Despite going 3-0 up Spurs managed to let Vitesse back into the game to show the new manager he has his work cut outBuongiorno, Antonio. On Tuesday the official Spurs Twitter account had briefly provoked online mirth by greeting their new head coach in Spanish, before hastily correcting the error and acclaiming him in his native language. Two days later the welcome inside Antonio Conte’s new home was unambiguous but Tottenham’s performance was the equivalent of speaking in tongues. Little about this club’s behaviour of the past two years has made much sense and, in a stadium yearning to be pleased, the task in hand was emphatically pronounced.This was a bizarre night’s football and much in keeping with the state...
Manager made underachievers into champions at Juventus, Chelsea and Inter but demands funds to work his magicAntonio Conte believes he can end a 13-year trophy drought at Tottenham. He has not said so publicly just yet, but this is a man who has described the pursuit of victory as “an obsession, a drug”.When Conte joined Internazionale in 2019, he told the Italian edition of GQ magazine: “I can accept having only a small chance of winning at the start, even just 1%, but there has to be at least that much.” Continue reading...
Conte deal is close and that means club will need to get serious after spending millions going nowhere and demotivating KaneFarewell then, Nuno. It was, let’s face it, almost entirely doomed from the start, to the extent there is pretty much zero point in analysing the gains, the losses and the legacy of Nuno-era Spurs.What memories will Tottenham’s 35th permanent managerial appointment leave in north London? A way of standing. An expression of sympathetic bafflement. The sense, above all, of a head coach who seemed at all times to be encrusted with an ancient sadness, a courtly keeper of the grail in someone else’s castle, whose final words, dispatched by the hand of Daniel Levy, will be “He chose …...
We look at six areas the new manager and hierarchy must address after Nuno’s miserable, short-lived spellIt been nearly two years since Mauricio Pochettino was dismissed after an awful start to the 2019-20 season yet Tottenham have never really moved on from the manager who had led them to the Champions League final a few months earlier. Five of the side that started against Liverpool in Madrid remain at the club – Hugo Lloris, Harry Winks, Dele Alli, Son Heung-min and Harry Kane – but neither José Mourinho nor Nuno Espírito Santo was able to establish their imprint on a squad created by Pochettino and weakened by poor recruitment. The expected appointment of Antonio Conte is a statement of intent...
Exits for Conte and Zidane, together with talk of Pochettino returning to Spurs, epitomise the chaos of modern football At first glance, Antonio Conte leaving a club in dispute with the owners soon after leading them to a league title may not seem particularly significant. This is what he does. His departure from Internazionale follows ostensibly similar departures from Juventus and Chelsea, and he left the Italy national job early as well.But this is about far more than Conte. What is happening at Inter is emblematic of the chaos of modern football and the struggles of an industry that had become a stage for the soft-power machinations of various states and oligarchs and was in need of major financial recalibration...