Ange Postecoglou sends message to Igor Tudor ahead of Liverpool vs Tottenham

Ange Postecoglou has urged Igor Tudor to instil ‘belief’ in his Tottenham players ahead of their Premier League match against Liverpool this Sunday.

Spurs lost their fourth game under Tudor on Tuesday night as they were beaten 5-2 by Atletico Madrid in the first leg of their Champions League last-16 tie.

Diego Simeone’s side were three ahead after just 15 minutes with goalkeeper Antonin Kinsky at fault for two of the goals before he was substituted two minutes later.

Spurs are just a point clear of the relegation zone ahead of their trip to Liverpool this weekend and with Tudor expected to take charge of the game at Anfield, Postecoglou believes the Croatian needs to improve the confidence in his squad.

Asked if he is unsurprised to see Spurs’ current situation, Postecoglou told TNT Sports on Wednesday night: ‘No, I wouldn’t say that.

‘I am still invested in the club because I have an attachment to those players, I worked with them for two years, the last time I had an interaction with the fans was 200,000 of them in the streets of London.

‘It pains me to see it, it definitely looks like the players are fairly lost at the moment. There’s obvious pressure there and it’s a real difficult time.

‘It all kind of manifested himself in what happened last night, it was almost a worst-case scenario, you’re playing a side away from home, Atletico Madrid, who never drop to a performance level [below], they’re always at a really strong level and it was just a horror start for them.’

Asked what the players need now, Postecoglou replied: ‘It’s hard for me to say and me speaking about it tends to skew the argument. I think what’s really important right now is there is no way anybody objectively would say these players are performing at the levels they are capable of. They’ve just got to try to ease the pressure on them somehow.

‘I thought last night was a tremendous opportunity for them, they’ve done really well in the Champions League, they’re on a good side of the draw, Atletico away is tough but you’ve still got to take them back to Tottenham, it just felt like the pressure was there.

‘I’m sure they trained on the pitch the night before but the amount of times they were slipping over, I think that’s still pressure, there’s just a real desperation in everything you do, mentally you’re desperate. Then that manifests itself in a physical way, you’re lunging for things, you’re rushing things.

‘It’s hard for me to comment from the outside but, for me, it’s about instilling some belief, show them the kind of players they are, not that they can be, that they are, what they’ve already shown.’

Asked if the expectation of the fans compared to the financial backing from the club needs to be addressed, Postecoglou said: ‘That’s a broader argument but the reality of it is they’ve got to deal with it now, that’s the most important thing.

‘The football club, I said it a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t behaving to me like a big football club in terms of the kind of players it was attracting.

‘But it is a big football club, we saw that last year, there was a couple of hundred thousand people in London going nuts there and I felt it, how big a club it is.

‘But in the Premier League it’s a slippery slope once you take your eye off the ball with certain things.

‘But all that is not important right now. What’s important now is where they are in the league, they need to maintain their Premier League status which is obviously paramount to what they want to build.

‘Those kind of questions you kind of go, ‘okay, we want some real direction here’. I think it’s pretty clear what Tottenham fans want – they want the team to play a certain way, they want success, every team wants success.’

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