Spurs manager tells players to eat, sleep and breathe football
It may come as a relief to Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy to hear Antonio Conte insist that a winning mentality cannot be paid for, but the Italian has sent a clear message to the club and the Spurs players that football must now be what they eat, sleep and breathe.
“I know very well that this club has not been winning for many years,” Conte said. “I think that to win, you have to build to win. Winning doesn’t happen after one, two, three days, one month, two months. You must have vision. I think this club had a great vision outside of the pitch. Now I think we have to start to have a vision also on the pitch, on the football topic. I think this is important if we want to win.”
A mental improvement will be just as important as all the physical training at a club who have not won a trophy since 2008.
“It’s not easy because you have to work every day and you have to breathe a winning mentality every day, and you don’t invent this,” the new head coach said. “It’s impossible to pay [for]. Because it doesn’t cost any money for a winning mentality. You have to start every day with this type of mentality. You have to start to think about football for many hours of your life to improve results, to win. To start to think that, ‘OK, I want to win, but I know that it means sacrifice, it means to suffer. It means to work very hard’. And if you start to think in this way, it means that you want to become a winner.
“To win a top trophy, you have to know that most of your time in your life, you have to dedicate to football. We need to start to think about football more and more and more.”
Ahead of his first Premier League match in charge of Spurs at Everton tomorrow, Conte added: “In the Premier League now, I think there is a gap with at least four teams. But this situation must be an incentive for us to work harder, to try to start to work to close this gap, to think that we have to be competitive and then to try to fight for the title. I need time, but I’m not scared about this because in my life I always work very, very hard to reach the target and to enjoy a title with the club.”
One man evidently impressed by Conte’s arrival is striker Harry Kane
“It shows great ambition,” Kane said of Conte’s appointment. “His resume speaks for itself. He has won trophies at the highest level with the biggest clubs, so everyone is excited to learn, excited to work under him and that passion he shows every day, every meeting, every training session is what you thrive on.
“You go into games wanting to put your body on the line for him, and you can feel that already.”