Coventry City 1-2 Spurs | Ange’s verdict: “We had to dig deep”
Thu 19 September 2024, 01:15|
Tottenham Hotspur
Ange Postecoglou spoke about a ‘different performance’ from the team as we managed to turn the tide against Coventry City and win our Carabao Cup third round tie thanks to late, late goals on Wednesday evening.
There can be no doubting that we were under the cosh in the middle period of the second half where the home side took the lead through Brandon Thomas-Asante on 63 minutes and created a number of chances before and after to put the game out of sight - none more so than skipper Ben Davies sliding to protect an open goal and deny Haji Wright a tap in.
Starting with a team showing eight changes, including full debuts for Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall, Ange was forced to change again in-game with injuries to Wilson Odobert and Timo Werner. Later arrivals off the bench Deki Kulusevski, Heung-Min Son and James Maddison - back at his first club - also turned it around as we started to click in the last 10 minutes.
Maddison and Kulusevski had already gone close when Deki played in Djed Spence for his first competitive Spurs goal to level two minutes from time and, in a dramatic finale, Rodrigo Bentancur won possession on halfway two minutes into added time, threaded the perfect pass through to Brennan Johnson who did the rest, a cool finish clipping over advancing Ben Wilson to win the tie and book a place in the fourth round.
Speaking to our Review Show, Ange said: “It was a typical cup tie. I thought Coventry were outstanding with the energy they brought, their crowd got behind them and it was difficult for us to get a foothold in the game.
“We had to dig deep, a different performance where we had to hang in there. We did that, and at the end, we found what we needed to win the game and get through to the next round, and that’s the most important thing.
“It’s probably what we’ve been missing in the first four games. We’ve had performances, but just lacked that bit of cutting edge and belief that we can go on and win games of football. Hopefully today… we showed it enough last year, we know it’s there, it’s just this year we haven’t felt the same sort of relentlessness to go and get a result and hopefully today helps us build into our performances in the Premier League as well.”
