We cannot wait to get Harry and Dele back
HUGO LLORIS admits Tottenham are counting the days until Harry Kane and Dele Alli are fit enough again for first-team action.
The worry is that in the meantime, the rest of the squad has to do much better than they did against Leicester on Sunday if they are to have a hope of making it past Dortmund to the Champions League quarter-finals.
Spurs maintained their 100 per cent winning record in the Premier League since Kane damaged his ankle ligaments in the final minute of the 1-0 defeat against Manchester United with a 3-1 win over Leicester.
But in the same period, they have been knocked out of the Carabao Cup and the FA Cup. And although Kane will hopefully be back – alongside Alli – in the next
league game against Burnley on February 23, that only gives them the away leg to salvage Spurs’ Champions League hopes if they struggle against the Bundesliga leaders.
“We need to deal with a few more games and then hopefully the squad will be full again until the end,” said Lloris. “First of all we need to keep our place in the top four and then maybe more.
“But in terms of performance, we have to do better if we want to dream of big achievements.
“Dortmund play fantastic football. They have so many fantastic players and I’m not surprised they’re top of the league in Germany. The manager [Lucien Favre] is very good with a great idea of football. It’s going to be very, very difficult.
“We need to obviously improve the team performance, and we need the stadium to push, to help us. On some days it’s difficult to deal with Wembley but hopefully in this big game we’ll receive this help from the crowd.
“That said, in terms of mentality, spirit, you cannot ask more. For sure we’ll improve together the team performance, but the mentality is great in the changing room and we showed that again on a difficult day.”
The restrictions on Tottenham’s use of Wembley while their new stadium continues to hit development problems mean the top tier has been shut in recent home games, dampening the atmosphere. Nevertheless, the side come into tomorrow’s game on the back of three successive home wins.
That is thanks in part to Jamie Vardy’s penalty miss on Sunday after he had been brought on from the bench to make the spot-kick his first touch in the game.
“I was surprised his first touch is a penalty,” said Lloris. “I know him a little more than other players. He usually shoots strong and he can go everywhere in the goal.
“But on his first touch? You need intuition and a bit of luck to save it.
“It helped us to keep believing and then we scored the second goal.
“It was a good moment for me and the team because at that moment if we had conceded a goal then the game would have changed completely.”