Following Thursday night’s defeat at the Etihad, Tottenham Hotspur head coach Antonio Conte made several worrying admissions about his side’s current fortunes.
Indeed, Spurs have now conceded two goals in matches against Chelsea, Leicester, Manchester United, Newcastle Bournemouth, Liverpool, Brentford, Aston Villa, and Arsenal, three to Arsenal and Leeds, and most recently, four against City on Thursday.
This makes it 11 matches out of 20 in the Premier League in which Spurs have conceded multiple times, and the fact that Spurs have only managed to win three of those matches and have lost seven has highlighted the team’s inability to consistently outscore the opposition.
For a man who prides his sides on being built on solid foundations, this is clearly a big, big problem for Conte, who expressed his disappointment at how many individual errors his side are making at the back:
“Yeah but you know we are really disappointed because many times, you have try to justify the goals that we are conceding. For sure this is a period we are not so lucky because we are making many, many mistakes, many mistakes, but football is this”, said Conte to Football.London.
“Sometimes you have a positive performance. Sometimes you are in situations that are not so positive but we have to continue to work and believe in ourselves.”
“As I said in the past, this type of game with more experience you never, never lose. You don’t buy experience, (laughs) well you can buy experience. You can buy it, but you know very well that we have to buy experience step by step, year by year.”
“For this reason when I speak and I tell you we have just started the process to try to become competitive, it means that we are also working under this aspect because a team with experience never concedes four goals.”
When asked about Ivan Perisic’s culpability for three of the hosts’ goals, Conte defended the Croatian, and held his hand up for setting his side up to be more vulnerable, stating that responsibility for goals conceded rests on the shoulders of the whole team, rather than just one player:
“Yeah but I don’t like to go about the single player, but for sure when we concede four goals the first person responsible is the coach. Then the players because I don’t put the mistakes on my players.”
“The mistake first of all is mine because it means that maybe we have to work defensively more to be more compact, like the whole team not only the defenders because when concede a goal it means the whole team not only the defenders, the keeper or a single player.”
Conte then continued on stating that he has seen enough signs from his sides in various spurts across the Arsenal and City matches that his side still had some life in them, and that he will continue to work hard with them to eradicate the defensive mistakes that have been characterising their recent performances:
“The only way that we have to continue to [improve] is to work. I repeat. About the performance also against Arsenal and today against Manchester City, the team is alive. It’s a team that played football with personality and created chances. At the same time if we compare this season and last season we lost a bit of solidity defensively, because we are conceding a lot of goals.
“If you can see the stats about the goals we conceded this season then you can see that we have conceded a lot of goals. We have continued to score goals but the difference is a big difference. We have to try to find more solidity but when you concede a goal the whole team has to defend much better.”
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