

It is a frustration all football fans have come to know well in recent years. Each summer, like a keyboard-based Indiana Jones, we embark on a search for truth; bravely fighting the Soviet spy-esque threat of self-appointed “ITK’s”, evading the duplicitous Nazi monkeys of Tribal Football, Sportingo and The Spoiler all the while searching for the holy grail of Sky Sports News or official site confirmation.

Add into the mix our club’s “Supermarket Sweep” approach to the transfer window in recent years and the hearsay questioning which figure from our managerial structure is the driving force behind any given signing and it makes Spurs fans bigger victims than most of Silly Season Syndrome™.

So why does this new and quite infuriating phenomenon continue to dominate our summers? It would be easy, surely, to stick to the front pages of the newspapers and avoid News Now for a couple of months yet so few of us do. Sure, we say that we believe none of it and will only trust information substantiated by the club but perhaps we are more taken in than we would like to admit. It certainly doesn’t stop us following the rumours and debating earnestly the merits of signing a player we are only tenuously linked to.

Of course, it didn’t used to be this way. Before the Internet, teletext and the radio acted as the first and final word on football news and mostly a reliable one. Any ITK’s you knew were so hilariously unreliable they were easy to ignore; if you didn’t believe your mate when he told you he was in the pub with Denise van Outen on Saturday night it was easy to dismiss his earnest assertion that “Baggio has signed for Spurs, it’s definite, my Dad’s mate works for the club”. Where once a foreign player would be preposterously talked up based on someone signing him on Championship Manager, now we have YouTube clips offering tangible proof of a players talent.

Is it more information than we need? Does the Internet give these swindlers and their rumour mongering an illusion of authenticity? Is it harder to disbelieve now? Perhaps the talk of big money purchases and exciting signings act as a pleasant distraction from the numbing, horrifying certainty deep within us that knows, despite the hype and gossip, that all we will have to show for it at the end of the summer is an over-priced and past it winger, a 17-year old French kid nobody’s heard of and Anton Ferdinand.

Whatever the reason, like a public who say they are tired of a sex scandal whilst newspaper sales soar, we complain yet do all we can to keep up and be the first to know.

After today, there are 82 days to go until the transfer window shuts and we will be mightily relieved when it does. Yet come next June and in spite of ourselves, the frustration of previous summers will be unable to dim our enthusiasm for new faces and we will resume our search for the facts.

No matter how bafflingly infuriating the process may be.




Oh, and we’ve signed David Bentley.

Definitely.

A mate told me.

His uncle works at the club.

Definitely……

Pop in soon for more from the Voice of Reason. But until next time, good bye!

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