It was not until the early stages of this season that the sale of Jermain Defoe to Portsmouth started to look less like a prudent piece of business and more like a disaster for Tottenham Hotspur. When the 26-year-old left almost a year ago Tottenham had a surfeit of strikers; suddenly, after the departures of Robbie Keane and Dimitar Berbatov, they had too few. From embarrassment of riches to just embarrassment.

There is logic to Defoe’s return: Harry Redknapp, who first signed the striker as a teenager for West Ham United from Charlton Athletic, has always admired the player and the feeling is mutual. The usual “never go back” warnings do not apply here.

The biggest winner is Defoe himself. Welcomed by Tottenham’s fans last night, he leaves the South Coast with a record of 17 goals in 36 appearances for Portsmouth. He bids farewell to a club who look likely to slide down the table and says hello to one expected to climb the league and have a realistic chance of winning a trophy. His weekly wage improved from £35,000 to about £50,000 when he joined Portsmouth and he is likely to have negotiated another rise for his return to White Hart Lane — not forgetting any signing-on fees he may have received.

Last season at Tottenham, with no prospect of regular starts given the excellence of the Keane and Berbatov partnership and his England future imperilled, Defoe moved to Portsmouth in a deal finalised so close to the end of the transfer window that it was initially done as a loan. Portsmouth were frantically trying to raise the money to buy Defoe by selling Benjani Mwaruwari to Manchester City.

While the fans at White Hart Lane continued to pay tribute to their departed striker by chanting his name, Defoe scored eight goals in his first seven games for Portsmouth. And he started for England against the United States and Trinidad & Tobago at the end of the season.

Defoe is ineligible for his new side’s European campaign after appearing in the Uefa Cup for Portsmouth, but is available for the second leg of the Carling Cup semi-final against Burnley two weeks today and for the FA Cup fourth-round match against Manchester United at Old Trafford on January 24.

Tottenham’s chagrin at paying about £15 million for a player they sold for about £9 million less than a year ago is mitigated by the structure of the deal. The North London club’s cash outlay on Defoe will be far less than the headline figure because Portsmouth still owed them money for Defoe and Younès Kaboul. Portsmouth, meanwhile, offload a player whose enthusiasm for the club had dimmed and cash in on a saleable asset.

And with Tottenham in relegation peril, the potential cost of not doing the deal was simply too high for Redknapp.