Ange Postecoglou held his latest press conference on Friday afternoon as Tottenham Hotspur prepare to travel to Brentford in the Premier League and here’s every a full transcript with every word he said.
Tottenham secured a 3-0 win on Thursday night against Elfsborg in the Europa League, with first goals for the club for academy products Dane Scarlett, Damola Ajayi and Mikey Moore, to ensure Spurs ended up fourth in the competition table and they now take their place in the round of 16 in March.
Postecoglou and the players have no time to pause and take a breath though as they now travel to Brentford this weekend looking to get their Premier League season back on track after a dreadful run with just one win in 11 matches.
In his press conference Postecoglou was asked about Radu Dragusin’s knee injury and transfer updates, as the north London club continue to battle with others for 19-year-old Bayern Munich winger Mathys Tel as well as looking at other prospective new signings.
Our Spurs correspondent Alasdair Gold was among those putting the questions to Postecoglou. Here’s a full transcript from the press conference at Hotspur Way.
What’s the latest Radu Dragusin update?
Still not [sure]. We’ll let it settle down and obviously get some information over the weekend. Not available for the weekend at the moment and we just have to see the extent of it.
Could it be a long term issue?
Hard to tell. It’s a knee, so we’ve got to let it settle down. There’s always concern when there’s a knee injury but we don’t know the extent.
There’s three days left of the window, are you excited?
I was looking at the date, I was hoping it would be all over today but apparently it’s extended ’til Monday. So we’ll see what happens over the next couple of days.
What have you heard about Mathys Tel?
Not a great deal. I usually find out at the tail end of this stuff what’s going on. Obviously we’re exploring some opportunities in the last couple of days of the window to see what we can do. But nothing’s across my desk yet.
Will you tell us when it is?
I reckon the way the world works you’ll probably find out before me, mate. So we’ll see.
With the Michael Oliver online abuse. what are your thoughts and what can we do about it?
What can we do about it? Well there’s some pretty easy things to do about it, which is punish the people who are the perpetrators of it and make examples of them. Unfortunately the anonymity of the technology world nowadays means people can hide and allow themselves bravado they would never have if they put their face and name to something, so they’re cowards to start with. But if found out, name them, shame them, put them out there and we’ll see if anyone else follows suit after that.
But there should be no tolerance for anybody, whether it’s a referee, player or anybody else. I think it’s been out of hand for a long while now and we’re too accepting of it as part of society. We’d never have accepted it before social media if someone said something like that and we knew who said or wrote it. There were laws that made it almost impossible to do. But now, because they hide behind this cloak of anonymity, the cowards have a voice.
Is Micky van de Ven fit enough to play a full 90 minutes?
We’ll see. Probably not 90, only because of the short turnaround. He felt really good last night. Great to have him out there. You know he’s a good player but you don’t realise how much of a good player he is until he…there’s a lot of our players who have been missing for quite a while. It’s not just the impact they have individually but the impact they have on the group. The whole group got a lift from seeing him out there last night. He got through it really well, felt really good afterwards, so the idea is to get him some game-time, build up his minutes over the weekend.
Can academy stars like Ajayi and Scarlett be involved from the start against Brentford?
I don’t know about the start but we have had youngsters starting for quite a while now 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds so that doesn’t change. Certainly with the guys last night, in terms of team news, the only one who really becomes available from last night is Djed (Spence). He should be okay for the weekend. Sergio Reguilon has a chance as well. But the rest won’t be able to come back and obviously if we’ve lost Radu it means the young guys who were involved last night will be involved again.
How do you view the challenge of Brentford?
Brentford at their place is a tough nut for every club. Their home form is really good. Our league form is not great and we need to address that. So irrespective of who we are playing this weekend, especially after last weekend’s performance and result, we need to address that. Our season still has plenty of opportunity and potential for success this year but we need to address our league form. While it’s a tough place to go to, we need to go there and make sure we give a good account of ourselves.
Which injured players are the next cabs off the rank?
They are all kind of around the same time, around 10 days time. We are talking about Vicario, Johnson, Destiny, Wilson, Timo. Romero is a bit of a tricky one. We are not really sure yet. There is still some work he needs to do. Certainly all those guys, I think of the long term ones apart from Dom (Solanke) who is probably a week behind them, the rest of them are slated to be back in the next week to 10 days to be available.
What’s the exact situation with Romero, is it a setback?
It’s just a slower healer with him and it is one we are looking at on a week to week basis. Again, he has been out for quite a while. Like with all the other long term ones, we are just taking our time.
Will you look at short-term cover at centre-back if Dragusin is out long-term?
I think depending on the extent of Radu’s (injury), it might be an area we need to look at and certainly this weekend (we are) exploring some options.
You looked to be repeatedly telling Lucas Bergvall to calm down in the first half, were the Swedish fans getting into his head a bit because they were taunting him a bit?
I don’t speak Swedish mate so I’ve got no idea. No, he’s 18-years-old. He’s such an exciting player but I think like any young player he made a couple of mistakes early on and he just wanted to atone for those mistakes. He dug himself into a bit of a hole where he was trying to do things a little bit too complicated and the message was just to get him to settle down, keep his game simple and get his rhythm back.
The thing is with Lucas is that even when he’s making those mistakes, he works awfully hard and never stops running. It’s such a great asset for him
Probably in his mind it was a big game for him, of course it was, but playing against a club from his own country, but that’s the reason we’re exposing these guys. The more experiences like that the better and they’ll be able to deal with them further down the track.
With the injuries, can you see the light at the end of the tunnel now?
I hope so mate, but every time I’ve seen the light at the end of the tunnel it’s usually been an oncoming train. We seem to be losing players as we get them back..
If we can get, even if not all back together, you know, even two or three of them might, so we saw the impact Micky had, and I didn’t include Madders in that as well, so Madders is probably around the same time. So if we get two or three of those back in sort of 10 days’ time and then maybe a few days later, a couple of the others. I mean that’s why I’m trying to manage the minutes of the guys we have available because we don’t want to lose anyone else, but again, best laid plans, you know, we obviously tried to shield Radu last night, because he had played a lot of football, in the first half and he comes on and you know he gets injured.
So again you can’t plan for these things, so hopefully, I mean we’ve got a big week coming up for sure starting Sunday, .We’re going to have to do it with this sort of core group of players, so we’ve just got to be careful about how we go about it.
As we approached the last couple of days of the transfer window and going into the next six to 12 months, what are the next steps for the Spurs to go forward now do you think?
I don’t think we can look too far ahead right now because there’s there’s a couple of immediate objectives that we need to really tackle. One is our league form, we need to rectify that and improve that and find some consistency in that, and then there’s some fairly big opportunities over the next sort of month or so for us to make an impact in a couple of tournaments, starting Thursday night.
So I think that’s where my head’s at at the moment. Beyond that, like I said, I really believe there’s been some growth in the guys we we’ve got here, which I think we’ll see the benefits of further down the track. But right now the main objective and criteria is to look at what’s in front of us.
What have you made of the job Thomas Frank has done with Brentford in the Premier League?
People forget, it wasn’t that long ago that to have Brentford as a Premier League outfit would have been unheard of, but I think the whole club deserves credit, definitely Thomas, but the whole club, you know, it’s a well-run club, they’ve got a clear identity, they’ve got a clear idea about what they want to do and who they are and the way they do their business.
I think there’s a few clubs now who are understanding that that’s the way forward. You set yourself up with a plan, you find the individuals that will drive that and you stay the course.
Brentford away was your first game around 17 or 18 months ago…
17 or 18 years ago I think, mate.
A lot has changed, does it feel like a long time ago?
Yeah it does and I guess the average tenure of a manager these days isn’t that long anyway so if you manage to stay in a job for a while, yeah it does feel like a lot time ago when I think about everything that has transpired since then. I think it was the day after we sold Harry to Bayern and it was a fair challenge before us. I think we scored, Cuti got concussed and we had to take him off. It should have been a sign for me of things to come and that it was never going to be smooth sailing, but enjoyable all the same.
The squad has gone through a big turnover since and got some really exciting young players, but 18 months down the line, would you have hoped for the squad to be more ready to handle four competitions?
Yeah, look I guess people looking at it from the outside will say yeah that has probably been the case, but we’ve just had to deal with a real extreme situation, which unfortunately once we got hit with what we got hit with is then very hard to rectify on the run. We obviously got some significant injuries early on, which hampered our progress and then we had to rely on a small group of players to get us through and that then burdened them.
It has kind of been this vicious cycle of us not being able to get out of the cycle we were in, so when you sit here now and say maybe we could have had a more robust squad, but I think the volume of games that clubs are playing, we’ve been into an extreme situation but a lot of clubs are facing similarities in Europe. If you are in Europe these days, particularly Champions League or Europa, it is tough to maintain a competitiveness with squad numbers and level of performance. Obviously we’ve done well in the Carabao Cup, which has added even more games to us and all these things have added a burden, but there has been some lessons learned for sure.
Lucas and Archie were veterans in terms of experience at the end last night. They’ve played so much and stepped up, are you wary of the need to maybe take them out when you do get players back?
Yeah, look I think that is something I am mindful of because depending on our progress there is still a fair bit of football to play for us. In Europe certainly there are still a number of games and potentially at least one game in the Carabao Cup, but hopefully two. We’re still in the FA Cup and apart from the league there is still a fair bit of football. I think it would do Archie and Lucas some good to freshen them up a little bit. Mikey (Moore) is the other end of the scale because he obviously missed a couple of months, but you can see he is playing with a bit of energy now. At the same time, if their performances keep stacking up and they warrant to play, we’ll keep selecting them because they’ve been really important for us.
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