Spurs to use Bale as building block

Tottenham 2 Newcastle 1

Afterwards, given the opportunity to reflect on his player’s performance, Andre Villas-Boas illustrated how Bale can be the catalyst for a more fundamental realignment of the club’s long-term ambitions.

With the memory of Bale’s astonishing, vibrant contribution in the final 15 minutes of the game — he had been good

beforehand, but simply mesmerising in the latter stages of the game — still fresh in the mind, immediate thoughts turned to the inevitability of a summer-long saga of bluff and counter-bluff between Europe’s top teams as they attempt to prise Bale from Tottenham’s grasp.

For Villas-Boas, though, Bale’s continuing development and emergence as a world-class talent has the potential to shift the transfer market in another direction and act as a lure to those players who may otherwise have seen Tottenham as a B-list kind of club.

“I think he can attract players to the club,” said the Spurs manager. “People also move when they find other players are also able to promote their own potential. I think this is key to the other players too. One player can be great in individual moments of brilliance and can help other players have those moments too. Gareth has that effect.”

With two top-four finishes in the past three seasons, Spurs are on the cusp of establishing themselves among the Premier League elite, particularly with Arsenal and Chelsea currently treading water and Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool side at a very early stage of development. And while it takes more than one outstanding team, let alone one outstanding player, to help a club make a lasting shift up the pecking order, Bale’s presence provides a significant building block.

Certainly Lewis Holtby, signed from Schalke 04 last month and already looking a very shrewd acquisition, not least because of the way he linked with Bale, believes the Welshman provides an extra dimension. “He’s a world-class player, one of the best in the world I think,” Holtby said. “What he’s producing week in week out is fantastic but you have to give the credit to the others.

“Of course he scores goals, he is perfect for us but you have every player in the team who works hard for the club. You see Hugo [Lloris], how he saved the chance. The defenders put their bodies into every shot. Everyone is working really hard, that’s the key of the game. To have a player like Bale makes the difference.”

That was certainly the case at White Hart Lane. Bale’s early free-kick was cancelled out by Yoan Gouffran’s deflected shot midway through the first half and Newcastle, unrecognisable from the side that had lost its way before the January arrival of six new faces, five of them French, looked capable of claiming a point.

Then came a loss of concentration at the back and Bale was in for the second before embarking on a late rampage that should have brought more goals.

As frustrating as that was for the visitors they could have no complaints. They were also relieved to learn Gouffran had not suffered the broken leg first feared when was stretchered from the pitch, drawing heavily on oxygen.

The pieced-together team is melding quickly with give and take from old and new members of the squad. “It was my birthday on January 23 and got French CDs as a birthday present from the family,” said Steven Taylor, the centre-back. “I normally just get black socks — but they thought these would be more useful now that there are so many French lads.

“When there is a bit of banter we want to get the French boys involved and settled in. Before the Aston Villa game as an initiation they had to sing in front of the boys and that was a good thing to get them started — broken in. We didn’t have a clue what they were singing, by the way, it was in French. But I could see from their smiles they must have been good.”