Tottenham manager Antonio Conte has told fans how long they will have to wait before they can consider their club genuine title contenders.
The 2-0 win at the City Ground on Sunday lifted the north London club level on 10 points with Manchester City and maintained the five-point gap over Liverpool, despite the Reds’ 9-0 mauling of Bournemouth the day before. Even over the longer term, Tottenham have won more points than any other club since the beginning of March.
That run came on the back of a strong transfer window in January and a summer of heavy investment in the squad to cope with being back in the Champions League for the first time in three years. The only points Spurs have dropped in their opening four games was in a creditable 1-1 draw against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge.
But Sunday’s game was the first of seven in a 21-day period - a run faced by all teams in Europe that will test to the full the strength of the respective squads. So in order to go toe-to-toe with the strongest teams in the Premier League, Conte believes he needs two more chances to complete the “project” he was persuaded to undertake by Daniel Levy last November.
“For sure in this moment, this is the moment this is the period the club can understand if we are really, really complete in the squad or maybe we will do better,” he said. “For sure compared to last season we are more complete as a squad. You know very well though, that to reach other teams I think we need time, patience and at least two transfer markets to reach the same level.
“When you have to play one game every three days, it's normal to make rotations. The player has to be intelligent to understand sometimes to go on bench, to come in, to alternate.”
So far Conte has pretty much started with a fixed starting eleven. But ahead of Wednesday’s trip against West Ham he has promised the newer members of a squad a chance to impress once they have got used to his very specific demands from them.
“With the new players we start to work with them only one month and half,” he explained. “It was the reason for playing the old players in the opening games. At least in the end my choice was good as we got four good results in the first four games!”
