Former Nottingham Forest defender Djed Spence has opened up on the manager who "shattered" his confidence.
The 24-year-old was part of the promotion winning team who won at Wembley in 2022. Having been on loan from Middlesbrough at the time, his stellar performances earned him a Premier League move to Tottenham Hotspur - but the dream didn't quite go as planned.
Antonio Conte, who was Spurs boss upon his arrival to North London, publicly claimed it was the club's decision to sign Spence and not his. Falling more and more out of favour as time went on, a decision was made to ship the full-back out on a six-month loan to Rennes in the second half of the 2022/23 season.
Speaking on the Rio Ferdinand Presents Podcast, Spence recalled: "It wasn’t a nice feeling. Especially as I was coming to the club on a high, I was confident, I was buzzing, had just won promotion. Then it was like running into a brick wall. It shattered my confidence a bit, obviously, I’m young. It’s not nice to hear.
"I knew it was rubbish at the time. It wasn’t a nice feeling. I was even going into the club like ‘what am I doing?’. I feel like whatever I did, that man [Conte] wasn’t happy about anything. Even if you did the right things, you were like, ‘did I do the right thing?’ cos he’s not really a complimenting guy. It gets to a point where you don’t really need validation from a coach. You just go, ‘Oh’. I probably had one conversation with him."
Conte was sacked in March 2023. Yet upon Spence's return to Spurs, he still found it difficult to nail down a starting spot and failed to feature at all during Ange Postecoglou's first season due to loan spells at Leeds United and then Genoa.
But the former Forest man has finally managed to break into the manager's plan during the current campaign. He has played 18 times so far, scoring and assisting once.
"When a new manager comes in you think, 'alright, everyone's going to get a fair chance, he's going to have a look at everyone'. With me, I don't think that was really the case," he added. "But that's part of the game of football. Football's not fair. [Postecoglou] just said basically I need to go out and play and that's when I ended up going to Leeds.
"Sometimes you might not get a chance that you feel like you deserve. I've always known I was good enough. People say, 'it's good to see he's got a second chance and he's doing well'. I never really got the first chance. This is my first chance and I'm taking it. I'm just happy I worked hard, I stayed consistent and I was ready."