Modric: Are We REALLY Taking a Stand?

This time last week I was 100% certain that, should a shady looking character with an eastern European accent turn up on Daniel Levy's doorstep with a suitcase full of £50 notes, to the tune of £40m or so, that dear old Luka would be on his way. But you know what, cynical as I am prone to be on such matters, I now think we might actually be making a stand this time!

Now, I know from reading the internet, that many people have a dislike of Harry's flirtations with journalistic types. Not me though, I've always thought he handles them quite well. I'd rather have him answering questions than not, even if sometimes the answers aren't what we want to hear. However, you've got to give it to him, he's played an absolute blinder with this Modric business.

Levy seems to be sticking to his "not-for-any-money" statements, but I think it's natural, given recent history, to be a little distrustful of these. However, if Harry keeps sticking the knife in at every opportunity by reminding the world of what the chairman has promised him, then Levy is going to find it extremely difficult to accept even an enormous offer - it would make him look a right pillock.

I think it would take Modders to kick up a Berbatov-esque stink, hand in a transfer request and for that £40m+ offer to be sitting on the fax machine for there to be a chance of this happening - otherwise how the hell is the chairman going to justify it? Call me naieve, but it's a set of circumstances I'm finding more and more unlikely with every passing day. Yes he's made some ill advised comments recently, but I don't hold that against him. I want to believe he was lead astray by agents, that maybe the interviewer was asking leading questions, that perhaps they were taken out of context. Maybe they weren't, but hopefully he'll have yet another change of tune when he realises he has to stay. If and when that day comes he'll need to say something to pacify the brokenhearted, even if those words are hollow and meaningless.

Come September the 1st, what I would love - even more than a sparkly new £30m striker, would be for Luka Modric to still be a Spurs player. Not because I think we'd be lost without him (I actually think Bale would be a bigger loss) but because it would prove to me, and the rest of the world, that we are not a selling club, that the chairman cares more about the quality of the team than the quality of his bank balance, that he IS a man of his word, that a contract is a contract and should the big guns come sniffing round our next big superstar 12 months from now, that there's a new track record of us NOT selling, no matter how much pressure we get put under.

Now that would be sweet.