CONTE WAS VERY VERY ANGRY

Moura reveals boss’s rage as ‘stupid’ errors dent Spurs hopes

LUCAS MOURA has revealed how a furious Antonio Conte lambasted his Tottenham players in the dressing room following their defeat to Southampton with the club in danger of losing ground in the race for the top four.

Conte was ‘very angry and upset’ after Spurs led Saints heading into the final 10 minutes only to concede twice and succumb to a second successive Premier League defeat.

Tottenham face Champions League-chasing rivals Wolves this afternoon knowing another defeat would see them slip behind the Midlands club in the table and risk facing the wrath of Conte once again.

‘He was very, very angry! Very, very disappointed,’ said Moura. ‘We made some mistakes that we cannot make. We work almost every day in training and it is the small details that make the difference. So he got very angry with this, very upset. Not only because we lost the game but we made stupid mistakes that we cannot make.

‘It is not about the result it is about the attitude and the concentration to be in the right place on the pitch. He is very passionate for the game. We need to be ready to listen to him and to accept. He sees the smallest detail and wants us to be almost perfect.

‘That is good because we can improve and have already improved a lot with him. We need to take advantage of having a manager like him.’

Tottenham are well short of perfection. They struggle to beat teams who press them well, as Southampton exploited last week. Harry Kane, last season’s Golden Boot winner, has just five league goals this term, putting him behind the likes of Burnley’s Maxwel Cornet and Teemu Pukki at Norwich.

And yet, the signs of progress are there. After the Leicester win, only Pep Guardiola had taken more points per game than Conte since the Italian took over from Nuno Espirito Santo.

Even now, two losses later, it is only City and Liverpool.

It is not just Spurs that have kicked on post-Nuno. Wolves are quietly going about their business under Bruno Lage, who replaced Nuno in the summer, and are in the conversation about the top four places. Lage has sympathy for his predecessor for how it worked out at Spurs, where Nuno was sacked after just four months in charge.

‘Even now Conte is asking for time to work to have consistency in the team,’ said Lage. ‘Every time, what we want as managers — not just me, like Conte was asking for more time to work to bring more consistency. Time to work.’