Date: 30th April Age: 32 Position: Midfield Source: Turkish-Football.com Rumoured fee: Free (end of contract) Transfermarket.co.uk value: £4m
Comments on Rafael van der Vaart:
Sad. It's the right decision, obviously, but I'm going to miss him. Still by a good margin the best player I've ever seen wearing our shirt. His second time wasn't as good as his first - he'd gotten a bit worse, the league a lot better so he wasn't one of the best players in it anymore. But he was still one of our best players. Even last year when everyone proceeded to call him awful and a waste, it's worth noting he was still our second highest scorer and played a pretty brilliant first half of the season. Anyway, thank you for coming back even though you clearly didn't need to, thank you for giving it your all in spite of divorce, miscarriage and witch-hunting Bild. Thank you for the memories, and please come back soon.
everytime he plays I feel like he is the most active player but the team just lacks an idea how to make use of his abilities. As a holding midfielder, his strengths are wasted because he is too deep on the pitch. On the ten he lacks the connection to the rest of the team because the other midfielders are too weak to really set the scene for him.
did you watch many HSV matches? Because i watched all of them and sometimes i felt we would have been better off with 10 men than with 11 men and vdV playing. I dont want to talk bad about him, he has done a lot for us in the past, but last and especially this season he has been a burden.
His wife wanted to go back to Hamburg which was the main reason for his departure from Spurs. 3 months later he apparently hit her and they've since been divorced. He never really was the same. But then again he was struggling to complete more than 70mins near the end of his spurs tenure so maybe he was already way past it.
