Tottenham confront Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, the deadly showman who turned them down
The striker found Tottenham’s attitude ‘weird’ when they were keen on buying him in 2012 and his prolific form at Borussia Dortmund suggests he will be a handful for Mauricio Pochettino’s team in their Europa League tie
Paul Doyle
If only
Tottenham Hotspur had been less weird. Then they might not need to worry about trying to contain Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in Dortmund on Thursday. Back in the summer of 2012, the Gabonese striker got the impression that Spurs were keen on buying him from the French club he was at, Saint-Étienne, but he was put off by the Londoners bewildering attitude. “In the end everything became a bit weird – I didn’t really like the way things were done,” Aubameyang later revealed. “If Spurs ever came back in me for me, I’d say no.”
Spurs were not the only ones to get things wrong when it came to Aubameyang, and at least they seemingly identified that he would go on to become one of the world’s top forwards. Milan had buried that expectation by then.
The Italian giants had high hopes for Aubameyang after signing him as a 17-year-old. His two older brothers, Catilina and Willy, were at the club, each having been recommended by same talent scout – their father, Pierre, a former Gabon international and a professional with several French clubs, including Laval, where Pierre-Emerick was born. The youngest of the three brothers was quickly identified as the most gifted. Not only did he have phenomenal speed but he was adroit technically and had a panther’s killer instincts.
He underlined his potential by scoring seven goals in six matches for Milan’s under-19 team in the 2007 Champions Youth Cup. But the bridge from the Milan nursery to the senior team was weak. Like the other players from that under-19 side, such as Matteo Darmian, now of Manchester United, and Alberto Paloschi, now of Swansea City, Aubameyang had to leave to blaze a trail to the top. And what a flaming big mistake by Milan that now looks.
In fairness to the Italians, they initially let him go only on loan and, although he made a big impact as an 18-year-old at Dijon, stints at Lille and Monaco were less impressive. So Milan offloaded him to a fourth French club, Saint-Étienne, on another loan but this time with an option to buy. Aubameyang flourished to the extent that Saint-Étienne snapped him up within a year for £1.25m. And his performances got even better. That is when Spurs showed an interest in the player, before irritating him. Aubameyang stayed at Saint-Étienne another season and, despite playing mainly on the wing, finished the 2012-13 campaign as the second-highest scorer in Ligue 1, behind only Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Newcastle United then tried to lure him from France but Aubameyang’s father advised him to
accept a less lucrative offer from Dortmund instead, reasoning that the exhilarating counterattacking style advocated by the German club’s then-manager, Jürgen Klopp, would be ideally suited to the rapid player and, perhaps, a club that had just finished runners-up in the Champions League final held more appeal than one that had scraped to safety in the Premier League.
Although Aubameyang scored a hat-trick against Augsburg on his Bundesliga debut following his £9.5m transfer, Klopp was not convinced during the first season in Germany that the Gabonese forward would fit in at Dortmund. The club’s marketing director, Carsten Cramer, claimed this week that Klopp once backed out of signing a striker because he deemed his goalscoring celebration too self-centred, and Aubameyang’s declaration upon arriving in Germany that he would score at least 20 league goals in his first campaign left the manager similarly piqued and led to a dressing down for Aubameyang for appearing to rank individual targets above the collective. In the all-action style of Klopp, Aubameyang, used chiefly out wide, had to learn to impress by pressing and defending, too. “The coach does sometimes raise his voice a lot when he’s telling me to pull back and help the defence,” said Aubameyang in 2014. “I’ll know I’m doing better when he stops shouting at me from the touchline.”
The striker finished with 16 goals in all competitions in his first season but was erratic enough to make Klopp contemplate selling him. The player’s second season, and Klopp’s last, at Dortmund was much better even though the side struggled, the manager failing to adapt sufficiently to opponents who did not commit many players to attack. Aubameyang, at least, proved to be a conscientious and popular team player even if he enjoyed extravagant goalscoring celebrations, hairstyles and clothes, as to be expected from a showman who once wore crystal-encrusted boots for a Rhône-Alpes derby.
His form in the second half of last season was particularly devastating and he has ascended to an even higher level this term, setting a Bundesliga record by scoring in each of the first eight league matches of the season. Such excellence made the 26-year-old a deserving
recipient of the 2015 African Player of the Year award and a customised
Yaya Touré tantrum.
Dortmund’s new manager, Thomas Tuchel, has made the team more versatile and creative and Aubameyang, the team’s designated central striker though always adept at raiding from out wide, is showing his full repertoire of skills. He still tears teams apart on counterattacks but Dortmund now play with more structured possession and can regularly prise defensive teams apart with movement and ingenuity.
If Tottenham sit back in an attempt to guard against Aubameyang’s scorching pace, that will give more room for players such as Marco Reus, Shinji Kagawa and Henrikh Mkhitaryan to make mischief – without ruling out being undone by Aubameyang’s elusiveness, power and finishing.
The Gabonese is different from the striker he replaced at Dortmund, Robert Lewandowski, but both are deadly. This season the pair are battling not only for the title of Bundesliga top scorer but also, perhaps, to beat the all-time scoring record in Germany’s top flight, with Aubameyang’s 22 goals in 24 league appearances putting him one goal behind Lewandowski’s tally so far and only four goals behind the amount that Gerd Müller had at this stage in the 1971-72 season on the way to an eventual haul of 40 goals.
The only striker that Spurs wound up signing in the summer of 2012, as it turned out, was Emmanuel Adebayor. They also had a teenage Harry Kane on their books but the club were not yet fully aware of how good he would become and he was about to be farmed out to Norwich City, not having outgrown the hit-and-miss loan stint stage. Kane is flourishing now, of course. But how formidable a team they would be with both him and Aubameyang. As it is, the prospect of them trying to outgun each other is a very appetising aspect of a mouthwatering
Europa League tie.
Tottenham confront Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, the deadly showman who turned them down
