Tottenham Hotspur manager Ange Postecoglou admits he is “immensely” hurt by his team’s poor form, following a frustrating 2-2 home draw with Wolves to close out 2024.
Substitute Jorgen Strand Larsen scored an 87th-minute equalizer, leaving Spurs with only one league win in December. This result ensures they will be lower in the table at the turn of the year than in any season since 2008-09.
Postecoglou acknowledges that both he and his players are deeply affected by the situation, and he believes the team deserved more for their efforts against Vitor Pereira’s side.
“The players are obviously hurting, they want to turn this around and it’s not for the want of trying,” Postecoglou said afterwards”.
“Of course I am [hurting too],” the head coach added. “It hurts me because I’m responsible, ultimately. I’m the person in charge. So of course it hurts”.
“When I see how hard they are trying, it hurts even more because you want them to get a reward and I think today they deserved a reward for their efforts even though they were dipping into their reserves of energy, which I don’t even know where they got from. I wanted them to get a reward for their efforts”.
“So of course it hurts. It hurts immensely. At the same time it’s my responsibility for where we’re at right now and it’s my responsibility to try to get us out of it.”
Spurs moved up to 11th in the table, yet they are 11 points behind fourth-placed Chelsea and nine adrift of fifth-placed Manchester City. Despite the gap, Postecoglou remains optimistic about turning their league campaign around.
“I think so,” he said. “Because it’s still fairly tight. I just feel that at some point we’ll get a relatively healthy squad and when we do that we’ll be able to perform at a high level consistently and we’ve already shown this year we can beat anyone”.
“There’s a chance there you can go on a run. But at the moment that’s secondary to the first bit, we have to try to get some support for the players – both mentally and physically and in terms of numbers to give them the opportunity to play at their best.”
Wolves took an early lead through a fine strike by Hee-chan Hwang, but Rodrigo Bentancur leveled the score with a header. Brennan Johnson put Spurs ahead in first-half stoppage time, shortly after Jose Sa denied Heung-min Son’s penalty.
“The players are very disappointed but it’s not through the want of trying,” Postecoglou said. “I can see how hard they’re trying and if we were at our sharpest today, we would have got that third goal and maybe a fourth”.
“I mean we were inches away at times from getting the goal we needed and I just think it’s just we’re just lacking a little bit of that dynamic movement that we need because, you know, you look at those players, Dom [Solanke] and I don’t know where Deki [Dejan Kulusevski] gets the energy from and even Brennan and even Sonny and a lot of these guys, they’re finding some form of energy to still be out there trying, but you know we’re certainly not as sharp as we can be.”
