Vincent Janssen could miss the rest of the season with foot injury

Let’s check in on Vincent Janssen. The 23-year old Dutch striker, signed to be the understudy to Harry Kane at Tottenham Hotspur, is out on loan at Fenerbahce this season after Spurs basically punted him to sign a 32-year old Fernando Llorente.

The loan was supposed to be a way for Janssen to put his disappointing 2016-17 season behind him, re-establish his bonafides as a goal scoring striker in a lesser league, and hopefully either put him in the shop window or force Pochettino to give him another look.

It... hasn’t worked out like that. Janssen had two goals and two assists in his first three matches in Turkey, but picked up a foot problem in a match against Bursaspor in December. Now, ESPN is reporting that he might not return to the pitch until mid-April at the earliest, and might even miss the entire rest of the season.

This means that, even if he were to return to Fener before the end of the season, it’s extremely unlikely that the Super Lig club would exercise any option to purchase him at the end of his loan (assuming any such option exists). That means he’s almost certainly coming back to Spurs this summer, and who knows what will happen to him then.

Quite honestly, I’d almost like to see a healthy Vincent get another look in Spurs’ starting 11. No, he never lived up to the promise he showed when he was the Eredivisie’s leading goal scorer while with AZ Alkmaar, but you could never fault his effort, he was a tireless worker, and his hold-up play was pretty good. Watching the extremely handsome corpse of Llorente shuffle around the pitch this season just makes me wonder whether Year 2 of the Thicc Vin experiment might have been a little different than year 1.

I don’t know what this means for Janssen. Maybe he gets another loan. Maybe Spurs sell him for a ham sandwich and a bag of crisps. Either way, this is not the way Janssen’s career was supposed to go and I’m really pretty sad about that.