Blame me for inconsistency, says Postecoglou after Spurs slip up again | OneFootball

Ange Postecoglou took full responsibility for the chronic inconsistency that has caused Tottenham to veer from good to bad and worse. Sunday’s home defeat to Ipswich came just a week after Spurs thumped Aston Villa, and cost Tottenham the chance to move into third place, for a few hours at least.

First-half goals from Sammie Szmodics and Liam Delap gave Ipswich a first-half lead, and despite a succession of second-half chances, Tottenham could only manage one goal, from Rodrigo Bentancur.

It was too little, too late, and Ange was justifiably angry. Asked what went wrong, he said: “We didn’t start the game well at all. It was all sort of passive, without the ball, with the ball. I felt we didn’t get the tempo right or intensity right and then we gave ourselves a mountain to climb.

“Second half we were in the ascendancy and had opportunities obviously but we didn’t do enough with them.”

Tottenham have regularly gone behind yet come back to win, as they did in the 4-1 win over Villa and Postecoglou was asked about it. “They’re all different sorts of scenarios,” he said.

“When we went behind against Villa we were playing well. We weren’t playing well today. So you’ve got to look at in isolation today, it was a different scenario for me. I don’t think it was anything like last time. We gave ourselves too much of a deficit to try to overcome. Obviously second half we had the opportunities to do that, but we should never have been in that position.”

When asked about the inconsistency of a team that has beaten Manchester City, United and Villa, yet lost to lowly Crystal Palace and Ipswich, the manager said: “That’s down to me. That’s my responsibility. The inconsistency we’re having this year, ultimately it comes down to me and my approach and something I need to try and fix and see if I can help the players in that area.”

Spurs had a tough game in Turkey on Thursday losing to Galatasaray in the Europa League, but he denied tiredness was a factor. “I don’t think so. If we were seeing that, we’d probably feel it more at the end of games and we’re not feeling it at the end of games. We’re finishing games strongly. We can’t start games like that at this level and expect to overcome the gap that exists between us and the other teams.”

Like Villa, Palace and Arsenal before them, Ipswich did not endear themselves to home supporters with endless time-wasting, players dropping down for little reason, and the keeper taking ages with every goal kick. It made for a bitty, scruffy game, but Postecoglou said it is now endemic in the Premier League.

“I think it’s the way the Premier League is going. It’s pretty strategic now. You can almost look at your clock around the 20-minute mark and some player will go down, they’ll all come over to the coach and get instructions.

“It’s funny, I always liked the Premier League because it wasn’t like that. You would watch English teams play in Europe and get frustrated by it, but now it’s part of the game here as well. Nothing we can do about it. For us, if we want to mitigate those things because we don’t do it and we want the game to be played, then we shouldn’t give opportunities for the opposition to do that.”