Robertson backs De Zerbi and identifies exact reason for Tottenham early-season struggles | OneFootball

Andy Robertson has backed under-pressure Roberto De Zerbi to turn things around at Tottenham Hotspur, while pinpointing the main reason for the club’s early-season struggles.

Spurs have endured back-to-back 17th-place finishes in the Premier League and spent over £300million during the summer to revamp De Zerbi’s under-performing squad, with Robertson arriving on a free transfer.

However, Tottenham remain winless after five Premier League outings and sit bottom of the table ahead of the international break, while they also crashed out of the Carabao Cup at the hands of Liverpool.

And, speaking to the Stick to Football podcast, Robertson feels that the pain of recent seasons is still lingering within De Zerbi‘s first-team squad and also among supporters.

“They’re now starting this journey,” Robertson said. “They’ve had a couple of really tough seasons in terms of finishes in the league.

“They’ve had to go into the market, they’ve spent a bit of money, but I do believe Tottenham are now starting a journey.

“Now, I don’t know how far that journey can go, nobody does, but the determination in that group is, like, you can see last season hurt them a lot.

“And maybe we’re still guilty of carrying that weight of last season on our shoulders.”

De Zerbi wants new Tottenham signings to change narrative

Robertson also revealed that De Zerbi has made it clear that Spurs must move on from their past failings, with the new signings expected to help drive that change.

“That’s the message of the manager, first and foremost,” he added. “And also that kind of falls on me, the new players, of we need to forget.

“We need to now try and get Tottenham back to where we believe they belong.

“You just see certain moments, like the Liverpool game, we played so well there in moments, and then you get a goal against you, and it’s like [heads down].

“And then we go back to 2-1, and all of a sudden it’s chests out, and everyone’s wanting the ball.

“We need that all the time, even if you go 1-0 down, or it’s 0-0 late on.

“When we played Everton, we dominated pretty much the whole game, but we started getting panicked near the end, and we started rushing things.

“He [De Zerbi] wants all of us to be the ones that help drive us on, because he thinks that we don’t have the baggage of finishing 17th in two seasons and he’s right,” Robertson continued.

“So it’s like, bit by bit, we’re getting better and better.

“He’s super ambitious, you can tell that as a manager.

“He wants to be able to win trophies, he wants to be competing and things like that, and he knows it will take time, but he also knows that we need to start showing it sooner rather than later.

“I think we just need a little bit of luck, and we need a little bit more of forgetting about the past and how we need to move forward,” he said.

“I do think as the season goes and goes and goes, we’ll get better and better.”

Spurs are back in action on October 10 when they head to Manchester United, with De Zerbi and Red Devils boss Michael Carrick both in desperate need of a win to ease the pressure on their respective jobs.