The Italian has form for erupting after matches but latest show of rage points to manager and club being a poor fitOn Saturday night, flushed with the glow of the stunning 3-2 win at Manchester City, Antonio Conte declared that his Tottenham players were the best group he had worked with in terms of attitude. On Tuesday lunchtime, the manager cut a relaxed and contented figure at a media briefing, suggesting that his relentless messaging about mentality, the need to suffer, to live and breathe the job – particularly the lows – were getting through.To those in attendance, it seemed like a turning point in Conte’s near four-month tenure. After the home Premier League losses to Southampton and Wolves, a...
Stirring Spurs comeback at Leicester suggests the Italian could finally be waking a sleepwalking clubIt felt like an end, not a beginning. Internazionale had just gone 2-0 down at home to Torino with half an hour to play and, as the camera panned to the touchline, Antonio Conte bore the expression of a man who had accepted an invitation to dinner only to discover that the menu would be entirely vegan. His side had won three of their opening seven games of the 2020-21 season and were eighth in Serie A. The prospect of mounting any sort of challenge for the scudetto seemed laughably remote.At which point, something stirring and strange happened. Alexis Sánchez pulled one back after a goalmouth...
Since the manager’s arrival players such as Dele Alli and Harry Winks, who looked shot, suddenly look like footballers againThere is, the statswallahs tell us, no such thing as new-manager bounce. Our brains, attuned to spotting patterns, spy a regression to the mean and attribute it to the arrival of a new manager. And probably in the long term that is largely true. But it does seem to ignore the way the replacement of one manager by another can lead players to reset and refocus; a project that had gone stale can, at least temporarily, be refreshed. It also ignores Antonio Conte.Five Premier League games since he took over at Tottenham have yielded 11 points and, while beating Leeds (narrowly),...
The sauce is a source of enduring obsession and furious debate in football – and speaks to our confusion as a nationAs with most wars, nobody can really trace the origins of English football’s enduring obsession with ketchup. Perhaps, like many things, it only really began to mean something when someone threatened to take it away. Battle lines were drawn. Sides were taken. Occasionally hostilities would subside, perhaps for years, before roaring back into life. And yet even seasoned observers of the ketchup wars can scarcely remember a week as bitterly contested as the last.It all began with Antonio Conte’s appointment at Tottenham, when reports began to emerge that the new manager had immediately banned ketchup from the club canteen....
The energetic manager watched his side fail to have a shot on target in his Premier League comeback at Goodison ParkTributes to Nuno Espiríto Santo had been few and far between this week until Antonio Conte found a fitting way to mark his predecessor’s reign. In the Italian’s first Premier League match in charge of Tottenham, just as in the Portuguese’s last, Spurs had no shots on target. Perhaps Nuno nodded on approvingly from afar.The paradox is that 0-0 felt the definitive Nuno scoreline, but his Tottenham never secured a stalemate in his ill-fated reign. Instead, after the breathless excitement of Conte’s bow against Vitesse came a game where, although Giovani Lo Celso struck the post, the only efforts on...