Ben Davies has revealed that Antonio Conte was a calm presence in the Tottenham dressing room after the draw at Liverpool and explained how the head coach worked with the players in the preceding week.
Ben Davies said: “He’s a very detail-orientated manager. All week we’ve been prepping for this game but it’s more a case of we look after ourselves first rather than who we’re playing against. We’ve got a way of playing which I think is pretty clear. He’s drilled that into us since he’s arrived and it will be small tweaks based on who we’re playing: how we press, how we defend and I have to say he makes it very, very easy for us out on the pitch. You know your role, you know your responsibilities. If this man’s running here, you know where you need to be. If you’re running in this zone, you know where you have to be. The level of detail he works to is incredible.”
On that block to deny Salah,
Ben Davies added: “He’s an incredibly dangerous player and when you get him on that left foot, you know he’s going to shoot at some point. I got lucky in a way, I just threw myself at it and got a foot in the way. It got me on the leg on my left foot. As defenders, that’s where you want to be. You want to be throwing yourself in front of it and I thought we did that well today. We were determined not to concede and even the goal, to concede a deflected goal is sometimes tough to take, especially when you know we’re going to have to suffer a bit in these games. You know you’re going to have to defend and we did that pretty well for most of the game.”
There was a mixed mood after the match, with Conte telling football.london that he was proud of his players but could see the disappointment in their eyes. Davies said the Italian did not let the anxiety of the match and his emotion on the touchline seep into his exchanges with them in the dressing room afterwards.
Ben Davies said: “He was very calm, very calm. You can feel there’s pride there in how we played, how we stuck to the game plan but in the next few days we’ll analyse it in detail, see where we can improve and it’ll be on to the next one. There’s no resting on good performances. We know we can get better. These are the kind of games we want to be involved in and show our best side in. It was a tough game, we were up against one of the best teams in the world right now and we’re satisfied with a point away from home. We played against two of the best teams in the world football [in Liverpool and Manchester City] and to be unbeaten is a good little achievement but the league position will show where we deserve to end up and who we pick up points against isn’t really a concern. I like to think [we’re heading in the right direction]. We have to try to competitive against the best teams. I think we’ve shown that this year. We’ve got to up our consistency. We have struggled with that for a while but we’ve got to take the positives with results against teams like this.”
On Thursday evening Tottenham welcome Arsenal in what will be one of the biggest north London derbies in recent memory with the Gunners now four points ahead of their hosts, who need to win to put pressure on their visitors’ final two matches. It will be played for the first time in front of a sold out Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Ben Davies said: “It’s a massive game. It’s been building up to this for a while. Even since it got postponed, we’ve been looking at when this game would come because we knew it would be important in the context of the season. Look for us now, Thursday’s huge. We know what we have to do going into it and there’s no hiding from that. We have to go out and try to put in a similar performance as we did today. We have to do whatever we can control. They’ve been on a fantastic run, you can’t hide from that, but there’s a lot of pressure on them to keep it up and do it in the remaining games. For us, we have to control what we can and try to win the game, try to win our remaining games. It’s not in our hands but we’ll see what happens.”
