Tottenham Hotspur are back at home this weekend, facing an FA Cup third-round tie against Portsmouth at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, with kick-off tomorrow at 12:30 PM BST. Read the match preview here, or have your say on the weekend’s cup tie on the Vital Spurs Fan Forum here.
Following the passing of Gianluca Vialli, Tottenham announced that Antonio Conte would not be taking be his press conference this afternoon ahead of tomorrow’s match. Conte had been a teammate of Vialli’s twenty years ago during their time at Juventus, and is grieving the loss of his compatriot and friend.
Instead, Conte’s assistant, Cristian Stellini, stepped in to fill in for Conte as he already has done against Marseille and Nottingham Forest earlier this season.
Firstly, Stellini was quizzed by Football.London about Vialli’s passing and the impact this has had on Conte, to which he responded:
“Antonio in this moment is upset and sad. Every one of us we are close to Vialli’s family and all the people that loved Vialli. He is an important person in Italy and also in England so we are close together to stay with his family and to remember him in the right way.
“For us he was a great player but first of all he was a great man. He teach us a lot of things, not only when he played also when he speak with everyone. If you know him and people that know him can only speak well about this great guy. He was a great leader for Italy.”
Stellini was then quizzed about the resurgence of Bryan Gil. In the absence of Dejan Kulusevski, the young Spaniard has started Spurs’ last two league matches, and put in a much-improved showing against Crystal Palace on Wednesday, contributing to three goals in the 4-0 win.
Stellini expressed his delight with Gil’s progress, which he attributed to his hard efforts in training, and that he was likely to stay at the club this January:
“I think so, yeah. He could and he’s playing very well. We’re so happy because he’s another player we worked a lot with. He has a great, great, great improvement, because he trains every day 110%.
He puts in all his energy every day and this is why he deserved to play a good match to be important in that match, with an assist, and the last pass before an assist. It was a great match for him.”
When asked about the possibility of resting Harry Kane, Stellini duly refuted this notion due to the injuries in Spurs’ forward areas, and seemed to indicate that we would once again see Gil, Kane and Heung-min Son start up front for the third game running:
“Could be an opportunity to give [Kane] a rest but we don’t have many players and the choice is compulsory. So we have to choose the players we have in the front line. We have three strikers at the moment and we’ll use them. It’s an important match in an important cup and if you want to respect it you use the players in their positions. At the moment we have those three.”
Stellini concluded the press-conference by giving an update on the fitness of Kulusevski and Rodrigo Bentancur, saying that tomorrow comes too soon for the pair, but that he hopes to have them back for next week’s North London derby:
“We hope so [for Arsenal], we’re working hard in this way and next week hopefully someone could be available for the match against Arsenal.”