Conte's debut at Tottenham ended thursday with a chaotic and crazy game at the team's Home of White Hart Lane. Although Spurs quickly led away Vitus 3-0 at home, they were quickly narrowed to a goal by their opponents and at one point played one less person on the pitch. In the end, the referee showed a total of three red cards to both teams in the second half, and the game ended in a chaotic atmosphere, with Tottenham Hotspur narrowly winning 3-2 against Vitesse.
In the last round of the UEFA Cup group stage, a group of bad substitutes lost 1-0 to Vitesse away from home, which also led to Nuno's dismissal to some extent. Therefore, this time to replace Conte to take over, the Italian coach did not dare to be careless, lined up the full main lineup, the front line Kane, Son Heung-min and Lucas Mora three arrows at the same time, which also made Tottenham's attack immediately after the opening of the reward, the game kicked off less than half an hour, they have a 3-0 lead at home.
In the 14th minute, Tottenham's striker teamed up to concoct the first goal: Lucas Mora's goal was barely saved by the opposing goalkeeper, Kane's pressing inside the box caused the opponent to make a mistake, and the ball was refracted by the defender to the feet of Son Heung-min on the right side of the goal. Although the Vites defenders had been relegated to the near corner of the goal line, their goal was pierced by a powerful shot from the South Korean striker. The goal also immediately shattered the confidence of the visiting team, and Lucas Mora played a beautiful combination with Kane on the counter-attack eight minutes later, easily shooting at the opposing goalkeeper in the box to extend the lead to two goals. In the 28th minute, Spurs' attack made a comeback, this time it was Wittes defender Rasmussen who tried to unblock the ball in front of Kane, but accidentally poked the ball into his own goal.
While the English media speculated whether Conte would remove several main players early at half-time, Spurs conceded two goals in less than seven minutes. Their three-goal lead lasted less than four minutes, with Rasmussen, who had previously swung in, took advantage of a corner kick to pull back a goal for the visiting team, before Bello went down to the next city before the end of the first half to narrow the score to 3-2.
At this time, the televised footage gave Conte, who looked a little worried on the sidelines, and BBC's chief football reporter McNaughty pointed out that the first game made Italy suffer such an embarrassing suffering, which may not be a bad thing for him and the team: "If Conte has a small book, I think the performance of Tottenham in this game is enough for him to write a full book." The team's offensive talent and enthusiasm are rewarding, but the sensitivity and fragility of the defence is also a fact, Conte saw the two sides of the team in his first game in charge, and of course, recognizing this reality early is a good thing for the Italians. ”
In the 59th minute, Christian Romero reluctantly pulled him down from behind after being broken through by opponent Oponda and received his second yellow card of the match. With more than half an hour to go before the end of the game, Spurs began to fall into the embarrassing situation of 10 people. Fortunately, Vitesse's attack did not work in the following time, and their captain Doic and goalkeeper Schubert were sent off with red cards after entering the 80th minute of the game. The former was expelled from the game because he brought down Kane with a wrestling move and received a second yellow card; the latter was found to be a handball foul by the referee after attacking outside the box, and directly received the third red card of the game. In the end, the game ended in chaos.
Conte's post-match assessment of the team was polite: "It's a crazy game, and usually I don't like this type of game because crazy means anything can happen, but we should have won more easily." We led 3-0 at one point, but two completely avoidable goals brought the game back into suspense, and the red card in the second half put us in trouble for a while, but in the end this bitter victory was good for the team and these teams, and they need to boost their confidence now! ”
For the transformation of the current team, Conte also admits that this is a huge project. His two predecessors, Mourinho and Nuno, both suffered disastrous defeats here, not only with poor records, but also by fans complaining about the negative and ugly game and wasting the player's offensive talent. Conte first lowered expectations of him to bring about a big change in the team in the short term: "I think there is a lot of room for improvement in this team, but we need some patience now, because there are too many aspects to change, both tactically and physically, and I also need the team to understand me [the philosophy of football]. I'm not afraid of what I'm going to do next, I'm just going to focus on whether we'll eventually reach our goals. ”
After the European Cup, Tottenham's group ranking finally rose to No. 2, and the next game they will play against Everton in the league at the weekend. With next week heading into international breakage, Conte had to stop his losing streak in the Premier League: "It's a tough task because we only have two days to prepare for this game. No, in fact we only have one day, because tonight the players just finished the game, the physical consumption is a lot, so tomorrow we can't do anything, we can only let these (main) players rest, I will gather the players who did not play tonight to train together. ”
But after watching Thursday night's heart-wrenching and helpless European League match, Tottenham fans didn't have much hope that the team could quickly get out of the trough of the previous period. One fan wrote on the BBC's message board: "You can get Nuno out of Tottenham, but you can't change some of the fundamental problems of this team, in fact, the creator of a lot of trouble is Levi, which is not something that can be solved by a change of manager." ”
Sports Weekly all-media reporter in London Liu Chuan