Tottenham side-eying Victor Moses as a Berahino Plan B

Tottenham Hotspur are in the market for wide midfielders, and Saido Berahino is the number one target. This much we know. But what happens if, for whatever reason, Spurs can't work out a deal for Little Bear? The Evening Standard suggests that a viable backup option might just be the suddenly-available Chelsea winger Victor Moses.

Spurs have been linked to the Nigerian off and on since he played for Wigan, but never very seriously, and once Chelsea got involved in his transfer back in the summer of 2012, it was pretty much a done deal. But Moses was never the kind of player that was going to excel at a club like Chelsea. Signed for £9m, he was pretty much instantly shunted to the bench after the Blues signed Andre Schurrle, and anyway, he's the kind of young player that Chelsea loves to snap up from smaller clubs and then flip for a small profit a few years later. In that light, signing him from a struggling Wigan side was pretty cynical move, and one could argue that Moses' development has stalled from that point on.

Moses spent the past two seasons on loan at Liverpool and Stoke City, but he hasn't exactly set the world on fire at either club, scoring four goals in 38 matches. And now with the arrival of the freshly-gazumped Pedro from Barcelona, he's pretty much done as a Chelsea player.

Chelsea rates Moses at £10m, but it's thought they might accept a bid as low as £6m. The Express (lol) even suggests Spurs have already put an £8m bid on him. This is undoubtedly crap.  If Spurs land Berahino there's no way that they'll go after Moses, but the Standard suggests that Moses and Crystal Palace winger Yannick Bolasie could be in the frame as a potential consolation prize if the Berahino transfer goes pear-shaped.

And there's an additional problem. As we've pointed out before, there's bad blood between Chelsea and Tottenham that goes way back to before the Luka Modric saga, and so it's not clear whether Chelsea would selling even one of their cast-offs to Spurs.

Moses isn't a bad player, though at 24 he's reaching the point where he's probably as good now as he's ever going to get. It's also not clear why Spurs would be that interested in him. He provides width and pace on the ball, but so does Clinton N'Jie, and Moses hasn't really shown the ability to play up top as a striker either. For £6-8m he's not a bad last-minute bargain signing, but I don't think he really fits a need for Spurs that hasn't already been filled, and for that reason I'd guess that this is probably more #batcountry than anything else.