CONTE: I CAN’T GUARANTEE SON A STARTING ROLE

TOTTENHaM manager antonio conte fired a warning to out-ofform forward son Heung-min to leave him sweating on his place against sporting tonight. son has started all seven games this season, but is yet to score despite the club’s unbeaten start. Last season son won the Premier League Golden Boot after a prolific season that heralded 28 goals for club and country. In March, conte said he would have to be ‘crazy’ to drop son — but the emergence of Dejan Kulusevski and the £60million capture of richarlison from Everton means conte is no longer reliant on the south Korean. speaking yesterday ahead of tonight’s trip to sporting, when asked about son’s place in his team, conte made clear the forward is no longer untouchable. He said: ‘I think when you try to build something important, when you try to build something with ambition and try to be competitive and fight to win, you have to change old habits, otherwise it means you want to stay in balance and it means you don’t want to have ambition. ‘For this reason all the players have to accept the rotation especially up front — we have four players. For me especially it’s very difficult right now to drop one of these four players, but I have to make the best decision for the team, also for the players. ‘sometimes it’s better to rest and don’t start a game, to come in and play only 20 or 30 minutes and then play the following games. ‘For sure I’m here to try to change the old habit. The old habit was that the players were used to playing in every game.

‘What happened in this type of situation is that you don’t have great possibilities to win.

‘You try to make the players happy, but big clubs have a big squad, a deep squad. In this moment we don’t have a big squad but we have just started to try to follow this path. For this reason what happens with one of these four players will be normal and it’s good for a coach like me to have these options.’ conte said the selection dilemma isn’t causing him sleepless nights, adding: ‘I think every manager likes this kind of problem.

‘For sure I have the possibility to pick three important players and know that I have another player on the bench who is ready to come on and help us, like in the last game against Marseille.

‘It was 0-0, I decided to put Kulusevski into the pitch and to keep also the three strikers to become more offensive. I think this is an important solution for me.’