How long do you wait for promise? How many seasons can you give potential before accepting that it has curdled into unfulfillment? How many years of not quite hitting the heights before doubts begin to be expressed about just how much promise there really was in the first place? Timo Werner is 27 now. He’s an experienced player. He should be somewhere near his peak. And yet still the question remains: just how good is he?
This loan spell at Tottenham feels critical. Succeed over the next five months and there is still time for Werner to emerge as a Premier League player of serious repute. Fail and his chances of a career in England are probably done, his hopes of a return to the Germany squad diminishing.
Werner is linked inevitably in the minds of Premier League fans with his compatriot Kai Havertz, having joined Chelsea at the same time, and having been similarly dismissed by Harry Redknapp as he defended his nephew Frank Lampard during his first stint as manager at Stamford Bridge. They represent, though, opposing poles of ineffectiveness: Havertz all languid elegance that never seems fully engaged in the game; Werner all dogged energy that proves just as fruitless but in a more frenetic way.
His career is mystifying. This is his 11th season as a professional. In six of the previous 10 he has failed to reach 10 goals for a season but in 2019-20, his final season at RB Leipzig before his move to the Premier League, he banged in 28 in 33 starts.
The question, then, was whether that was a freak, a golden season inspired by the gegenpressing of Julian Nagelsmann or some kind of Mephistophelean pact, or whether that is a level he can reach again.
The idea that there might be some sort of Bundelsiga tariff, that goals somehow come cheaper in Germany than the Premier League, is an appealing one, but there has been no flood of goals since Werner returned to Leipzig. On the contrary, he managed just two starts under Marco Rose this season.
Yet there was always a sense at Chelsea that there was a player in there somewhere. His movement and energy were good and he was often very close to scoring: he scored just 10 times in the league in his two seasons there, but hit the woodwork eight times. It was his decoy run that brought the winner for the Havertz in the 2021 Champions League final. He seemed habitually luckless with marginal VAR offside decisions, like the inverse of those finger spinners suddenly getting lbw decisions because DRS has proved the stumps to be shorter and wider than had been imagined.
From that point of view, Tottenham’s decision to sign Werner on loan as a short-term option to cover Son Heung-min while he is at the Asian Cup and James Maddison while he recovers from injury made sense. He prefers the sort of high-octane pressing game favoured by Ange Postecoglou, is not going to be daunted by the Premier League and, given he wasn’t getting into the Leipzig side, needs football if there is to be any chance of Nagelsmann naming him in the Germany squad for Euro 2024.
But at the same time, Werner did miss a lot of chances at Chelsea. And at Old Trafford on his Tottenham debut, that pattern continued. There was the early header that was probably heading just wide even before Jonny Evans’s intervention – credit for his movement and a decent effort from a cross that was a fraction too high for him. But then there was an awful slice having cut inside menacingly, the shot ending up so high and wide it was closer to hitting the scoreboard at the Stretford End than the target. And then, just before the break, he was released again, had Diogo Dalot isolated, cut on to his left foot and, in a moment that Chelsea fans will feel they had seen 100 times before, dragged his effort unconvincingly wide of the far post.
Perhaps that was why Dalot sat off him in the first minute of the second half; waiting for Werner to fluff his shot has rarely been the wrong option before. This time, though, Werner had support and rolled the ball square for Rodrigo Bentancur to score – his 10th Premier League assist, a statistic that itself suggests how much more effective he was for Chelsea than for which he is often given credit.
But is that enough? Five shots and an assist seem a remarkable start, but only one of those shots really troubled the goal. And so when he left the pitch after 80 minutes, replaced by Bryan Gil, all those questions remained unanswered. He had worked tirelessly, got himself into good positions, set up a goal and yet been frustratingly wasteful. Three and a half years after his Premier League debut, we are still waiting for Timo.
