Conte’s Tottenham revival powered by lattes and lozenges
Italian has got his message across thanks to honey sweets but turns a blind eye to Kane’s favourite pre-match beverage
Antonio Conte will again turn a blind eye to Harry Kane completing his pre-match ritual of drinking a caffe latte ahead of kick-off against Norwich City for Tottenham Hotspur’s Champions League qualification decider.
The Italian head coach powers himself with shots of super-strength espressos and is unlikely to have much time for the milky variety of coffee favoured by Kane, who Conte insisted will be available tomorrow after missing yesterday’s training session with a stomach bug.
Despite his attention to detail that has steered Spurs from ninth to fourth and needing only a point against relegated Norwich to clinch a place in the Champions League, Conte knows only too well not to mess with a man’s custom if it works. It was ahead of his first Premier League game in charge of Spurs against Everton in November when there was a commotion among Conte’s Italian staff.
The 52-year-old’s favourite Ambrosoli al Miele sweets, which Conte ships in from Italy, could not be found. Not only do they soothe his throat as he screams his way through matches from the touchline, they have also become a good luck charm. Conte can often barely speak after training sessions and games, and has grown to count on the honeyinfused sweets to regain his voice. They got him through Chelsea’s Premier League title-winning season in 2016-17 and have remained an important part of his own routine, as Tottenham’s players immediately found out.
Preparing for that league game, Conte was not contemplating a Champions League challenge and was clear how he would have responded had chairman Daniel Levy raised the possibility. “If you remember, we [Tottenham] didn’t score a lot, Harry at that period had scored only one goal and we conceded a lot of goals, many, many problems,” Conte said. “The only thing the club asked me was to try to improve the situation and to improve the players, to try to instil the good mentality and to bring this group of players to a level better than that moment. For sure, if he [Levy] had said to me ‘I want to go to the Champions League’, to be realistic, I can tell him only one thing… ‘are you joking?’.”
Mixing science with an old-fashioned feel for the game and his players, Conte is not a coach who spends from dawn to dusk at Tottenham’s training ground. Perhaps partly because he has been living in a central London hotel, he is not always the first in or the last to leave, but the work has never been harder while he is at the club’s plush Hotspur Way
complex in Enfield. During running sessions, Conte will put himself in the middle of the group to drive the pace and intensity of his players. He is hands-on in every aspect of training, and players have been stunned by his non-stop direction and drive.
Despite the fact all games and training sessions are filmed from every conceivable angle by club cameras, Conte still instructs his brother Gianluca, who is a member of his backroom staff, to film the Tottenham players on an ipad. Gianluca has often been spotted at the back of press boxes watching a game through his ipad and whatever the wobbly footage is used for, it has yielded results. After just two weeks of working under Conte, the match fitness data of the Spurs players went through the roof, proving they had not been pushed hard enough by previous head coach Nuno Espirito Santo.
Morale under Nuno and Jose Mourinho had plummeted among large sections of the Tottenham squad. Conte immediately addressed that by insisting that players had to eat together at the training ground, as they had under Mauricio Pochettino.
When they sat down for lunch together again, however, Tottenham’s players found there was no ketchup available and fizzy drinks were off the menu. The importance of nutrition and sleep were underlined, and Conte warned his squad that he would know if they broke his rules at home. His words were heeded and the body fat of every player at Spurs, including Kane, is said to have dropped since they became disciples of Conte. It is also hard to find a player still at Spurs, even those who may not start at Carrow Road, who has not improved.
Kane has been reborn under Conte, while Son Heung-min is enjoying his best season at the club and could finish as the Premier League’s Golden Boot winner. Cristian Romeo has looked like one of the signings of last summer, but there have also been more subtle improvements in players such as Ryan Sessegnon, Ben Davies and Emerson Royal. The better performances will not protect anybody from Conte’s burning desire to significantly upgrade his squad, with Levy needing to match the Italian’s ambition to be sure to keep him.
“I am enjoying, a lot, working in this club,” Conte said. “Now the most important thing is to try to get this result [against Norwich].”