For Antonio Conte, defeat has always felt like a mortal insult, a scar on the soul, and it is not difficult to imagine how low he was after Tottenham’s shambolic home loss to Wolves on the Sunday before last. It came hard on the heels of the defeat against Southampton – also at home, also deserved – and nobody was particularly optimistic about their chances when they went to the Premier League leaders, Manchester City, on Saturday.
Cue the Harry Kane-inspired 3-2 win, one of the shock results of the season and, certainly, the statement performance of Conte’s near four-month tenure. Kane scored two, including a 95th-minute winner, and might have had four but he helped to set the tone with his work rate, always “linking with the team defensively”, to borrow Conte’s words.
Conte’s players ran their socks off, they put their bodies on the line, they followed his tactical instructions to the letter. There was even a bit of nastiness, at times. And, for Conte, it added up to evidence that his messages about mentality were getting through.
It is doubtful that anyone at Spurs will ever torture themselves quite so much as the manager after a bad result. But Conte suggested that those against Wolves and Southampton had stirred something in his players; something he wants to see again and again, picking up at Burnley on Wednesday night.
“It’s very simple,” Conte said . “We lost two games against Wolverhampton and Southampton and then we won against City. The first step to change your mentality is, after a loss, you have to understand that you lost a game and, for sure, the atmosphere has to be different. When you lose a game and you come back to the training ground and, OK, it’s the same like yesterday … but yesterday you lost!
“If we start to change the atmosphere, to understand that atmosphere also depends on the win or the defeat … because when you know that the atmosphere is different, you try during the game to do everything to have a good atmosphere the day after or two days after.”
Conte brought up Bayern Munich, who suffered a shock Bundesliga defeat at Bochum on the Saturday before last and then drew at Red Bull Salzburg in the Champions League. They got back on track with a home win over Greuther Fürth on Sunday.
“I read that the Bayern players were very, very angry,” Conte said. “They said: ‘No. We can’t continue this way. We have to be strong.’ You show you are feeling that. The situation has to be different when you win and lose. Otherwise, if the atmosphere is always the same, always joy and celebrations, it will be very difficult to install the right mentality. You have to suffer. If you don’t suffer, it means that you don’t want to improve your winning mentality.”
Conte can count on Kane and his goalkeeper and captain, Hugo Lloris, even if the latter made goal-costing errors against Wolves and City. “I continue to say that it’s important to match experienced players with young players because when you have players with experience, the young players learn a lot,” Conte said. “We are lucky to have these two players, who are top, top players.”
Conte mentioned a somewhat injudicious line from his friend Pantaleo Corvino, the veteran sporting director at Lecce. “He says that you can make a mistake about your wife but not about your striker and goalkeeper – for me, that is the best quote I understand in football,” Conte said. And when asked whether the knock that Kane took to his back at City might rule him out of the Burnley game, Conte replied: “No. He had a hit in his back but he has to play. If he has one leg, he has to play.”
Conte went on to say that he was only joking and he would never force an injured player to play, but, with Kane his only specialist, senior centre-forward, his tongue might not have been entirely in his cheek.
It was striking, though, to see Conte in such upbeat mood. He has done plenty of complaining during his time at Spurs, especially about the level of his squad, stoking lots of creative tensions. Post-City, has something changed in him? In the aftermath of victory, Conte had described the group as the best he had coached.
“I’m finding a lot of availability of these players to work, to improve, to have more football knowledge,” Conte said. “They are very open. And it’s not certain that this type of situation can happen in every team. Sometimes you find players who want to stay in their comfortable zone, saying: ‘OK, I had my career and I don’t want to prove [anything] and follow you.’
“I come to the training ground with a smile because I know I stay two to three hours with people who want to work seriously and follow a path to improve the level and try to go another step.”
