Jamie O’Hara has claimed that Aymeric Laporte would be a fantastic signing for Tottenham but insisted that the Manchester City star might not want to join the North London club.
It was reported earlier this week that City had made an opening offer of £100m for Harry Kane and that the Premier League champions had told Spurs they were also willing to include some of their players in the deal.
Laporte was one of the players Pep Guaridola’s side were said to be willing to include in the Kane deal, along with Gabriel Jesus and Raheem Sterling.
The centre-half fell out of favour at the Etihad last season, with Ruben Dias forming a formidable partnership with John Stones.
O’Hara admitted that Laporte would be a useful addition for Tottenham but the former Spurs midfielder questioned whether a player of the 27-year-old’s quality would want to come to the club given their current predicament.
The pundit also urged Tottenham’s hierarchy to go after more realistic targets in their managerial pursuit.
O’Hara told talkSPORT – 24 June, 9:00 am: “If Harry Kane’s going to go, I’d take Laporte. He’d be a great signing, Laporte.
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“No (I wouldn’t join if I was Laporte). You’ve got to get a really good manager who is going to convince players to come to the football club. Laporte, in my opinion, is a top-class centre-half. He’s playing for Spain! He’ll go back to Madrid or something.
“I think that’s what the problem is, managers are looking at it, top managers, Conte, the Sevilla manager (Lopetegui), they’re going to say: ‘Look at the squad without Kane. It’s not that great. Are you going to back me and give me the £150 million, £200 million needed to rebuild that team?’ No.
“We’ve had a massive fall from grace. We are not the Spurs that played Liverpool in the Champions League final. We need to rebuild and we need to be realistic.”
Spurs Web Opinion
If we are going to lose Kane, then we could do a lot worse than getting Laporte as a part of the deal. The City star would be able to slot into our backline straight away and fix a lot of our issues since he comes with considerable Premier League experience.
Ordinarily, we should be able to attract a player of Laporte’s profile but O’Hara is right in saying that it is difficult to imagine us doing so without a head coach in place.
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