The main Belgian sport newspapers have been following Toby Alderweireld’s Tottenham situation very closely indeed, with them all throwing in their own angles over the past month or so.
PSG links have been most heavily pushed in Belgium, with the French press not really paying much attention yet, and the idea that Mauricio Pochettino was keeping the defender out due to contract issues has also been a favourite theme.
HLN are one of the newspapers to claim that, also stating last month that Tottenham were already looking ahead to a big summer transfer, and Alderweireld was considered likely to be leaving.
On Thursday they have an interesting snippet which claims that, after the Brighton match, Tottenham’s press officer prevented Alderweireld from speaking to the general media, only allowing a chat with Spurs TV.
It’s obviously been taken as some sort of sign, with HLN’s article saying: ‘Only to Spurs TV, the official channel where players usually talk in clichés and everything is filtered, was he allowed to talk.’HLN again pushed the line that Alderweireld is out of the team for off the pitch reasons: ‘Because he refuses to sign, Pochettino has downgraded him in the pecking order.’
The Belgian newspaper also tell their readers the defender is ‘not expected’ to be in the line-up to face Manchester United at the weekend.
There’s every chance Alderweireld himself decided not to speak to the media. At the start of the international break HLN had predicted the defender would talk about his Tottenham situation, calming things down (which they suggested would be fake), but the interview didn’t come.
Perhaps there’s some frustration in Belgium that Alderweireld isn’t providing the updates they’d expect. Given Tottenham have already been made the pantomime villain of this particular story, for a Belgian audience, it’s easier to blame them for a lack of Alderweireld words than it is to blame the defender.
