Toby Alderweireld will not travel to Turin on Monday for the first leg of Tottenham’s Champions League last‑16 tie against Juventus on Tuesday night in a move that will raise questions about his future at the London club.
The defender returned from three months out with a hamstring injury in the FA Cup replay win against Newport County last Wednesday. He played the 90 minutes and, having declared himself fit, hoped to be in the lineup for the derby against Arsenal on Saturday.
However, Mauricio Pochettino excluded him from the match-day squad and has now decided to leave him in London to work on his fitness, rather than take him to Italy for what is Tottenham’s biggest game of the season.
Pochettino reacted badly when questioned after the 1-0 win against Arsenal about why he had preferred Davinson Sánchez to Alderweireld in central defence and Spurs fans will hope the Belgian is not too unhappy to be omitted against Juventus and that it will not impact on his contract talks, which have been continuing for more than a year without reaching a breakthrough.
Alderweireld’s £50,000-a-week deal contains a one-year extension option, which is scheduled to activate in the summer of 2019 and would see him contracted until 2020. But it also features a £25m release clause. In the summer of 2019 he would be permitted to leave if a rival club were to pay £25m and complete the transfer at least 14 days before the closure of the window.
Pochettino has shown with several players – chief among them Danny Rose and Erik Lamela – that they must prove their full fitness following long injury lay-offs before they are reintegrated into the squad on a regular basis. Alderweireld did make the point after the Newport game that he and the medical staff had “worked very hard so my muscles are ready for this type of game and to play a lot of games again”.
