Tottenham Hotspur head coach Ange Postecoglou has robustly defended his set-piece policy despite watching his team fall victim to another dead ball delivery in their loss to Arsenal.
The Aussie boss, who has refused to appoint a set-piece specialist coach since his arrival from Celtic last year, has been heavily criticised due to his team’s struggles with defending dead ball situations.
Their Achilles heel came back to haunt them again in the North London Derby as Gabriel Magalhaes nodded home the winner from Bukayo Saka’s corner as Arsenal emerged victorious.Postecoglou said: ‘I know, for some reason people think I don’t care about set pieces and it’s a narrative that you can keep going on for ages and ages. I understand that.
‘Like I said, we work on them all the time like we do for every other team. You know that they’re a threat, as I said, for the most part, we handled them really well today, but we switched off for one and we paid a price and you learn from that and you move on.
But it is what it is, you know, it’s my burden to carry and I’m happy to do that.
‘I’ve always said, for me, there’s a bigger picture that’s at play here that’s much more important than the finer details of us getting to where we want to.
For us, the way forward is to try to turn the football we’re playing now into something meaningful.’
Postecoglou admonished defender Cristian Romero of full blame for Magalhaes’ winner, despite the Argentine appearing to lose the Arsenal centre-back in the lead up to the winner.
‘Arsenal are obviously a very big threat at set pieces. It only takes one,’ explained Postecoglou.
‘It wasn’t just Romero, a couple of others switched off as well. The delivery was spot on and Gabriel is always a threat in those situations.’Postecoglou believes his team’s biggest problem was not converting their dominance into goals – an issue he insists has dogged them since the start of the season.
‘We had some good opportunities but we created so many more, we just wasted some of our good play,’ he added.
‘Similar to our other games where we haven’t really had that conviction in the front third to take advantage of – whether it’s us winning the ball back or getting into that front third and nothing coming of it.
‘You keep opposition teams in the game when you do that.
‘We’ve just got to keep working at it, that’s my job. I’ve just got to keep giving the feedback to the guys, trying to guide them in the right way to make them see that for all their dominance in the game, you need to really be clear-headed in those kind of moments and, that’s my role to try to guide them in the right way.
‘We are a team that is progressing in many areas, with all that progress there are always new challenges and things you need to overcome.
‘When I look at the four games in isolation this year, the football is probably more consistent and compelling than our first four games last year but obviously our results don’t reflect that.’
