James Maddison has posted a clear and honest appraisal of Tottenham's second half collapse at Brighton on Sunday and promised that the players will use it to improve.
Spurs were excellent in the first half in the Premier League clash at the Amex Stadium with goals from Brennan Johnson and James Maddison seemingly putting them firmly in the driving seat. However, they completely lost control of the game in the second half and goals from Yankuba Minteh, Georginio Rutter and Danny Welbeck during an 18-minute spell turned the match in the Seagulls' favour.
While Tottenham vice-captain Maddison and head coach Ange Postecoglou spoke to the media after the match, the silence from the other players on social media since the match has spoken volumes following five wins in a row when the squad were constantly posting after their victories.
Some players' accounts have featured posts about joining up with their international squads in the days since and Maddison is the only one to have sent a message to the fans after the defeat through an Instagram Story post.
The goalscoring midfielder posted: "Yesterday's second half was unacceptable. We take full responsibility and criticism and will use it as fuel to move forward."
Maddison had also spoken after the match and had slammed the reaction of the team to the early goal from Minteh in the second half.
"A game of two halves - you couldn't get more of an obvious game of that phrase. The first half we were dominant and at two goals up in the second half we were really poor and didn't deal with the adversity of them scoring early very well," he said in his club interview.
"Well that's an understatement, we dealt with it very poorly I think. Just couldn't weather the storm, couldn't grind it out. They scored three goals from three attacks and we need to be more solid in that moment of adversity."
He added: "Being 2-0 up in the Premier League against any side is decent enough. We just weren't good enough in the second half. They scored early, which is always disappointing, but you've got to deal with it a lot better than what we did. It felt like we lost control of the game, the crowd got behind them like we knew they would if they scored, but we just didn't deal with the attacks.
"They got in too easy down the sides, we weren't aggressive enough. All of a sudden you find yourselves 3-2 down and a lot of work to do.
"It's not enough, 45 minutes in the Premier League. Teams are too good, there's too much quality. You can't just let off after 45 minutes and we've been punished for that."
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