Ange Postecoglou is speaking to the media following Tottenham’s 1-1 draw at West Ham United on Sunday in the Premier League.
With Spurs understandably prioritising the second leg of their Europa League semi-final against Bodo/Glimt on Thursday in Norway, Ange Postecoglou made eight changes from the side that won 3-1 at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in midweek. Dominic Solanke and James Maddison missed out with Djed Spence, Archie Gray, Kevin Danso, Ben Davies, Pape Matar Sarr, Dejan Kulusevski, Mathys Tel played a half each on Thursday night so start up front, with Wilson Odobert alongside them.
Wilson Odobert opened the scoring for the changed up Spurs team within 15 minutes. Poor defending from Max Kilman saw him hit the ball against Tel and the Frenchman fired it across the box for Odobert, who took a touch and slid the ball home. Just before the half-hour mark, Tottenham offered up some dreadful defending over their own as Jarrod Bowen was able to waltz down the right of their box, between Spence and Davies, and saunter inside before nutmegging Guglielmo Vicario.
Neither side could find a way through in the second half with the visitors creating more half chances before a late save from Vicario from Bowen.
Our Tottenham correspondent Alasdair Gold is among those putting the questions to Postecoglou after the draw. Scroll down for his latest updates from the press conference at the London Stadium.
17:04Alasdair Gold
Ange Postecoglou applauds the Spurs supporters after the Premier League match between West Ham United and Tottenham Hotspur at the London Stadium
We’ve got a full transcript with everything the Tottenham boss just said, which you can find by heading right here or scroll down for some highlights.
16:49Alasdair Gold
Yeah, again, we’re asking some big jobs of him, playing in the left and then in the centre. He’s constantly learning. A lot of our guys I know will develop into top footballers. They have to go through this process of learning and adapting and understanding the demands of the Premier League and the demands of this football club.
We’ve asked a lot of Matty since he’s come in. He’s pretty much played in every game at some point. He’s taken in the information and he understands the role a little bit better, especially out on the left. Again, important for us. These last few weeks we’ve obviously had Sonny out. We’ve needed him to fill that void and I think he’s done that job well.
16:36Alasdair Gold
Dom’s improving. We obviously left him out today but the medical team are pretty confident he should be right for Thursday.
16:30Alasdair Gold
Yeah proud of the players efforts. It’s not easy making so many changes and it’s going to affect fluency and even the rhythm of the team. But even the individual players haven’t played a lot regularly and it wasn’t just the changes, I mean I only made one sub so a lot of them played a lot more minutes than they have recently. I thought the efforts that they put in today were outstanding.
They were really disciplined and organised. We were disappointed with the goal we conceded but aside from that I thought we nullified their threat as well as we could and they had some decent firepower up front and I still thought we were dangerous going the other way.
So I’m glad the boys get some reward. It’s obviously not a win but get some reward for their efforts because I thought on a difficult day they handled themselves really well.
16:19Alasdair Gold
No, it doesn’t look great, but we’re just waiting for further information. We’ll just wait and see. Hopefully we’ll probably get some clarity tomorrow. It’s fair to say it doesn’t look promising but I’ll just wait and see.
