Spurs must capitalise on loyal Lloris resetting the clock
The last thing Antonio Conte and Spurs needed this summer was to instantly replace their captain and keeper. Hugo Lloris has reset the clock.
There’s been lots of talk about how many new players Spurs need to sign to keep Antonio Conte happy (lots) and when they need to do so (yesterday, ideally) but just quietly they might have completed one of their most important bits of business.
For quite a while – right up into the start of this season really – there had sort of been an assumption that Hugo Lloris would leave when his current contract expired in June 2022. He would have completed a decade of service at the club and few could begrudge him a move somewhere else.
He would also have been utterly, impossibly irreplaceable and it really has felt like only recently that Spurs have realised that.
Replacing a reliable first-choice goalkeeper, one who has been around for a decade, is no easy task. Few have managed it without missteps along the way. Until the announcement of Lloris’ new deal that keeps the poor bastard at Spurs until summer 2024, this summer that already promises plenty of necessary upheaval may also have contained plenty of unnecessary work as well identifying and securing a keeper to come straight in and replace a decade of top-quality service.
In a way, Spurs fans should perhaps be grateful not just for how good Lloris has once again been this year, nor how bafflingly loyal he remains to a club at which he has frankly pissed away the peak years of his club career, but also for just how awful an understudy Pierluigi Gollini has been. He is the worst Spurs keeper since Bobby Mimms. Has he ever made a save? Does he ever even actually move? Does he actually exist?
Gollini’s startling ineptitude has perhaps sharpened minds and focus on Lloris’ importance – not just as a keeper but as captain of the side.
He did have a significant dip for a couple of seasons, when high-profile errors dogged his game and the worst mistakes seemed to come in the biggest matches. Even in his gloriously successful international career as France captain he still managed to chuck one in his net during the World Cup final.
But Lloris was, again in a quiet, understated and almost unnoticed way, one of the very few but very significant big winners at Spurs from the Jose Mourinho era.
Under Mourinho’s low-block regime, Lloris inevitably largely abandoned the sweeper-keeper stylings of his younger days. This was without doubt a good thing, because he had become increasingly wonky at it. Focusing instead on leadership, defence-marshalling and shot-stopping, he once again established himself as one of the very best keepers in the division, a status he continues to hold.
He could have signed a pre-contract with any foreign team over the last few weeks, with plenty of suitors in France understandably fairly keen on the whole idea. A two-and-a-half-year deal appears a perfect solution for the club and, as long as he’s as happy to stay as he appears to be, player.
Lloris now has the security of a contract that runs until he is 37, while Spurs now have their first-choice goalkeeper for the remainder of the Antonio Conte ‘let’s try and actually win some sh*t’ experiment.
That gives them time in the short term to focus on more pressing areas of the pitch in need of immediate improvement, but just as importantly resets the clock on finding Lloris’ long-term successor. (HINT: It is not Gollini, lads.)
As the man himself said on the announcement of what will this time surely be his final Spurs contract: “In the next two years I will make sure we find another person for the next 10 years.” There’s nobody better to do it.
He has been a leader for Spurs from the moment he managed to wrestle the No. 1 spot from the redoubtable Brad Friedel, and his quiet, seething and eloquent rage after the Dinamo Zagreb fiasco last year – the Spursiest of low points – was among the best of his work for the club. If there was any doubt that change was needed, Lloris destroyed that notion.
Even among the other handful of elite players Spurs do possess, none can match Lloris for authority thanks to the success he has secured in international football. He has been captain of an absurdly good France side for even longer than he has been a Spurs player.
And he has been a Spurs player for a very, very long time now. He is the only man with over 300 Premier League appearances for the club, and with this contract could go past 400.
His 395 appearances for Spurs in all competitions put him 11th on an all-time list, already ahead of your Danny Blanchflowers and the Jimmy Greaveses of this world.
It would be hard to begrudge the man the chance to lift a trophy before he finally leaves this cursed club, and their chances of winning one under Conte just improved significantly. Conte, Levy and everyone else have one less thing to worry about, for now