“I remember we weren’t winning or we’d drawn a game and I sent (then chairman) Daniel Levy a message. He came back to me, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll win the next one’.” It was meant supportively. But to Conte, it spoke volumes. “‘What the…?’ I kept saying to him, ‘Look!’” It left the impression that dropping points was if not inconsequential then tolerable and, subconsciously, the players picked up on it. The fish rots from the head. “Footballers always take the easiest options,” Conte says. “Ones that make them feel good and require less effort.” In the March, Conte felt he had to call out the players and the culture at Tottenham in what proved his final press conference as their manager. The team had let a 3-1 lead slip with 16 minutes to go and drawn with relegation-bound Southampton. The speech has regularly gone viral, particularly as Spurs have flirted dangerously with the drop in each of the past two completed seasons. “The thing that drove me mad was hearing people around me saying, ‘Tottenham are never going to win anything’. That they’re losers.” In Conte’s reckoning, everyone associated with the club should have taken that as the worst insult imaginable. “They were made fun of. They’re still being made fun of. Even now. Arsenal lost 3-0 to Brighton (in their final game before this international break) and they were joking, ‘Arsenal have turned into Tottenham’, get it? Believe me, this irritated me a lot.”   submitted by   /u/Sparky-moon [link]   [comments]