Another Premiership weekend full of goals and upsets

Tottenham 2/ Liverpool 1
‘Arry is really earning his money at White Hart Lane at the moment - he even persuaded Roman Pavlyuchenko to score a goal in a relatively undeserved victory.

Stoke 2/ Arsenal 1
The Gunners showed that it’s never too early to write off a season with another disappointing result, and a worrying injury to Theo Walcott.

Spoiler bonus: Check out the goalfests at Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge after the jump…

Unsettled Russian had no say in £14m move

Casual racist Sergei Rebrov wasn’t the only one who didn’t want Roman Pavlyuchenko to move to London - according to his mummy Lyubov, the man himself never wanted to leave his home nation:

“Roman was sold by the club,” she said. “He didn’t want to go to England or leave Russia. It was 100 per cent Spartak Moscow’s decision to sell him.”

And reports in Russia suggest that CSKA president Yevgeni Giner has now called the 26-year-old to say he is welcome back at his former club should he wish to leave London.

Confident her son will be back on home soil sooner rather than later, Lyubov said: “I know for sure he’s ready to return to Russia anytime.”

The Telegraph claim that Pavlyuchenko was on the verge of signing for another Russian club (most likely Lokomotiv Moscow) when Spurs and their giant chequebook swooped in, and that he has failed to adapt to life in London.

Is this new found home sickness the reason for his ineffectiveness in the North London derby?

Redknapp’s plans to play the reserves might need altering

While all four still stand a strong chance of progressing, the Premier League’s UEFA Cup hopefuls Aston Villa, Portsmouth, Tottenham and Manchester City all drew interesting group stage opposition.

Harry Redknapp spoke about fielding reserves in some games but may rethink that policy when they clash with overwhelming tournament favourites AC Milan while Aston Villa will be challenged by Martin Jol’s Bundesliga table-toppers Hamburg and Marco van Basten’s Ajax.

Tottenham drew two teams whose star players they raided this summer - Luka Modric’s former side Dinamo Zagreb and Roman Pavlyuchenko’s old club Spartak Moscow while Manchester City will face off against Steve McClaren’s FC Twente in one of the toughest groups.

The good news for the Premier League representatives were that all four avoided Sevilla, Valencia and Standard Liege, who are three of the top four non-English clubs in the betting. The full draw is after the jump.

How to stop your team from scoring goals

Rival fans may have laughed at the fact that Tottenham finished eleventh last season after talking up their top-four credentials but one area where you couldn’t fault them was their knack of scoring goals. Their 66-goal haul was the fifth best in the league last season and even better than Chelsea’s. But Juande Ramos and Gus Poyet clearly weren’t happy with this free-scoring nature and set about enforcing a five-point plan to change things:

1. Get rid of Jermain Defoe
Juande logic: He might have scored 64 goals for the club from starting 110 games, but who needs Jermain Defoe when you’ve got Robbie Keane and Dimitar Berbatov? By selling him to another club with European aspirations, Portsmouth, there’s no way it’ll come back and bite us. If anything, he’ll help drag them down to our level.
The reality: Defoe has scored thirteen goals in eighteen league starts for his new club and scored against Tottenham this weekend.

2. You don’t win anything with left-wingers
Juande logic: We may already have Jamie O’Hara, Didier Zokora, Tom Huddlestone, Jermaine Jenas and Aaron Lennon here already but what we really need is more midfielders who prefer playing in the centre or on the right. Bring in Luka Modric, David Bentley and Giovani dos Santos, it’ll be fun trying to figure out where to play them all. Who cares if Bentley got into the England squad for his performances on the right, let’s sling him on the left or behind the strikers. Luka Modric is known as the exciting, attacking impetus of the Croatia team but there’s no harm playing him as a holding player. Maybe I could throw him on the left too!
The reality: Spurs ended up starting Gilberto, who hasn’t looked too convincing in his preferred position of left-back, as an attacking left-winger against Portsmouth.

3. Sell one of the best strike forces in the Premier League
Juande logic: Robbie and Dimitar scored 46 goals between them last season for our bottom-half side, and the fans voted Robbie as player of the season but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be able to cope without them. They both say they want

This man may never have seen a hard day’s work…

Tottenham’s Roman Pavlyuchenko netted his first goal for the club last night but not before launching a sensational moan about the long, arduous hours that his horrible new employers have forced upon him. 

“I looked at my watch and saw that the training session had gone on for exactly two hours! Then, there is another half an hour in the gym. Two and a half hours. Can you imagine that?

The weights started to get to me, and I stopped and said to the trainer, ‘I can’t do this’. That’s how they work - I’m shocked. I thought it would be a lot easier.”

How this man became a professional sportsman remains unclear.          

Fellow Eastern European emigre warns of ‘dark-skinned people’

Sergio Rebrov, who contributed little except for bad feeling in return for a pay packet at Tottenham, has been kind enough to offer advice to Roman Pavlyuchenko following his arrival in North London. Yet he didn’t dispense useful tips for avoiding traffic on the north circular or let him know that an umbrella might come in handy in Blighty - his comments had a much more discriminatory tinge:

‘I wouldn’t go for a walk on my own around White Hart Lane.

‘A lot of dark skinned people live there. So naturally the crime rate is higher than anywhere else.

‘It’s not nice to be a robbery victim. So I suggest that Roman doesn’t walk but drives around that area.’

Perhaps Rebrov thinks life is much more glamorous in his hometown of Horlivka, where the decline of the mining industry has made it more depressing than listening to a Coldplay album while thinking about how much cheaper petrol was five years ago. As if this wasn’t bad enough,

Profit collected at White Hart Lane’s revolving door

It was revealed today on Sky Sports that just four Premier League teams made a profit over the summer and not one of them was Arsenal.

Blackburn made a net gain thanks to the £15 million they received for David Bentley and West Ham made the biggest profit of anyone after selling half of their first team. It is also being claimed that Chelsea made a profit but The Spoiler’s calculator doesn’t come to that conclusion (surely the £24.2 million spent on Deco and Jose Bosingwa exceeds the £19 million gained on Shaun Wright-Phillips, Steve Sidwell and Tal Ben-Haim?). The other team to have received more than they spent were Tottenham.

Berbatov replacement arrives at the Lane

The first big business on deadline day has seen Tottenham sign Spartak Moscow striker Roman Pavlyuchenko for £14 million, prompting speculation that Dimitar Berbatov’s move to Manchester United is imminent.

But if Berbatov is to go then Spurs will surely need more than just Darren Bent, who struggled in his first season, and the Russian forward, who will probably need a settling in period. Will Spurs be forced into making another purchase today, or settle for what they’ve got?

Let us know what you think with a comment below.

Welcome to the Premier League, Poindexter!

We don’t know how they do things in Russia, but by the looks of things Tottenham’s new striker needs to work on his posing. Even the most wet-behind-the-ears Premier League stars know to adopt a pout or a gang sign when they sniff a photographer, they certainly don’t start gormlessly waving in a shirt made of strobe lighting, like Roman Pavlyuchenko - it’s just so uncool. The Spoiler suggests studying the work of Beckham, Ferdinand, Rooney, Lampard and other hip footballing hunks who know what it takes to smoulder.

Today’s transfer rumours, gossip and damned lies

It’s being reported in today’s Guardian that Chelsea and Real Madrid have agreed a fee of £28.6 million for Robinho. Considering the Brazilian has already stated his desire to join the Blues, we could find ourselves in the unusual situation of actually a seeing a transfer follow weeks of speculation -  eat your heart out Ronaldo, Lampard, Adebayor and Barry sagas!

Shaun Wright-Phillips is spoilt for choice
It looks like Chelsea’s unloved winger is ready to follow the Robinho example, too. For a long time, Portsmouth were favourites to sign Wright-Phillips but then they realised they had no money, so it’s either Everton or Manchester City who will welcome SWP into their family.

The Spoiler Truth-o-meter: Both represent good career moves but his glorious Manchester City past may see him lean towards them

Roman Pavlyuchenko to Spurs
It’s no secret that Spurs are in