Tottenham boss Ange Postecoglou has defended the club following some scathing comments from former club captain Hugo Lloris in his new book regarding the 2019 Champions League final loss.
Lloris suggested his old club were happy to be second best during his time at the club, claiming chairman Daniel Levy gifted the players watches with ‘Champions League finalists’ engraved before they had even faced Liverpool five years ago.
But Postecoglou, who took over at Tottenham in 2023 and managed Lloris before he was sold to MLS side LAFC, insists the period Lloris was referring to should be looked back upon as positive.
He said: “I haven’t read what Hugo’s said, it’s been mentioned to me. I think with these things you’ve got to put context around them and understand the broader view and that could have been a very successful period for the club.
‘They came very, very close. You’re talking about finishing runners-up in the Premier League and runners-up in the Champions League.
“It could have been a very different era and maybe in retrospect you’ll be looking at those things.
“It’s easy to focus on the negatives when the outcome is not what you want but there’s obviously a lot right at the time.
“From my perspective I’ve never allowed anyone else to dictate my ambitions, my aims, or what I try and do with everyone around me is you don’t put a limit on what you can achieve because if you do you potentially might miss something that comes along your way.”
Lloris Champions League story in full
In his new book, ‘Earning My Spurs’, serialised in The Guardian, Lloris explained exactly what happened on the eve of the biggest game in the club’s history.
He wrote: “Four days before the final, Daniel Levy called us all together to announce that, with the support of a sponsor, we would each receive a luxury aviator watch from the club. At first we were excited to see the elegant boxes.
“Then we opened them and discovered that he’d had the back of each timepiece engraved with the player’s name and ‘Champions League Finalist 2019’. ‘Finalist.’
“Who does such a thing at a moment like this? I still haven’t got over it, and I’m not alone. If we’d won, he wouldn’t have asked for the watches back to have ‘Winner’ engraved instead.
“I have considerable respect and esteem for the man and all he has done for the club as chairman – I got to know him – but there are things he is simply not sensitive to.
“As magnificent as the watch is, I have never worn it. I would have preferred there to be nothing on it. With an engraving like that, Levy couldn’t have been surprised if we had been 1–0 down after a couple of minutes: so it was written.
“At the post-match reception at the hotel, I had the impression that some people from the club and certain players were not sufficiently despondent at having lost.
“I would have liked people to come up to me and say, ‘Don’t worry, Hugo. Never again. We’ll give you the means for a comeback.’
“But when I returned to my room on the night of the final, I think I had the same feeling as Mauricio and Harry: does the club really want to win? Real Madrid would never have celebrated a lost final, and we shouldn’t have either.”
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