Ange Postecoglou held his press conference after Tottenham Hotspur fell to a 1-0 defeat at AZ Alkmaar in the Europa League round of 16 first leg on Thursday evening.
Despite an eight-day break to prepare for the match and the Spurs boss having a bench with the likes of Cristian Romero, Micky van de Ven and Dominic Solanke back from injury, Postecoglou's men never looked like laying a glove on their Dutch hosts on the night.
An own goal decided this leg of the tie as former Tottenham striker Troy Parrott, who impressed on the night, got on the end of a corner and his prodded effort was sliced up and into the far corner of the net by Lucas Bergvall.
AZ had further chances in the first half and Spurs struggled to make any impact on the game or force the Alkmaar goalkeeper into any real saves with another poor performance on the road in a European game. Solanke also picked up a late knock after colliding with the goalkeeper and had to come off just 15 minutes or so after coming on.
Our Tottenham correspondent Alasdair Gold was among those putting the questions to Postecoglou after the match. Here's the full transcript from the press conference at the AFAS Stadion.
What went wrong? There seemed to be a real lack of penetration in the team.
Yeah, it wasn’t great from us tonight. Pretty much all facets of the game. We didn’t really get to grips with any part of the game. We struggled to gain any momentum with the ball, we weren’t as aggressive as we needed to be without the ball. It was a tricky surface but having said that we kind of knew that from yesterday and yeah we just didn’t tackle the challenges we head out there in a real positive way. That allowed AZ to get into a rhythm, which when you’re playing away from home, it is difficult to stem the tide.
It was such a big game, why were the players seemingly not up for it?
Look, it’s a combination of things, but we’ll analyse it and have a look at the areas where we struggled with, but it’s fair to say yeah it was nowhere near the level it needed to be.
How is Dominic Solanke?
I am not even sure. It looks like a knock but I haven’t really seen it. Hopefully nothing too bad.
Given the stakes and the state of the season, why the lack of effort and attitude?
I don’t think it’s a matter of effort or attitude. I don’t think it is going out there and not trying, but like I said we didn’t really come to grips and have the right mindset to tackle an away fixture in Europe. It is always tough and we obviously conceded the goal, which was a disappointing set of events but even after that we didn’t really settle down into the game at all. You are going to face some pressure when you play away from home in Europe and weather the storm and get to grips with it, but we never really did so that was a disappointment.
Given the team struggled to break down AZ after conceding an early goal, how much confidence do you have in being able to break them down next week?
I don't have any doubt about our ability to break them down, but obviously we have to play a little bit differently to how we did tonight, not just with ball but without the ball too. We've got to be a lot more aggressive than we were tonight. We were just lacking a bit of aggression in everything we did. We were a little bit hesitant with the ball, hesitant in our pressing and we can't be that way. If we address those things I'm sure we'll be in a position to at least cause them more problems that we did tonight. It's only 1-0 so I guess that’s a positive in that we didn’t let the game get away from us.
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