Most of the Tottenham Hotspur squad has rightfuly been under a microscope this season with Spurs just one point above the Premier League drop zone right now, but perhaps no player's stock has fallen further than goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario.
Once regarded as one of the better keepers in the English top flight after having been a top, top keeper in Serie A before that, Vicario is now seen as one of the worst in the league. His save percentage fell to the worst mark among all current Premier League starters, and even that did not come close to fully reflecting how dismal he was in terms of all the basic errors he was making in goal when facing crosses or playing it out from the back.
Vicario was an untenable disaster at his worst, and he only has the Atletico Madrid's notoriously slippery pitch to thank for embarrassing Antonin Kinsky, who could have easily made Vic look even worse if he received a chance.
Guglielmo Vicario was suffering for a while
But when Tottenham fans learned that Guglielmo Vicario was playing through a hernia and severely limited, playing through the pain to help the team, they had to feel at least somewhat bad for all the Vicario criticism. Old clips of him grimacing in pain while being unable to properly launch kicks forward surfaced, and it is obvious, looking back, that at least part of Vic's poor performances - but probably not all, given the sheer magnitude of specifically mental errors - were due to the hernia.
According to Football.London's Alasdair Gold, one of Vicario's goalkeeping coaches revealed that the player had indeed been struggling for months with the hernia. And Tottenham Hotspur fans hearing about just how long Vicario has been struggling through this are wondering why on earth the club and the player just didn't get the surgery sooner.
Sure, Kinsky was slipping and sliding a lot against Atleti, but he was never that bad in the other games to make anyone think he could not be an upgrade on a clearly injured and hampered player. Again, Vicario was statistically speaking, THE worst goalkeeper in the Premier League and extremely error prone, with Spurs now in the relegation fight. Kinsky could not have been worse than an injured Vicario.
While what Vicario did was admirable, it was also foolish for Spurs to allow him to keep playing, especially if they knew he could have performed a lot better after getting surgery done sooner. It's a case of hubris and poor decision making, the kind that has plagued Spurs for years and may finally doom them to the Championship. Why didn't Spurs just shut him down sooner? Why didn't they encourage him to just have the surgery instead of performing poorly? It makes no sense to let him "play the hero" like that when he didn't need to.