LLORIS: WINNING UGLY MAKES US EVEN STRONGER
HUGO LLORIS reckons he and his Tottenham team-mates are well on the way to becoming the bad boys Jose Mourinho wants them to be. A recurring theme of Amazon Prime’s ‘All Or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur’ documentary is Mourinho’s insistence that his side is too nice.
That they need to behave more like you-know-whats if they want to challenge for – and win – the biggest prizes.
He has been hammering the message home for some time now and as his men prepare to take on Everton in their season-opener today, Lloris is adamant it is definitely getting through.
The Spurs captain, the last man to lift the World Cup, said: “You know, it doesn’t mean outside the field you are not a good guy.
“You can be a good guy outside the field but when you are on the field you have to do everything.
“And everything means also to have this personality to be naughty, to get the winning taste.
“This has to be the way to go.
“When I look at the games after the restart there were some good signals.
“I could see some improvements, especially in the way our manager wants us to play.
“Last season was a tough season for everyone, maybe especially for the manager because he arrived in the middle of the season in a bad period, especially for confidence.
“So now it’s a new season with four weeks of work together, more or less, and it’s very important to have a good start to see the progress in our games, performance and results.”
Does that mean Tottenham will lay down a marker of their new, nastier persona against Everton today?
Lloris added: “Yes, but it’s not enough on its own. You need to plan, you need talent, team spirit, you need a lot of things to become the winning team.
“At some points at some moments in some games, it’s true, you have to know how to win in the ugly way.
“You don’t need to play the fantastic game to win.
“And that kind of game that you win, it makes you even stronger, because you know on a bad day, you know how to win.”
Spurs will no doubt have to find ways to win ugly in what promises to be a hectic first month of the season.
Arsenal’s FA Cup final success against Chelsea in August meant Spurs dropped into the Europa League qualifying rounds, which means they face four games in the next 10 days – two in the top flight, one in Europe and one in the EFL Cup. Lloris said: “We just have to adapt to the schedule.
“I can’t hide from saying that playing a Premier League game, League Cup game and Europa League game in a short time, less than 48 hours between the Premier League game and EFL Cup game, I mean, it’s not easy.
“And if we go through it will be the same again the week after.
“We have a squad, the manager will take the decision, but as a player you don’t have to think much, just make sure you are ready for the next game and do your best, always with the winning mentality, which is something we have to follow.”