No really, Erik Lamela is close to a return for Tottenham Hotspur

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Erik Lamela is close to a return for Tottenham Hotspur.

...Lamela. ERIK Lamela. You know, the Argentine guy we signed a few years back? No, the other one. No, we sold him to Roma. He did the rabona thing? ...Yes, he’s still here.

Sky Sports understands that Lamela is... stay with me here... close to a return, and he could feature in the first team as soon as the end of the next international break.

We’ve gotten used to seeing Lamela’s name on the injury report. After all, it’s been nearly a full 12 months since we last saw him play for Spurs. In that time, he’s had a hip injury that turned into two hip injuries. That led him at one point to his old club Roma for a change of scenery and his old physios.

Eventually, however, he went under the knife in April for surgeries on both of his hips. If Sky is correct, he’d be in line to feature for Spurs for the home match against Bournemouth on October 14 at the earliest. That begins a stretch that includes a trip to Real Madrid (which Lamela can’t play in anyway), and Liverpool at Wembley.

There’s a video on the Sky article linked above that shows Lamela working on his own in training, doing lateral movements and some light work with the ball, presumably without pain. It’s the most we’ve seen him move in some time, and it’s nice to see.

We joke about Lamela being “dead” and demand the club show a picture of him holding up today’s The Guardian as proof of life, but in truth this is really excellent news. I’m a big Lamela fan and have been since the beginning, and I would love nothing more than to see him triumphantly return to the pitch for the Liverpool match as an impact substitute... only to watch him put a two-footed tackle on Emre Can and get sent off. Because #narrative.