Here at Cartilage Free Captain, some familiar names always seem to pop up both in our transfer rumor articles (whether they're Bat Country or not) and in our comment section. Names like Leandro Damião bring pain to the longer tenured members of our site, as well as Yevhen Konoplyanka. One that doesn't bring pain and seems to get most everyone excited is, of course, Andriy Yarmolenko. Well, it appears that this dead horse has risen from the ashes and it doesn't appear to be #batcountry.
Peter O'Rourke over at ESPNFC has stated that Spurs are renewing their interest in the 25-year-old Dynamo Kiev attacker, citing unnamed sources.
Before anyone goes nuts on this, let's pump the brakes and look at the entire rumor mill, because it's complex, even though the article itself doesn't have much to it other than O'Rourke trusting his sources. Here's what we know.
- Back on June 2, the same site reported that Chelsea, Liverpool, and Tottenham were all interested in Yarmolenko and mentioned that the price could be as much as £19m.
- Yarmolenko has also been linked to numerous other clubs, including European giants PSG, though there's little to attach to that other than your standard bat country reporting.
- Yarmolenko has made it rather clear that he has no interest in signing a new contract with his current club and his deal expires next Summer. He has gone as far to say that he wants to leave this window.
Then there's this little nugget that popped up on Twitter yesterday:
Stoke will make an "unrefusable offer" for Yarmolenko in the last week of the transfer window. 21 Mio € + bonus http://t.co/QOT7DTf7kP
— FutbolUkraine (@FutbolUkraine) August 11, 2015
Yes, that Stoke, the one that just broke their club record fee in signing Xherdan Shaqiri. The price listed is a little shy of what ESPNFC was reporting some time ago, but this is more hearsay and spitballing.
We haven't had much in the Yarmolenko saga in the past week or so. The last report was that he had told Kiev essentially to jump off a cliff with any new contract, and then the trail went cold.
If O'Rourke is reporting this, then there has to be some substance to it. He doesn't generally make stories up, but with the apparently imminent signing of Clinton N'Jie in the next 48 hours, there's no way of knowing just how serious Spurs are about plucking Yarmo from Ukraine. Let's hope that this is something substantial because this is a player that would instantly improve the attack.