Ange on Cuti and Micky: "45 minutes was always the plan" | OneFootball

Ange Postecoglou explained to our Review Show that it was always the plan to play Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven for 45 minutes of Monday's Premier League clash against Nottingham Forest.

Ange started with four of the back five that kicked-off last week's fine win against Eintracht Frankfurt in Germany to take us into the semi-finals of the UEFA Europa League - Destiny Udogie was rested completely from the matchday squad, with Djed Spence coming in at left-back.

Cuti and Micky started together for only the sixth time since October - and the third time in our last four matches - before being replaced by Ben Davies and Kevin Danso at half-time as Forest ran out 2-1 victors at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Captaining the team in Heung-Min Son's absence, Cuti has now started our last nine matches in all competitions after only starting one between November and 9 March. It's a similar story for Micky, who has now started five of our last eight since returning to action at the same time. Before that, he'd started once since December.

"They were going to play 45 tonight," said Ange. "If it was a Sunday game, they probably wouldn't have played at all, but with it being Monday, it was a good chance to keep building those guys up, a good chance for Kulusevski, Richarlison, Wilson, Kevin to get some minutes as well. We were able to rest Destiny and Madders, Lucas. That will be helpful as well."

Ange was asked further about the central defensive pair in his post-match press conference.

"I thought they needed to play some minutes tonight because it becomes 10 days leading into Liverpool (on Sunday)," he said. "With both of them we've got them in a really good place physically now and I just want to keep them ticking over. I felt that there was no need to play more than 45 minutes today and we needed to get a couple of others game time. I just felt that if it was Sunday we probably wouldn't have played them, but on a Monday, especially for Micky because he's been playing just one game a week, we need to build him up because he's in a really good place at the moment so I thought 45 minutes for both of them would be beneficial."