Former Sky Sports pundit in extraordinary anti-Tottenham rant.
Tottenham are a ‘team going nowhere’ and Gareth Bale should quit White Hart Lane ‘as soon as he can’, according to former Manchester City and QPR star Rodney Marsh.
Spurs currently sit third in the Premier League and are unbeaten since 9 December.
Last weekend’s 2-1 win over Arsenal left Spurs seven points clear of their arch-rivals, who sit fifth, and the Lilywhites look likely to secure qualification for next season’s Champions League.
The north London outfit are also closing in on a place in the Europa League quarter-finals after a fine 3-0 home win over Inter Milan in the first-leg of their last 16 clash.
But Marsh believes Spurs’ limited spending power means means they are far from being one of England’s top clubs and the ex-Sky Sports pundit wants Bale to seek an exit.
“When you look at teams like Manchester United, Man City and Chelsea at the start of the season, you say, ‘I wonder who they are going to sign’?,” Marsh told talkSPORT.
“When you talk about teams like Spurs, you say, ‘who can they hang on to? Can they hang on to [Luka] Modric, can they hang on to [Dimitar] Berbatov’? Now everyone is saying, ‘can they hang on to Bale’?
“Spurs become a top team when everybody is saying, ‘I wonder who Spurs are going to get’ and it’s a real, proper top player. That’s when you can say they have arrived.
“If Spurs go out and sign a really top world-class footballer like Man City have done in [Carlos] Tevez and [Sergio] Aguero, that’s when I will believe Spurs are anything other than a team that are going nowhere. They are doing fantastic, by the way, but they are not there.”
Bale has scored 11 goals in his last nine games for club and country and his performances have seen him compared to Ballon d’Or winners Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
The 23-year-old has been linked with moves to Real Madrid and Barcelona and Marsh says Bale will only become one of the biggest names in world football when he joins one of the La Liga duo.
“If I was advising Gareth Bale, I would tell him to get out of Spurs as soon as he can, because it has run its course.
“A couple of years ago when he scored that hat-trick against Inter Milan away from home he was stunningly brilliant. There have been about ten games this season where he has been stunningly brilliant. But it hasn’t been over a long period of games. It has been hit there, miss there, hit there.
“He has been on a roll recently, for about three months, where he has been nothing but outstanding. So my point to Bale would be, before you go into a little slump and don’t score for nine games and everyone says, ‘well Bale is not the player we all thought he was’, get out, get to Barcelona or Real Madrid and become one of the biggest players in the world.”
Bale scores his fiftieth goal for Spurs in Thursday night’s win over Inter but the Wales international also picked up his fourth caution of the season for simulation and he will miss the second-leg in six days at the San Siro.
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