DRIVING FORCE
Vic's the wheel deal!
TOTTENHAM can motor to a 10th successive league win tonight and, if they do, it will be largely down to their VW engine.
Due to all the hype about goal aces Harry Kane and Dele Alli, it’s been a bit overlooked how important Victor Wanyama has been to their title pursuit.
You can bet the West Ham midfield won’t be eagerly anticipating taking on Wanyama.
Michael Essien, in his pomp at Chelsea, lived up to his nickname ‘The Bison’ and Wanyama has similar brute power.
Against Arsenal last Sunday, it was hard not to pity the Gunners’ Aaron Ramsey as he was swatted away by the muscular Kenyan.
Worth
Having voted for N’Golo Kante in the Football Writers’ Association poll for player of the year, it struck me how it would have been ideal to have seen first whether Wanyama can help Mauricio Pochettino’s men to an incredible title win, having been 13 points behind leaders Chelsea on March 18. Win tonight and that gap will be just a point. Certainly the £11m Spurs paid Southampton for the 25-year-old last summer looks the bargain of the season. What must he be worth now – four or five times that?
Wanyama’s back story is inspirational, too. Growing up on the back streets of Nairobi, he played football bare foot until winning a pair of Nike boots. Initially he found them so heavy he could not run in them. He fell in love with the Premier League, watching games at a local cinema. Not surprisingly, two of the players he admired the most were Patrick Vieira and Roy Keane. Now he can claim to be in the same bracket, with his ability to pass, tackle and run with the ball so powerfully. You also have to love Wanyama for a 2012 tweet, which has something of the ‘Boring James Milner’ parody account about it: “I had spaghetti and it was very nice.” He was playing for Celtic at the time, so it may have been Spaghetti Hoops! But Spurs fans have adapted it for a terrace chant, styled to Ritchie Valens’ 1958 rendition of La Bamba. So much now depends on Wanyama driving the north Londoners on. If he can keep replicating displays like the one against Arsenal for the last four games of the season, it could still be a case of ‘to the Victor go the spoils’.